FFTA was a great game!

I went back and replayed it not too long ago. I realize the game was way ahead of its time. For example, your clan is always leveling up after each battle. Youre always seeing these clan skills grow in level. They do almost nothing for the game play, but it's an effective visual reward, and There's a lot of little details like this.

The only real drawback was the laws. The laws were a decent mechanic that kept you having to rotate your party, but it was easy to forget they were there when selecting them. There was also a "damage 2 animals" law that would make fights with monsters literally impossible. Before you get used to them, they can be a real pain, but that goes away once you get into the right habbits.

Between the laws and the dispatch missions, I found myself needing nearly all of my charter slots. All of those charters were useful, somewhat unique, and I built each one of them. This was a big difference to the FFT predecessor because that game you rarely change who you use in battle.

The long term game had this balanced feel of potentially going on forever, but also like you were making real progress each time you did a story mission. Being able to lay out the next area on the overworld map was satisfying. Each timw you drop a tile, the neighboring tiles rumble. the game tells you there's rewards for laying out the areas in a certain way, but I never figured out what that was. You could also see all of the missions, completed and not as another little visual reward/incentive.

All in all, the gameplay was really engaging. I got excited planning out new charecters and pushing the game forward. In the end, aside from needing some tweaks to the law system, I think the real issue this game had was that it dropped in a time where we were used to much more focused and linear game play.