askchapo

It's the only gba game I still have my original cartridge of from when I was a kid and bought it a few weeks after launch. My original file has 500 hours played on it according to the in game counter. I've played it from a new file 4 other times. The story isnt great, it's enough but dont expect anything close to fft, its more Saturday morning cartoon vibes. This is fine cause there is like...SOOOOOO many side missions. The main game is maybe a quarter of the full game, possibly less. The party building/leveling system is my favorite out of any rpg ive played. Experience is split into exp for your stats and AP for learning abilities, the abilities are attached to equipment which you need to be using to have the ability and then when you reach enough AP it's yours. There are dispatch missions you can send party members on where they wont be there for a set number of days or battles and those grant AP but not EXP, this is how you can get silly with it. You have two main ability slots. One for the class youre using and one from any other class you have gained abilities in. So for example, if you want a fighter with white magic but dont wanna sacrifice hitting hard by leveling as a white mage, you can send em on dispatch to learn the spells, maybe get a couple levels in the class to get your mp up to snuff and then switch back to fighter for most of your stat leveling. Your party can be up to 30 people although you only use 8 or so in battle at a time, so the customization potential is off the charts. In my last playthrough I made the main character a fighter with white magic who had doublesword from the ninja class and a standard physical attacks miss me every time ability from the archer class (there also passive and reactive abilities and you can pick just one but once again, from any class you've mastered the ability from. I had a split summoner/assassin who took a brief stint in red magic to learn doublecast. Once you get the hang of how the system works it's just really fun to work on your team. It's a super easy game and I kinda wish there was some tougher challenges for when your party is nearly maxed out, but there are 300 quests, a system of battling other parties for control of the world map, capturing and raising monsters if you've got a beast master and it used to have cool link cable co-op missions as well. The battle system is also WAY better than FFT, you can cast a spell on the turn you select it for example