YMMV / Final Fantasy Tactics A2

• Breather Boss: The Final Watch at the top of the third Brightmoon Tor. After facing off against wave after wave of brutal foes that can easily massacre unprepared parties many times over, your final foe is...an ordinary Crushatrice with only two Blackwind guards. The former does have more health than anything else in the game, but not a single Turning ability, meaning it should barely scratch you compared to the preceding fights.
• Cult Classic: Not as well known as the previous two Tactics games, but it's considered just as good as them in terms of gameplay and is fondly looked upon for fixing many of their mistakes.
• Game-Breaker: Ahoy.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Dreamhares and their cousins, Hoppy Bunnies exist to turn moderately challenging situations into teeth-grinding nuisances. They are extremely fast, difficult to hit and love spamming haste on their allies, or slow on your party. Dreamhares also have a highly effective charm spell to top it off.
  • Malboros also appear in several varieties, including a type that can Charm half your team without fail, whilst being immune to all status effects itself.
  • Also, anything able to attack you at extremely long range (looking at YOU, enemy Fusiliers/Cannoneers/Tricksters).
  • Facing large numbers of Fairies in small battle fields will result in "Slow" purgatory, even if you are 10 times their level.
  • The "Shelling" family of monsters can be infuriating - Most of these turtles love to immobilize with Headbutts; Adamantitans can eat your gear with their Munch ability, including difficult-to-replace pieces; and Toughskins delight in spamming Resonate, a skill that inflicts the Disable debuff on anyone carrying a bladed weapon. Prepare to watch your powerful Spellblade or Parivir stand there like a dope for the entire battle.
• Memetic Mutation: The mess that is Luso's outfit has become the poster child for hideous and impractical fashion sense among Eastern RPG characters. Expect the poor guy to eventually show up in any conversation about bad video game character designs.
• Narm: The default clan name is "Gully", and you will get some bizarre messages. The player can invoke this even more by giving them an even dumber name and it features no blacklist.
  "I would love to join Clan PissBagel!"
  "This is an open invitation to Clan Baconator
• Popular with Furries: All of the races from the previous game make a return here, along with two new additions: the Seeq and Gria. While these two are nowhere near the level of popularity the Bangaa race has garnered, they are still welcomed by the Furry Fandom. Especially the Seeq.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Most agree that Vaan is much more accepted/tolerable here than he was in Final Fantasy XII. It doesn't hurt that he Took a Level in Badass a little.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Here.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • Easy to do accidentally on the "Foodstuffs" quests. You are supposed to kill X number of a specific enemy and then talk to the guest requesting the quest. However, you are free to kill as many of the other enemies on the level as you want. If you don't realize that, because the requests do not make that clear, these missions can become That One Level.
  • Many missions have laws that are brutally hard to uphold but aren't necessary for success, so you have the choice of accepting the challenge or just breaking the law and forgoing clan privileges.
• Tear Jerker:
  • There is a quest where you have to fetch someone zombie powder to end their life, and thus, their pain. All through this quest, this song is playing, making the burden the player takes on this quest far heavier, and the mood very sad. You do have the option of getting the memory-erasing herb so they can forget their pain, but the fact you have to make the choice between the request and what looks like the better option still looks tough.
    • And thus, Video Game Caring Potential ensues if you do get the memory-erasing herb.
    • What's even worse about this? The person wants to end their life with Zombie Powder to forget their pain. However, the Witch Of The Fens tells you that Zombie Powder preserves the user's memories. If you fulfill the request, the man is doomed to become a living corpse. Near-immortal, and still in pain.
  • Another quest is from a miner, requesting help in rescuing his fellows after an accident and talking of their cries in the dark. When you get there, the battle is against a number of ghosts. These are the miners, including the petitioner, who were unable to escape in time.
• That One Attack: Illua's Dimensional Rift. This special attack reduces everyone's current health points in the area of effect by 75%. Said area of effect is a 3x3 diamond, identical to a summon. Add to this the fact that she can boost her Accuracy with her Saber ability and that she can cast that attack from afar, and you have there an unavoidable ability able to cripple your entire team.
• That One Boss:
  • Lord of the Flowsand has a nasty habit of tripping players up, given how early it appears in the storyline. It has about 5 times the HP your characters do, capable of dealing high damage, has an attack that drains HP to heal itself, and to top it all off, it regenerates a percentage of any damage you deal to it.
  • The first fight against Illua isn't a picnic either if you haven't spent time doing sidequests. While you only have to defeat the Mark, her allies are hardly pushovers, and she uses unique and devastating magic that can quickly tear about your forces. How badly? Try 75% of all units' HP in 3x3 diamond. Illua also boasts high HP, the "Reflex" R-ability that allows her to avoid most physical attacks, and she is immune to debuffs. Oh, and she also seals the Judge, meaning no clan privileges and no bringing KO'ed units back. Finally, beating her immediately sends your party into another Boss Battle without a chance to save in between.
• That One Level:
  • The "An Earnest..." missions, which require you to find up to four dates for a chronically overscheduled petitioner. Amazingly, the lucky ladies care more about level, MVP trophies and other unspecified attributes than little things like gender and species. The last one is physically impossible to do without dispatching, which is a problem if you've been relying on the story characters and don't have any standout Player Mooks.
  • Once the player has completed all 300 missions, one final tournament becomes available. The first two fights are challenging. The third one consists of a pair of Tonberries, some enemies to cast haste on the Tonberries, and about four rounds of free turns for the enemies.
  • The "Cleaning" missions are a bit of a crapshoot. Sometimes, the time limit is as little as two rounds or as long as four rounds. Sometimes there aren't any enemies to bother you. Sometimes there are a bunch of Mimics that spam lightning magic, or fast Dreamhares that use their Dance moves to Haste up and raise their attack, and also spam status spells on you. The times when you get two rounds to clean a Mimic/Dreamhare infested ship are loads of fun.
  • The "Time to Act" mission, which combines this with That One Boss, Luck-Based Mission, and Annoying Video Game Helper. You only have one controllable character, along with five guest moogle allies of various jobs. If any one of the moogles is KO'd, you lose. How Scrappy the mission is mostly depends on the Tinker. If the Tinker skills go your way, the mission isn't so bad. If it ends up casting Haste on the enemies, you might as well turn off the DS and try again. What's more, the mission starts with an enemy Sniper packing the double-shot ability with a very squishy Black Mage moogle already in range, so it is not uncommon to fail this mission before your character even gets a turn.
    • Also a Guide Dang It!, as it's never made explicit that the repeatable prerequisite mission to Time To Act increases the capabilities of the ally moogles in Time To Act.
• Woolseyism: The Yojimbo job, meaning a samurai/ronin hired to be a bodyguard, is changed to Parivir, Sanskrit for bodyguard. The change is of questionable quality as the Parivir is a samurai class. But in fairness, Yojimbo also means bodyguard.

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