Micro management isn’t really needed but if you really wanted to…
During missions, Vaan, Penelo and other characters in the story are the ones responsible for leading the espers that are summoned. I find the AI generally does a better job than “Heroes of Mana” in controlling the characters and espers; attacking when an enemy is near or curing anyone on your side when they’re hurt. You can also issue commands to each unit separately but mainly to the leading heroes. Bringing over the Gambit System from FFXII, you can basically set which skill or magic our protagonists can automatically use at will but only one. All the other skills and magic have to executed manually. Fortunately it’s a breeze to issue commands and change the Gambit setting during battles thanks to the stylus control. As you would expect from the RPG element, new magic or skills are obtained as the characters level up from gaining experience. Quickenings (or “Mist Knacks”) have also been brought over and works pretty much the same way except you gain them from defeating bosses instead of using the License Board.


Setting Penelo to cast “Curaga” in the Gambit System.
You start off in missions with a set number of espers but more can be summoned from gates scattered throughout the maps. First however, you have to go occupy them which takes a few seconds of time. Once that’s done, you select which member of your party you want the summoned espers to follow and they’ll appear after another few seconds. It’s fast and you don’t have to be by the gate when summoning. As you would expect from an RTS, you can queue up what you want to summon and there is also a limit to the number and types of espers you can have of course. Basically the more gates you occupy, the more powerful espers you can summon.


You don’t need buildings to churn out units, just these Summoning Gates.
In addition to the usual elements such as fire is weak against water etc, you have to deal with the different unit types too now which are melee, ranged and airborne. Again, each have their strengths and weaknesses but, most of the time you can win by sending your entire army charging forward as long as they have healers backing them up. And if you’re unsure what element is weak against what don’t worry because RW actually tells you an esper’s elemental weakness in their charts. Before each mission, you actually get to see what you’ll be up against so that you can edit the espers you’ve got in your team appropriately.

Gaining new espers means collecting Holy Stones from battles and then spending them in the Licence Ring system. This works very similarly to the Licence Board system in FFXII where there are multiple branches from empty slots. The more of these slots you unlock on one path, the more powerful high ranking espers you can gain access to but at the same time, the more Holy Stones you’ll have to spend. The circular Licence Ring isn’t as big as the Licence Board due to space limitations on the DS but you’ll find all your favourite summons available such as Ifrit, Shiva, Ramus and the Chocobo. There are also the common enemies such as the Goblin, Saboten and the deadly Tonberry too. You’re only allowed to bring five kinds of these espers along to battles and these can be edited in the Esper Deck. There are five different decks available for editing so you won’t have to worry too much about having to change espers a lot.


Unlocking new espers require Holy Stones – It’s Tonberry!
As far as the traditional FF RPG element is concerned, you’ll still find some of it here. You can walk around on a world map of Lemures, speak with NPCs on your airship, purchase items to equip and level up. You’re really limited to your airship when it comes to walking around freely and talking to characters though, unlike the vast environments in the PS2 game. What’s new however is that you can now synthesize your own weapons too using the materials you mine up during battles. The only problem this new feature is there isn’t much choice in what you can make. By the time you create something you’ll find that you can obtain in the next mission or so which is kind of meaningless.