Perhaps what makes up for the lacking exploration element is the way the story is presented. Towns have shops with different goods up for sale and sometimes a library to learn about the LA world. Rather than putting you through as much dialogue as possible, a lot of the story is optional. In key locations you can chat with characters to learn more about them or, perform other actions to expand on the story. If you’re not interested, you can just tap the “Progress with Story” button to move onto the next stage of the game.


Why not take a break and have a chat with your fellow party members?
While it does indeed feel very linear at first when all you can see is one single path on the world map, talking with characters becomes the key in unlocking side event battles. Apart from this, there really isn’t much exploration that can be done. Locations are presented as spots just like those in FFT and TO. There are no random battles. If you feel the need to level up, all you do is repeat a battle from before. Not very exciting but thankfully, you won’t have to level grind too much as the difficulty between levels is spread out fairly evenly.


Not much to explore I’m afraid.
Another key feature is the “After Break” talks which are again, optional. After every battle, you’ll have a chance to speak with one of your party members. They say something and you have a choice of replying with three different answers. If you manage to pick the right one, your friendship level goes up and you might end up with a little present. Usually an item you can equip. It’s a fun mini game that helps increase the character development and unlocks the little bonus picture gallery that can be viewed after beating the game.


If you know your characters well enough, you might get a gift.
It’s good to see the traditional button controls haven’t been completely abandoned even though by default the game is set to touch screen only. Touch screen mode generally works well and allows a smoother game experience for some obvious reasons but there is one problem. The game is played from one isometric angle only so when you’re trying to tap a square behind a unit, you end up selecting the square the unit is on itself. Fortunately, there are confirmation dialogues to confirm what you’ve done but I think this problem could easily have been resolved if they allowed you to use the D-Pad too while in touch screen mode. That or actually let you drag the cursor around.