Great game, lousy touch experience – FINAL FANTASY TACTICS: THE WAR OF THE LIONS for iPad Review

I’m a Final Fantasy fan, and Tactics was one of my favorites when it first came out for the Playstation. The compelling storyline, great characters, and strategic combat is a winning combination. So, I was really excited to see it come to iOS. My first impression was also really positive. While I loved the original art, the new art is even better; it is simply stunning. However, all this marred by an awful touch interface. Selecting the right square to move to or target is really frustrating. The touch targets are too small, and terrain features and other characters are often in the way of where you need to touch. The screen rotates only in 90 degree intervals, which is annoying when you only want to rotate a couple degrees to get a better view of the squares you are targeting. Likewise, the zoom and vertical rotation are very limited, so often you are unable to find an angle that shows you what you need to see. The net result of this was slowing gameplay down, and really interfered with my enjoyment of the game. This was not so much a problem on the console version, as the cursor moved discretely from square to square. But when moving to touch, they should have changed the controls more to match the new medium. Allowing the screen to rotate freely and supporting smooth pinch to zoom would go a long way to make this game more playable.
Review by KeithK3 on FINAL FANTASY TACTICS: THE WAR OF THE LIONS for iPad.