Didn't think it was, but its pretty shocking just how sloppy it is, on the plus side it makes me appreciate the witting of the main series more.
A few more point that I just remembered. The game use "O" to confirm and "X" to cancel, which is the japenese default but very much not the NA, usually company will flip it when they port stuff over, but not here so you'll constantly do something when you mean to cancel. You can upgrade cards, but the game doesn't tell you what the upgrade does, which can lead to a bunch of really awkward stuff, like your non lethal tranq pistol turning into a lethal gun or the upgraded card having a lower limit in the deck (ie you can have 4 basic but only 2 upgraded, so if you upgrade all 4 of your card you can use 2 and essentially lose the other 2). The enemy AI is also completely brain dead, I tried to kill myself once to restart a level but even walking right in front of the enemy and standing still was too much for them, I had to drop a mine next to a bunch of barrels and trigger it myself to finally die.
So I grabbed another game, wild arms XF. Wild arms is a cowboy theme JRPG franchise that died out in the PS2 era (5, the last one, was pretty bad, it went full anime plot). XF is a tactics a la final fantasy tactics. It does a few interesting things, almost every main story battle has some sort of gimmick, maybe you gotta escort NPS, or sneak somewhere or there's a time limit. The variety is great, but a lot of fight end up being a bit tedious or you have to figure out how the dev wanted you to clear a level and might have to restart a few times until you figure it out. New classes are given to you at fixed point in the story rather than FFT more organic version where you get them when you met pre requisite. Classes have good variety and a good amount of interesting skills, similarly equipment tend to be more interesting than just stats stick. So overall I'd say its a compare very well to FFT gameplay wise.
Story wise trough, ouch. It sorta tries to do the same kind of political intrigue story, but it just doesn't even have 1/10 of the writting chops to pull it off. Characters are all cartoonish archetype and the main story is just a convoluted mess. The games has to twist itself in all kind of knots to justify your character being involved in the story and then just end up resorting to "she's the one" bullshit anyway. Otherwise it also goes pretty deep in the anime cliche, there's even the usual skits about some 30+ character being constantly called old and treated like they're 80 or something.
