>>16589688
Skills tied to base items, shallow class tree, shit story, shallow characters who have no motives or complexities (in fact, a critical plot point in the ending is that nobody changed, but they cannot stop the main character). Also, judges were cancer, because they existed only to be completely ignored by checking the laws and only fighting when they don't affect you, making them a pointless mechanic that only punishes you for forgetting to check. The map design element of having 2d maps that cannot be rotated means that every map is just a differently designed one-way slope.
The reason some people are capable of liking FFTA is because the genre doesn't exactly have a lot of examples. If you want to play a game that is very similar to FFT, you have only a couple of games to play. If there were a dozen games that were at the level of Tactics Ogre and FFT, then FFTA would be completely forgotten.
>>16589868
Honestly, it's so FFT-like that they will never be able to seperate the game from the comparison. They even use the same color, font, and style for displaying height. This was clearly designed around FFT. If anybody remembers, a few years ago, they revealed that they were making a sequel to FFT, but it was a mobile game. This is probably the remnants of that project, to be perfectly frank.
So while it's not officially a Tactics sequel, it'll never be viewed as a non-Tactics game.