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Final Fantasy Tactics Advance Review Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is--
--Whoa whoa whoa, what!? I just started the review and already getting a yellow card!? Okay, okay, lemme see what I did. Lesse, push start.... Law Cards....aha!
Well screw it, I already have a yellow card, may as well go all the way! If you haven't played Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, then don't worry, I'll explain everything. It's a strategy RPG that is a lot like Final Fantasy Tactics, only this one is definitely geared toward a younger audience. The game itself isn't bad, but if you ever start a thought with "It's like Final Fantasy Tactics but" you're going to be sorely disappointed. There are a couple areas they expand on, but there is a severe lack of the complexity that Final Fantasy Tactics was great for. Since this game is about 90% mindless battles and 10% "plot," let's jump first into the plot and get it out of the way. The game starts with kids having a snowball fight to show you how to play the game. I'm cool with that. Good tutorial level, except that it's ridiculously long and boring. I was so happy to find out I didn't have to "kill" my opponents with snowballs that deal 1 damage. After that, Marche and his friends go home and start drooling over their faaaavorite video game: Final Fantasy. Yes, they not only break the fourth wall, they shatter it. So they all go to sleep (I think) and wake up in, get this, a Final Fantasy game! Is it magic? Is it a dream? I won't spoil you! Ha ha ha ha ha! So once you're in this OMG-Final-Fantasy world, Marche immediately jumps into racial slurs and insults a bangaa (one of the five races in the game). A moogle named Montblanc comes to his aid and enlists him into his clan. From then on, the game is all about clans. Your clan goes into the local pubs and takes missions. Some of them are completely random and involve dispatching your random "we don't matter" characters onto meaningless jobs while you walk back and forth or get into senseless battles. There are also plot-progressing missions that are the missions you need to complete to reach the end of the game, but the plot is really thin so sometimes scenes seem meaningless, but it turns out: that is the plot. No mistake. On the subject of Clan Missions, I had one really huge beef with the missions and that was that some were offered, but impossible. Drove me up the walls. Some missions require you use a special item, which you obtain by taking other missions. But some missions come available and yet, it isn't possible to take it because the mission that has such-and-so special item isn't available until way later in the game. Why is a mission that requires "Runba's Tale" on the list of available missions when the mission that gets you Runba's Tale isn't unlocked until you complete certain plot-quests waaaay late in the game? Just unlock them all later when they're do-able! I'm one that sometimes likes to complete all sidequests before moving on, but I hate having a list of 10 missions that I can't do. Especially since sometimes there's a mission that I can do lodged in between a bunch that I can't, so I miss it. I don't like going through a giant unless they're all valid options. Not to mention all the missions that you can do multiple times that frequent the list. I don't need a million options. Pace yourself, FFTA.
Speaking of lists, let's talk equipment. Your characters learn abilities based on what equipment you use, much like Final Fantasy 9. And for some reason, almost all abilities are learned from your weapon and not many from your armor. It's a decent system, but since there are so many abilities in the game, it means a lot of weapons. And for some reason, they didn't make a filter. If you make a Gunner, it won't limit your weapon choices to only guns. You still have to scroll through the list of swords, blades, katanas, greatswords, rapiers, bows, hunting bows, and so on. Sure, it automatically puts your cursor on the first available weapon that you can use, but some classes can use daggers (at the top) and bows (at the bottom), so if you want that bow, it's scroll time! The main things that are really missing from this game are menus. I understand that this is a handheld game, so you can't get too complicated because there just isn't room. But I would really like some way of knowing what abilities are available for each job class. There are Archers and Hunters for Human job classes. How are they different? Well, they have different abilities, but you don't know what they do until you change their job, equip the item (normally a weapon) that teaches that ability, go into your ability list, and push select on that ability. It's too much work. I like to avoid walkthroughs when I first play a game, but I was struggling to enjoy this until I found a chart of abilities for each job class online. It made the playing experience a lot better knowing what you're doing and building toward. That being said, I do really enjoy that each race has its own job classes and skill benefits. I played the game with two characters of each race so that I could fully explore each race, which makes the game interesting. It somewhat keeps you from making a team that's all the same exact build. The other thing that helps this: laws. Laws are a great idea with horrible execution. What I really like about laws is that they force you to diversify your team. You can't have a team of greatsword-wielding warriors if the laws of that fight are "no greatswords." And if you use exclusive mages, but walk into a "No Color Magic" fight, you're going to see a lot of yellow and red cards unless you use your other, non-mage allies. So it's a great idea. Problem? No regulation and too troublesome. For one, I am always getting into trouble for some reason or another. Often it's that I'm using one of the several categories of swords, but don't know what category it is in. "I'm a Warrior and Blades are illegal, so I can't attack." (Wrong: you're using a greatsword). "I'm a White Mage and Holy is illegal, so I'll stick to curing." (Wrong: Holy = White Magic). I break the law all the time and I don't have any idea I'm doing it until I see that stupid judge and hear his whistle.
It's too annoying to remember and check the laws all the time. What would've fixed it all was if they had just made illegal actions red in your menu. If you want to attack, but see that Attack is Attack, then you'll know right there that it's illegal. Or even if they kept them on the screen so that you don't have to cancel out of all your actions to bring up the menu of laws. What I like about laws is that sometimes it's beneficial to break them. "I want that weapon. Sorry, thief, you're stealing it despite the anti-steal law. You will go to prison. You will not pass go." Plus the aforementioned diverse clan. Possibly the worst part about laws is that they can absolutely ruin the fun of the game. The laws are random in the majority of cases, so sometimes the laws are really mean to you. Like when I fight a group of animals and there's an anti-"Dmg2:Animals," meaning if you hurt an animal, yellow card. Kill one? Red. Basically, you have two options: counterattack everything to death (no penalty for counterattacks) or have one or two characters take one for the team and deal massive damage to the animals, killing them all (and getting that trip straight to jail). But what's even worse than your team being bogged down is when the enemy is bogged down. Laws shouldn't be randomized because sometimes you enter a fight against mages, but there's an anti-magic law in effect, so now there is no threat. At all. Sometimes there's an anti-fight law, too, so the enemies run up to you, and can't act, so they stare at you and wait to die. It doesn't happen all the time, but there's usually somebody in the enemy ranks that is completely worthless. It's bad. Laws could really be interesting if the fights were meant to have certain laws, as a couple fights in the game do, but it needed more of it.
Another big problem I had was that I could never figure out units were mine and which were the enemies. In Final Fantasy Tactics, your units shared a color-scheme and the enemy units shared a color-scheme. In this one, I really don't know. Some enemies have different colors, but all of the colors are so diverse that I just can't tell. So many times I've dealt what I thought was the winning blow to an enemy, only to find that one of their guys has been sitting right next to me the whole time. I had a guy surrounded once, then forgot that he was an enemy and figured it was my whole group getting together for a group-heal. I cured the little moogle in fact! Lucky him! In a game where you can use standard-looking characters like this, you need some sort of distinction. I can't remember that "all your red mages are red, but enemy red mages are blue and your sages are orange while theirs are green and blah blah blah." Not to mention that some units like the Moogle Gunners are the exact same.
I think the reason for all the unit and law confusion is because even with it, this game is easy. Really easy. Granted, I did a lot of sidequests, but even still, I could often use only a couple characters per fight and win. I usually brought the full cast because they needed to learn abilities and that's how they learn, but they generally just sat in the back. The computer is dumb. Final Fantasy Tactics had an amazing computer intelligence that used smart strategies like hiding when hurt, targetting weak characters, and even sometimes hurting their own team for the greater good. This game's AI is almost entirely random. I'll have a character on his knees dying and they have an archer poised to kill him...and the archer shoots my guy that's full on health and has the Reflex ability "Block Arrows." Good job. And if that wasn't enough, you eventually get these things called Totema that can do massive damage to all enemies on the screen no matter where they are. And what does it cost to use this? Judge Points. I never use JP because they're pointless. Totema are the backup strategy for when you accidentally send your entire team out on individual missions (or in jail) and are in a "difficult" fight with just Marche. The CPU never uses Totema, so I tried to do the same. I don't want advantages over the CPU. I want a challenge. But really, this is a game aimed at a young audience, so maybe younger audiences will struggle with it. Who knows? I know that whenever I got Game Over, it was almost always because I forgot a law and Marche went to jail (which is an instant loss). The only exception is this one fight where I was killed in a single hit before I could even act, but I'll say no more of this to not spoil things. I played this game on an emulator on computer. I like to play on the actual system that the game was released for, but I didn't, and I'm so glad I didn't. Many emulators have this ability to speed up the game, which I feel is essential to this game. It is really slow. My emulator can double the speed the game moves at, and I don't think I ever took my finger off this button. I really should've just weighted it down. The movements are slow. The actions are slow. The judges are slow-- well, actually the judges are quite fast, but they take up turns in combat that are basically pointless and I wish they could just be disabled. There's a lot more to be said for this game, but I think these are the main points. There are a few other things to point out that I find odd, like how you get to create your own world map. Creating your own map isn't bad, it's just kinda weird when you first start doing it because I for one wasn't sure if I was doing it right. Should I put all my cities together? Should I put some up top and some below? I...I just don't know!
I could also mention the useless money in this game. As you see above, I have umm, a lot of funds. In the beginning of the game, I was in a severe money-crunch because I bought up all the weapons and armors in the stores in case they were worth having, so I was lacking in funds. But later on, there is no use for money at all, so it just starts building. Also there are some battles you can fight against random clans on the map (see that tiny red person in the top of the above image?). They annoy me. I never want to fight them because they're so weak, but they appear and disappear at complete random so I almost never move more than one space at a time because I'm avoiding them like a game of PacMan.
Also the different regions need freeing, which I foolishly did, but whenever you free somewhere, they randomly come under attack and you need to help them or they'll be unfreed. It's not a bad idea if Eluut Sands wasn't always under attack! The fights aren't hard and I assume these and the random clan fights are a way of having "random encounters" so that you can level-up your units, but for me they were just a distraction from the tiny plot so that it feels longer. It's a strange game with basically no plot that is aimed toward young kids. It's easy and cute and a waste of time, which is exactly what young audiences are looking for. A better title for this game would've been Final Fantasy Tactics Junior.
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