I loved the first Final Fantasty Tactics game on the Playstation. It is probably my favorite PSX title ever. I played daily for hours the entire summer after freshman year in college. Not only did it keep me from spending a ton of cash on other games due to longevity, but it also made me a fan of strategy games in general. Leveling up, creating death squads that used different abilities in combination to devistate opponents, and killing Chocobos was all I did that summer while I lived in my parent’s attic.
When I got to Korea, one of the games I was most excited about on the GBA was Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. The game had a different feel than the original FFT. There were beings in the game called “Judges” that dictated the rules of battle. For example, you could be told that for a mission you weren’t allowed to cast spells, or move more than one square at a time. These rules got broken from time to time, and would send your character to jail. From there you had to pay to get the character back. While this added challenge, some of the rules were poorly worded, or vague. It led to a lot of situations like this. The main problem I had with Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was that each turn took FOREVER to execute. Everything took too long to finish executing: walking, attacking, casting spells. Everything.
I had heard mixed things about Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2. People that hated the Judge system continued hating on the game, and people that will play anything with Final Fantasy in the title played it and loved it. I didn’t import it early, which shows how much I thought Final Fantasy Tactics Advance needed improvement before I’d consider a further investment in the franchise. It went from a “Day One” purchase to a wait and get it used if possible title.
I finally found a copy at out local shop and bought it without thinking. On the ride home on the subway I had some mild buyer’s remorse. “What had I done? I haven’t touched my Nintendo DS since I got my Cowon O2. When do my eyeballs have time to play a game when I’m busy watching or listening to podcasts all the time? Do I really want to carry around two pocket sized amusement devices? Will I still be into this gameplay after all these years?”
After two days of owning the game I’m about ten hours into the game. My doubts have been destroyed. It’s a marked improvement over FFTA. The Nintendo DS version of the game is much faster between rounds, and the Judge’s system has been “fixed”. Instead of punishments, they present the rule breaking as a removal of bonuses. Functionally it’s about the same, because you get more free loot for following the rules than breaking them, but it’s not as big a deal to follow rules. The rules are also posted on the second screen at all times, so you know what you need to watch out for. Also, you get to pick a perk you keep as long as you follow rules. This gives you an incentive in the game to stick to the rules even though breaking them from time to time would give you an even better benefit. Laws can still screw you over from time to time, but I haven’t had to juggle three different rules at once and try to remember picky details like if a sword is technically a light blade, heavy blade or a rapier once.
The story is very open ended, and you can advance the story at your own pace. Unlocking new weapons and classes is kind of funky at the moment. I have loads of swords and other items I can’t use because I don’t have the beginning level classes finished well enough to earn more obscure classes. It’s a big tease to unlock a new weapon for an entirely new class and have no idea of the requirements how to use the weapon in the first place. There are a lot of nice touches to keep people playing just one more round, and the way they’ve balanced the classes by race (also in FFTA) stops you from building a uniform death squad right away. By this point in FFTA I think I had all the classes I used for the rest of the game, or near enough to it that the differences hardly mattered. Right now there are multiple dozens of more classes I haven’t even seen yet. I’m sure there are some broken classes, just like the other games, but I have yet to find those classes yet.
The game has multiple settings at the beginning for difficulty. I set it on HARD and didn’t look back. There have been a few missions at the eight hour mark that have proved challenging enough that I’m happy with my purchase. FFTA never felt like a real strategy game because it was so easy, but FFTA has a much better difficulty presented so far. It’s not like the most difficult battles in FFT, but it’s consistently down to making the right choices in units, abilities, and equipment loads that means that you can’t make mistakes often and still survive. It’s also pretty forgiving about death. Losing a character in battle doesn’t kill them outright like it did in FFT. I wish there was a “superhard” difficulty that brought that option back. I’m not obsessive/compulsive enough to play Fire Emblem, but I do play Final Fantasy Tactics with a “can’t lose anyone” obsessive slant.
I’m happy to have another long lasting game to carry around with me when I’m in the house. It’s basically the perfect bathroom game. I won’t play it at work because children freak out about teachers having Nintendo DS games they don’t know about, but I think I’ll get some mileage out of this game.
