can’t begin to tell you how long I have been waiting for this title to come. Before I played massively multiplayer online games, there was only one other title that my play time was best registered in days, not hours. That game, of course, was the original Final Fantasy Tactics on PSone. Sadly, for this review I was unable to put in the 150 hours that this game deserves, but I can tell you this title is just as deep and engrossing as the original, if not more so.
Like the original, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is all about turn-based combat. For the Final Fantasy fan, all the items and weapons are familiar; but unlike the RPG editions, all the movement and action is done on a huge grid. Also, there is no overhead map. To find battles, the player travels to the local town pub and asks for tasks to complete. In total there are an amazing 300 missions in the game, but the player will also find himself battling for turf with other clans (which is basically a guild with all your players in it) in random encounters on the Ivalice world map.
While the 300 levels may seem like an obscene amount, many of them can be done by sending a clan member to handle it, who will then come back later and report success or failure. But even though some tasks can be completed in this fashion, there is still an ungodly amount of standard battles to complete.
At the heart of any Final Fantasy Tactics game is the job system. By completing missions and winning battles, the player gains job points that enable characters to unlock new careers. Unlike the original, every job is not open to every race. For example, only Vieras can become quick-footed fencers, and Bangaas are tailor-made warriors. But even with this limitation, the job list is gigantic. There are 42 different combinations of race and job including Paladin, Fighter, Beastmaster, Animist, Sniper, Fencer, White Mage, Black Mage, Archer, Thief, Soldier, Warrior, White Monk, Bishop, Templar, Assassin, Juggler, Red Mage, and Dragoon – to name a few.
Beginning to understand the depth here? This is just the beginning. For a character to memorize a spell or special attack, they must equip an item with that power for a certain amount of attack points before that ability is learned. So, if you want to teach your characters lots of different stuff, you can spend months on end endowing them with new moves across all the various jobs.
The gameplay also introduces some interesting new challenges and enhancements. For example, each battle features a Judge who awards points for doing certain abilities, as well as gives out yellow and red cards for doing restricted moves or attacks that he dictates at the beginning of each encounter. Get too many yellow cards or a red card, and the offender will be sent to jail – which in turn costs the player money to spring him. You can also capture monsters, as well as trade characters via the link cable. Or, perhaps even better, you can hook up two machines and play the game co-operatively with a friend.
Not only is this game incredibility deep, but for a strategy fan like myself, it is addictive enough to destroy your social life. It does have a couple of drawbacks however. For one, the story is very adolescent and reminds me a lot of the The NeverEnding Story (which isn’t a good thing). And for a game this difficult, I really don’t see why the story couldn’t have been more engaging to an adult. Secondly, while it is very cool that each race has its own version of the black mage, for example, it is a shame that your clan members look almost exactly like the people you fight most of the time. After a good 12-hour session, it’s pretty easy to kill your own people if you aren’t paying attention. And finally, it is a bummer that you can’t rotate the camera.
However, none of the little problems really matter once you dig into this epic game. If you own a Game Boy Advance and love strategy, you simply must play this game. It might even be better than Advance Wars, and that’s saying a lot in my book.