Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

"A game so consistently bad that its ineptness feels intentional"

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is bad. Very, very bad. Staggeringly, hopelessly, painfully bad. Yet it's actually playable despite the fact that it's so bad. Hence it is the worst kind of bad game: the bad game that I can't stay away from even though it's so consistently inept that I feel bad for having anything at all positive to say about it.

This is partially because somebody thought it would be a good idea to release a game like this for the Game Boy Advance. Why? The only portable game I've ever played that's been any good because of rather than despite its medium is the original version of Tetris, the pack-in for the original Game Boy way back in 1989. Because it's a Game Boy Advance game and not, say, a Playstation game, we are subjected to an awful menu system, ghastly music, and all sorts of other limitations that come from having far too much information for a system like this to handle.

And menus are important in a strategy RPG. Sure, the original Final Fantasy Tactics had an occasional quirk, but at least that one had enough space to show you all of the necessary information without making you hunt for it. FFT Advance does not even bother to show such useful information as the statistics of the weapons in your inventory. There simply isn't enough screen real estate for the game to display such basic information as whether a piece of equipment will increase or decrease your stats when it actually matters. To make matters worse, there is absolutely no auto-configuration of equipment here. No fitting rooms at the stores nor an optimum equip mode in the party menu screen. Making this particularly maddening is that changing the job of a character removes every bit of his or her equipment (even if the new class can use it).

A bad equipment system is no small flaw in a game such as this, because the job system here is really just the job system from the previous game, with the clever and balanced method of learning new abilities replaced by that awful equipment-based system from Final Fantasy IX. It was bad enough the first time around, and here it does nothing but suck as much fun out of the job system as possible. Whereas you could previously gain new skills at your own pace, you must now operate entirely on the game's terms, learning new abilities only as the weapons that teach them are made available to you. And because there is only one way to learn each skill, you will have to suffer through the weakest of weapons every time you start learning a new class. Adding insult to injury, AP is doled out in fixed amounts at the end of the battle. An elaborate job system that requires you to learn entirely at the game's pace rather than your own, basically.

Advancing through the classes is made complicated by the fact that there are five races, human, Nu Mou, Moogles, Viera, and Bangaa. On one hand, each race only has access to some of the jobs, but on the other hand, there is so much overlap between the jobs that it hardly matters. Most everything from the previous game is here (save for some of the sillier stuff like mimes and calculators), and the abilities should all be fairly familiar. Note that there are no class levels; you open up new classes by gaining a certain number of abilities in a lower one instead. Enhancement moves at a dreadfully slow pace for this reason, although giving the game the finger and looking up a jobs list on this site helped quite a bit.

Enhancement is further hindered by the fact that character stat growth is based almost entirely on what job a character is when leveling up. This happened a bit in the previous game, but here it is much more important, especially given that hit points and magic are no longer based on equipment. Whereas brave and faith were all that the previous game really used to push you in the direction of certain classes, this game pulls no punches in crippling your options once you've used a particular class long enough. No, really, this is supposed to be a complex game designed to give as much freedom as possible to the player, they swear.

Battles are about the same as they were in the first FF Tactics game, with a few exceptions. The obvious one is that you can't rotate the field at all (luckily, it's not really an issue). You will be relieved to know that the developers still haven't strayed from their path of sabotaging the game every step of the way, though: timing is all but gone. Characters take their turns in an order determined by their speed stat, but that's really all there is to it. Everything resolves right away (!!), but because this would otherwise break the game beyond all hope, the controlling factor in everything is now hit percentage. Even in the comparatively entertaining areas of the game they found ways to make things as frustrating as possible, it seems. Be careful where you play this game if you are prone to bouts of profanity when things don't go as expected, especially when the AI characters start using that ability that makes them immune to all physical attacks.

It simply wouldn't be any fun if you were actually allowed to play the game on your own terms, so don't be surprised when they throw out all sorts of reaction abilities designed to keep you from using specific abilities on a given character. They're not bluffing: you even run across those annoying flans from Final Fantasy X that are invulnerable to everything but one specific type of magic. Make sure you purchase a second Game Boy, too; damage predictions are only approximate and it's nothing if not infuriating when the enemy has 25 hit points, the game tells you that your attack will do 26 damage, and it actually only does 24. As a bit of consolation, the AI will occasionally do hilariously stupid things, like attack when there's a 0% chance of a hit.

Kindly, the two jobs with the lamest secondary abilities have been retooled to make up for the removal of timing. Instead of the pointless charge ability, archers now behave similarly to Mustadio (while the gunner class is mostly concerned with status changes) and dragoons breathe fire as much as they jump. I am particularly thankful for the latter modifications, because it now means that dragoons aren't just a novelty with neat weapons. Minor but significant is that most of the status-related attacks do damage as well this time around. Note that you don't really get any character-specific abilities this time around, so you're free to do whatever you want with your party members. You are allowed six characters per battle rather than the previous five (except when the game decides to be particularly annoying), although I don't find that it makes much of a difference.

Admittedly, things do get a lot better as you approach the end of the game. This is true for two reasons: first, that that once you have most of the weapons, the most annoying part of the job system is removed, and second, that your characters become obscenely powerful (one of the assassin abilities is instant death that works 50-70% of the time). Not that battles were ever too tough to begin with; the only time I ever lost (as opposed to the 30-odd times I had to reset because of unfavorable laws) was when I was supposed to protect a character who couldn't survive a single hit by the enemies yet kept walking directly into the line of fire. At least the game is consistently bad.

Now the worst of it: battles take place in the presence of judges. Judges enforce randomly-determined “laws” (you can, thankfully, see what laws will be in effect on a given day) wherein you are not allowed to perform certain functions under the threat of all sorts of obnoxious punishments. The concept of laws is, to put it simply, the most mind-numbingly stupid concept that I have ever seen in a video game and I am completely at a loss as to how anyone could think that this would be a positive addition to the game.

At first it's not so bad because the laws are limited to one per battle and often affect abilities you've not yet encountered. It's actually rather fun the first couple of times they disable the Fight command and you get to run through a battle using only your secondary abilities (good thing almost every secondary ability deals damage), but eventually they start piling on more laws and the laws you encounter keep getting worse and worse. I don't mind being told that I can't use items for a battle, but when I'm forbidden from using entire character classes, it makes me want to hurt things. The further you get, the worse the laws get, so expect either to blow through a whole lot of law cards or spend as much time wandering around waiting for the annoying laws to go away as you do fighting.

The developers must seem to think that I'm actually going to go to all the trouble of leveling up fifteen separate characters (or learning every job for my six defaults) just so that I can be prepared for the game banning all guns and bows for a battle. A character can receive either yellow cards or red cards depending on the severity of the violation; a red card means a trip to prison and you immediately lose if your main character gets a red card. Yes, it is actually possible to lose the game simply for attacking an enemy with the wrong type of weapon. This is not even remotely fun and it is yet another way in which the game mechanics are designed explicitly with the point of limiting what the player can do. Important enemies are often immune from the laws, and the game will not hesitate to rub lemon juice in your eyes with this fact.

Sometimes I wonder if the people making this game were intentionally trying to make it as stupid as possible. If the law system alone isn't bad enough, a significant portion of the plot actually revolves around the fact that it is so painfully stupid. There is even an elaborate side game designed around making the law system less annoying. The law system really is about the single worst gameplay mechanic I have ever come across in twenty years of playing video games.

The rest of the plot isn't any better. Starting in the “real” world, several outcasts come across a strange book. One character says that she doesn't like books, she likes games. Like Final Fantasy. The next morning, our hero (“Merche”) wakes up . . . in the world of Final Fantasy. After that we get some nonsense about clans and then a goofy story about crystals. Those of you who like to complain that all RPG plots are about saving the world should rejoice, though: the goal of this game is, no lie, to destroy the world and ruin everyone's fantasies entirely for the benefit of the main character. Heck, even he doesn't really benefit from this goal, and the character motivation only gets weaker as the game goes on.

Despite the claimed setting, it's not really any more self-referential than any of the other recent Final Fantasy games, and it has about as much to do with the plot of Final Fantasy Tactics as does Vagrant Story. Be amazed, for there's no Bahamut summon in this game.

Mostly you're just a member of a wandering “clan” (mine is called 'Clan Dropsy' – it's a play on the default name) performing missions on tips for local pubs. Missions are either “go somewhere and fight a battle” or, much like the side missions of the previous game, “send a character off on his own while you do some busywork”. Some missions (you'll know which ones) advance the story, while some just give you more to do. There are also battles with other clans (the closest the game has to random encounters) and some straight story battles, but this is the one aspect of the game where you're mostly allowed to do things at your own pace. Be not fooled by claims that the game has 300 missions, because most of them are only as interactive as the propositions from the previous game. You also get to assemble the map to your liking, but it's nothing special given that the locations and the places to put them are fixed. But, hey, at least you can put the port city in the middle of the mountains if you so choose.

Don't worry, I have no qualms with the artwork. Sure, the backgrounds are as bland as any other Game Boy Advance game, but the character designs are nifty – think the characters from the previous game, but with noses. Character sprites aren't bad, if sometimes hard to tell apart. Most all of the ways in which the artwork is downgraded from the previous games are due to the fact that this is a game designed for a lowly portable system rather than a fancy console system, so I guess I can't complain about that. Well, no more than I have already. Music is, well, about what you would expect for a portable system that probably spends much of its time with the volume turned off anyway. It's only really a disappointment in the way that it's a disappointment that the battlefields aren't rendered in 3D.

Of the flaws in this game, I would probably attribute a quarter or so merely to the fact that it's a game designed for a game system smaller than a paperback book rather than a game system that you plug into a television. The other 75% is entirely inexcusable, and it's all I can do not to conclude that the developers intentionally set out to design a terrible game. The idea behind the job system is that it should allow me to do just about anything I want, but there's hardly any more freedom with this system than there is with the traditional RPG Final Fantasy games of late. The law system? Nothing but arbitrary restrictions on fun. And so on.

In short, what we have here is a game that promises a great deal of freedom and then turns out to be nothing but an endless series of steps to limit that freedom, both implicitly and painfully explicitly. Is it merely due to hardware limitations or did they just get the least competent game designers in all of Japan to put this one together? Either way, the results are sometimes pretty but always annoying. The only thing that has so far assured that my portable electronics all remain in one piece is that the underpinnings are enough like the absolutely phenomenal game to which this is supposed to be a sequel.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 01/14/05