Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is a game that took drastic changes from the original Final Fantasy Tactics, but I think almost all of those changes made it a worse game than its predecessor.
There’s a couple good changes in the game, don’t get me wrong: you can finally cancel movement meaning that if you realize that moving to a tile isn’t enough to get in range to attack you can just cancel that and move somewhere else, which is the big QoL feature i wanted the most. Random encounters now appear on the map, which is cool! The game also feels like it was made with the GBA in mind: you’ve got a lot of missions (300), and they feel more compact, more designed around a mentality of being quick pick and play missions, which is fitting for a GBA game. The game’s tone is also way more lighthearted than FFT, which again feels more fitting for a GBA game.
Sadly, the story is not great at all. You play as Marche, a young kid who gets teleported in a magical world full of Final Fantasy inspired imagery, along with some of your friends (tho you’re separated from them), and your goal is to find a way back to the real world. A pretty standard isekai scenario, but none of the characters are really good. For example there’s one of your friend whose entire character arc is “i don’t want to go back to the real world because my hair in white in it and i have to dye it red every day”. There’s nothing really interesting or innovative in the story, and i don’t really care for it’s message on escapism which doesn’t even fit with the narrative that much imo.
And the gameplay is a big, huge, massive step back from FFT imo. None of the maps are really that interesting or memorable. The game UI is atrocious, there’s no button to automatically equip your best equipment, i don’t even think there’s a sort button either, seeing if an item is better than what you have equipped is so unintuitive it took me 10 hours to figure out it was a feature, there’s a lot of issues with the menuing in this game and none of it is due to the lack of buttons the GBA has.
Abilities have been reworked too: instead of spending JP to learn an ability of your choice, you learn them from your equipment, like in FF9. This system is awful. It makes sense in FF9 because each character has a specific class (Zidane is a thief, Steiner is a knight, etc..) so this system allows you to build their specific class as you wanted. In FFTA everyone can change job between fights, so it makes no sense. Worse even, some of the best abilities are locked behind equipment you can’t find without following a guide because you need to steal them (which requires getting the right stealing ability) or do specific missions or w/e to find them. I didn’t follow a guide, so i ended up only having the most basic of abilities which sucked.
The game is also very grind heavy. Unlike in FFTA, there’s no level scaling for enemies, and only doing the story missions with a few side ones here and there won’t be enough to have a good enough team for the endgame. I had to grind around 10 levels for it (which isn’t even hard, just boring), and even then the final boss had an attack targeting my entire team that one shot almost everyone.
Overall, this game isn’t really bad, it’s just very forgettable, and a lot of its design wasn’t enjoyable to me, especially coming from FFT. If you enjoy it at least there’s a lot of content in it, but for me, it’s just a disappointing “sequel” to an excellent game
There’s a couple good changes in the game, don’t get me wrong: you can finally cancel movement meaning that if you realize that moving to a tile isn’t enough to get in range to attack you can just cancel that and move somewhere else, which is the big QoL feature i wanted the most. Random encounters now appear on the map, which is cool! The game also feels like it was made with the GBA in mind: you’ve got a lot of missions (300), and they feel more compact, more designed around a mentality of being quick pick and play missions, which is fitting for a GBA game. The game’s tone is also way more lighthearted than FFT, which again feels more fitting for a GBA game.
Sadly, the story is not great at all. You play as Marche, a young kid who gets teleported in a magical world full of Final Fantasy inspired imagery, along with some of your friends (tho you’re separated from them), and your goal is to find a way back to the real world. A pretty standard isekai scenario, but none of the characters are really good. For example there’s one of your friend whose entire character arc is “i don’t want to go back to the real world because my hair in white in it and i have to dye it red every day”. There’s nothing really interesting or innovative in the story, and i don’t really care for it’s message on escapism which doesn’t even fit with the narrative that much imo.
And the gameplay is a big, huge, massive step back from FFT imo. None of the maps are really that interesting or memorable. The game UI is atrocious, there’s no button to automatically equip your best equipment, i don’t even think there’s a sort button either, seeing if an item is better than what you have equipped is so unintuitive it took me 10 hours to figure out it was a feature, there’s a lot of issues with the menuing in this game and none of it is due to the lack of buttons the GBA has.
Abilities have been reworked too: instead of spending JP to learn an ability of your choice, you learn them from your equipment, like in FF9. This system is awful. It makes sense in FF9 because each character has a specific class (Zidane is a thief, Steiner is a knight, etc..) so this system allows you to build their specific class as you wanted. In FFTA everyone can change job between fights, so it makes no sense. Worse even, some of the best abilities are locked behind equipment you can’t find without following a guide because you need to steal them (which requires getting the right stealing ability) or do specific missions or w/e to find them. I didn’t follow a guide, so i ended up only having the most basic of abilities which sucked.
The game is also very grind heavy. Unlike in FFTA, there’s no level scaling for enemies, and only doing the story missions with a few side ones here and there won’t be enough to have a good enough team for the endgame. I had to grind around 10 levels for it (which isn’t even hard, just boring), and even then the final boss had an attack targeting my entire team that one shot almost everyone.
Overall, this game isn’t really bad, it’s just very forgettable, and a lot of its design wasn’t enjoyable to me, especially coming from FFT. If you enjoy it at least there’s a lot of content in it, but for me, it’s just a disappointing “sequel” to an excellent game
Reviewed on Jan 28, 2023