As a quick refresher, I absolutely loved Final Fantasy Tactics and was thoroughly disappointed by its follow-up, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. This is the third game in that loosely connected spin-off series and I'm happy to say that it was better than the previous one. Not fantastic or anything, and nothing close to the original, but still a solid and enjoyable experience. Once again, you control a small band of diverse fighters and healers, traversing isometric environments in a turn-based fashion and trying to defeat your enemies before they can defeat you. Outside from these battles, which compose the bulk of the gameplay, there's a world map you can traverse, accepting missions, crafting new weapons and armor, and training your various units up sprawlingly diverse "job" ladder that includes healers, fighters, ninjas, archers, gunmen, wizards, and so many other roles. Too many, in fact. My biggest criticism of the game was just how wide open and sprawling the job fields were. The original Tactics game had 20 possible jobs to choose from; it'd be really hard to maintain a crew that included one of everything, but you still came to use and understand almost every single one of these jobs. Tactics Advance had 42 jobs, an amount that lent itself to some natural overlaps and redundancies. Here in Tactics A2, there were 60 jobs to choose from, which meant that even in a 35-hour run through I never really used the majority of the jobs available to me. The other pain in the ass was the way abilities were learned; those with even a fleeting familiarity with Square RPGs know, for instance, that a white mage (or priest, or healer, or whatever) is one of the most basic job classes there is, and that basic abilities of these characters include health restoration, removing negative status effects, and raising fallen allies from the dead. In my 35-hour play-through, however - in which I used a healer in just about every battle - I was never able to learn how the "raise" spell. The thing is, in this game you learn your spells and abilities from the weapons and items you equip. But you also have to create your own weapons and armor out of loot you've found on various missions. The whole thing feels needlessly complex, and it was pretty easy for me to reach the end of the game with, say, a thief who didn't know how to steal weapons, or a healer who knew two spells. It seems like there was way too big a focus on the breadth of classes available and not enough depth to any of those classes. Each of the sixty job classes uses its own weaponry and armor (with some overlap, admittedly) and I often found myself crafting new weapons only to find that they were of no use to any of the twenty-odd characters in my party. By game's end, I had all sorts of assorted crap I had never used, and yet my party knew way fewer skills and abilities than in any other Final Fantasy game I'd played. But I digress, apparently, and I don't want the main takeaway from this post to be that Final Fantasy Tactics A2 was far too convoluted and bulky for its own good. It was a decent little game that was just the right amount of challenging - that is to say, I failed several missions, but never did I fail the same one incessantly and frustratingly - and although its story was nothing to write home about, it was still far superior to the childish silliness of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. The game doesn't come close to the greatness of the original, but I never expected ti to do so; as such, it met my expectations quite well. If you're a huge fan of either the Final Fantasy series or turn-based strategy RPGs, this is probably right up your alley. Otherwise, don't bother. Thirty-five hours is a long time to spend playing something you don't like.
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