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not the original but ok

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 9
Date: September 15, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I adore the original Final Fantasy Tactics for PS1 but this is not the same game. It is cute and if you are a fan of Final Fantasy it is a nice addition to the family but the game is just not very interesting.

It is cute and I think it is honestly geared at a much younger player. Kids will probably like it a lot more than I did.

Disappointed but still playing

Pales to original, but good on its own

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 5
Date: December 09, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Ahhh, many years I have waited for FFT to be brought back, and it was with great anticipation that I played this game.

Being a fan of Square(now SquareEnix), I would have bought this game whether it was a remake of the original, or as I was pleasantly surprised, a completely new game in itself. But, although I enjoyed this game, I couldn't help but draw comparisons to the original and determine that FFTA falls short in many ways to its predecessor.

Don't get me wrong though, FFTA is well deserving of the "Final Fantasy" Moniker and plays very similarly to the original FFT. The few changes added to FFTA like the "Mission" and the "Law" system do make for a different playing experience, but not necessarily a better one.

There were really 4 main things keeping FFTA from being a great game:

1)"Kiddie" like design of the characters
2)Lack of a good plot
3)Annoying item and equipping system
4)Too easy

Let me explain:

"Kiddie" designs-
The game itself presents excellent graphics, and I am still impressed by what this little handheld GBA can do, especially with games like these. But I was a little disappointed that my main characters were a blond Alfalfa-like girly boy, and a rabbit.

The Plot-
The plot was somewhat okay when you performed missions to move the story along, but the other missions seemed completely unrelated and useless. And even after you beat the last boss, the game still goes on. I never understood that if the whole point of the game is to change the world back to normal, why doesn't it do so after the last boss. It seems like there's no end to the game, and I don't have another 90 hours to find if there is one!

Items and equipping-
Probably the most annoying part and biggest drawback of the game is the item and equipping system. It could take you hours just to make sure your clan is equipped correctly! And when you change the jobs of your characters, you're back to square one because of the auto-unequip feature. They should have put in an auto-equip like the original game. Of the 90 hours spent playing the game, 75 hours are devoted to equipping your characters, 10 hours devoted to learning the equipment system, and 5 hours of gameplay! Well, that's what it seemed like anyway.

Ease of game-
Last but not least, the game lacked the challenge of the original. The "Law" system makes so that you can rarely lose a character if they die, only in certain areas. There were many times during the original FFT where you needed to reset and start from your last save point because of losing one of your best warriors in a battle. And the orginal FFT was overall more challenging, there were many points where you were overmatched and lost many times. In FFTA, I don't remember losing a match once.

In conclusion, I stand by the title of this review. FFTA for GBA is a good game if taken on its own. But it can't be taken solely on its own because it shares the name of its predecessor FFT for Playstation. When comparing the two, FFTA just seemed to fall short of its predecessor. I couldn't help but notice from the graphics and difficulty that this game seemed tweaked for the younger generation to play, which is also understandable as Nintendo has been known for their "younger-tuned" video games.

The little annoyances in FFTA keep it from being a great game, but shouldn't keep it from your video game library. If you're a true fan of strategy and turn-based games and even Square games(like me), this game is definitely worth playing. If you're new to the strategy genre, there is another strategy game for the GBA that I thought was better than this, try Tactics Ogre.

FF = Fatally Flawed

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 5
Date: July 14, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Slogging through this game ranks as one of the most miserable experiences of my entire life. I gave FFTA every opportunity to prove that it was worthy of the Square-Enix label, but the only thing it proved to be was a cure for insomnia. The criticisms of this game are boundless. There is absolutely no central theme. The gameplay consists of wandering from one pointless mission to another. The battle engine is mediocre at best and the childish dialogue between the androgynous characters leaves you feeling nauseated. The mere fact that the game opens with a snowball fight should have signaled that we were in trouble. This game lost all focus on the "strategy" and "RPG" aspects that should have been central. There was no exploration involved and very little intereaction with third party NPCs. The original FFT for PS1 surpassed this game in every way. I'm quite convinced that this game served as nothing more than a disingenuous attempt to cash-in on the Final Fantasy legacy. RPG fans would be wise to avoid this waste of money and 60+ hours of your life!

Not the most challenging, but a good time killer

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 5
Date: October 26, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This is a good game to pick up for a 20-30 minute block of time and get in a couple of battles. The battles are slightly repetitive, but you can mix things up nicely by changing the composition of the team you send out.

It's all about strategies and tactics

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: November 03, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is a very different form of RPG. Like Crystal Chronicles, Tactics uses a completely different approach in terms of battle system. Battles are still turn based but the way you control the party is very different. Regular FF games in the numbered series have your party and the enemies lined up on different sides and take turns to attack. However, in Tactics, it employed a similar system with the N64 RPG Aidyn Chronicles: you have you to move around the battle field, find vantage points to get the highest damage rate to yoru enemies. Unlike Aidyn Chronicles, which you have a very free choice of locality in terms of positioning your party, Tactics employed the grid system. So instead of a battle arena, you have your party standing on a grid battle field with varied landscape and how many grid squares you could move will depend on how fast and what level and jobs your characters are. Similar to Aidyn Chronicles, you need to position your characters at favourable spots e.g. at the back of your enemies, or standing on a higher ground in order to score the best possible damage on your enemies. The good part is the system will show you the possible hit rate and damage you would score so that you can trial and error before actually carry out the actions. It might sound hideous to taditional turn based RPG players, especially hard core FF players, but it does provide you a lot more fun in determining what kind of strategy you should use: team work or individual attacks.

Battles are carried out in form of clan wars and clan mission. Clans are basically yoru party. You can have any number of people in your clan as long as you welcome them into your party, however, at the most you would only be able to use 6 in any battle. There is a huge variety and combination possibility for clan members as there are Human, Viera, Ni Mu, Bangaa and Moogle for you to choose from, and each race have their strength and weaknesses that are compatible with a huge variety of jobs to be mastered. So you would need to plan on how you want your clan to develop in the long run.

Clans earn their living by taking up missions and involving in clan wars. Missions are in the form of action mission, dispatch mission and negotiation mission. Action mission involves real battle controlled by yourself but the other two involve dispatching your clan members to handle them themselves. So the more well trained your clan members are the higher chance for you to be successful in those missions. Again this involves the tactics and strategies of developing your clan members.

The story is unfolded during different missions (and they tend to me more expensive ones too) so if you want to proceed with the story you would definitely need to buy missions from the pub. Also your characters will level up automatically provided they score experience points with successful actions during the battles. So if you intend to train up a strong clan make sure everyone got a chance to participate in various battles. Further the stronger your clan, the bigger is the sphere of influence of your clan and the better negotiation power your clan will have in the world of Ivalice (your clan will level up in a similar manner as your character).

In all, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is a very strategic RPG game which is pretty addictive to players. Nonetheless, when you first start the games, battles might take ages to finish until your characters are strong enought to cause one or two hit kills. Lastly, always advice team works in battle and the most important is, you can link up with another GBA game with your friends and use two clans or more together to explore the world of Ivalice. Doesn't this sound cool?

FFTAdvance is good.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: November 04, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I've played the series since FFOne for the SNES. They were good. All of them were good until I played FFT for the PSOne. The game was hard. I'm a regular game player. Not avid, but a regular joe. The learning curve was unbelievable. There was so much to learn. I felt asleep just trying to complete the tutorial. I didn't like it as much.
Now that this version came out. It's more simplified for average guys like me. I'm still playing it. It's a good games for the average game player. Loyal Final Fantasy Tactics fanatics might be disappointed, but I like it.

Take Your Tactics, Son

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: October 18, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Those of you who played Advance Wars and Advance Wars 2 and liked it know what a wonderful experience it is to conquer a strategy game. That is what this is. A fantastic showing of strategy that blends well with the story-driven swordfighting of the RPG. Yes, it is true this is not the most difficult game out there, nor is it the deeply powerful experience of most 80+ hour RPG's. But, it is a good time waster and will find it's way to wriggle into your daily routine.
So Take your Tactics, son and report to me in the morning. You'll feel better.

no regrets

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: October 22, 2003
Author: Amazon User

When I started playing this game, I likened it to a cross between Golden Sun and Advance Wars. But the more I play it, the more I realize that it's really much more like Advance Wars than Golden Sun. I can't say I'm disappointed, since I enjoy strategy games like Advance Wars, but it didn't satiate my RPG craving by any means.

You don't get to walk around towns, talking to people and picking up clues: everything is centered on battles and missions. (If you're my brother, this is a good thing. For me, it gets boring.) While I've already logged over 50 hours on this game, I estimate about a third of that time was spent snoozing or watching TV while the Game Boy was paused. My video game stamina is generally quite high (every time I play Final Fantasy III, I break the curse on the Cursed Shield, which takes several hours), but playing this game for long periods of time tends to make me sleepy.

Still I find that I have developed a mild `addictivity'....

When you turn the game on, the intro sequence actually starts with the words, "It was a day like any other...." Fortunately, (most of) the cheese stops there. The story line is one I haven't seen before--"How Do We Get Back to the Real World?" (but I've been wondering this for years). The characters are fairly modern: one kid's parents are divorced, while the father of another kid is an alcoholic, I think; they don't get along with the other kids at school, and they want to escape their lives through fantasy. Sounds like typical Millennial Generation kids--don't know why I haven't seen this kind of plot before. The dialogue is, for the most part, pleasantly devoid of sap, and when emotions do come into play, they are connected to situations closer to those you or I might experience. Compare "I wish my mom were alive and my dad weren't a drunk" (in this game and empathizable) with "I was kidnapped at birth and raised as a killing machine--what a pity that I must also save the world" (in other games and, well, less empathizable).

The whole law thing is new to me. It doesn't get tricky until you have to worry about three laws at a time (some of which are really ornery). Before then, if you're about to engage in battle and don't like the laws you'll get, you can walk around a bit more until the laws change (as they do with every footstep) and you find some you can live with.

The experience-earning system has been, I believe, simplified. No more keeping track of how much experience your units need to gain before they reach the next experience level: each subsequent level is always reached after a unit gains 100 experience points. Attacking an enemy more experienced than yourself will gain you much experience; attacking an enemy less experienced than yourself will gain you little experience. Same as always, right? Except that if you send a strong unit to attack an enemy, she will gain less experience from it than one of your weaker units would have. And you can gain experience just by using items.

TIP: One quick way to level up an inexperienced unit is to bring him along with your tough guys and have him do nothing more than throw some cheap potions at the experienced units. Works like a charm--my gift to you.

I recommend the Player's Guide to this game, not so much for help with each mission, but to sort out the weapons and armor. In most RPG's, you travel around from town to town, and you can be reasonably assured that whatever gear you find in the next town will be better than the stuff you just bought. Not so in this game, where you "walk" from one town to another (out of five total) in seconds, and each shop only adds to its inventory. (Turns out, even the old gear is useful, so it's good that the stores don't clear it out to make room for the new, but it's such a PAIN to scroll through 50+ different weapons, trying to figure out which one is better than what you've already got, and how.) Each piece of gear may or may not teach a spell to certain characters, and keeping track of what gear teaches what spells to what characters is otherwise nearly impossible without a lot of patience and a database program on your computer. (I gave up writing my database after I killed an entire Sunday afternoon/evening on the first tenth of it.) Thus, my decision to buy the Player's Guide.

My biggest gripe is that the game manual is not sufficiently thorough. The first several pages of the Player's Guide cover "the basics," and much of this information should have been included in the manual. Most of the game can be figured out with little difficulty, but a few nuances escaped me for some time. For instance, it took me two days to figure out, on my own, how I could tell if a new piece of gear increased or decreased a character's stats, because the manual was actually wrong in this case. (Press Start, not the 'L' button, when you're about to equip an item in your own inventory.) Also, certain bits of information provided within the game are not explained in the manual. (What do 'wt' and that fraction after it stand for? Oh, that's where that character currently stands on the turn order list--I guess 'wt' stands for 'wait time' or something.) Little stuff like that, you know?

Thanks for reading this very long review. In summary, FFTA leans toward the monotonous, but is still fun and mildly addicting. I don't regret buying it.

Handheld Final Fantasy, What next?

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: October 29, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Well first of all, I love it, simple as that.. Now when you get cheated it's judged... =P Die you stupid Cheaters! =P But When you actually play the game, it's like holding the PS2 controller moving people around... My friend said, when we saw it in Nintendo Power, that it looked like a piece of junk. She ended up LOVING IT! (She said the same thing for Zelda: The Wind Waker, loved that too.)

Aloha.

Fun, no complaints

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: May 20, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game is addicting. Like caffine addicting. Seriously, this game is fun. The story starts out rather childish with apperntly shallow charecters, but as it progress, say about, for me, twenty hours into the game, you see that it's actually closer to a story about escapeism. The battles are just sweet, though sometimes (Very begining) there appears to be too much talking. The discover new areas thing was fun too. Now off to face down the final boss who I hate because my most powerful charecter is a paladin, paladins only do holy damage, and it's immune to holy damage.

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