You be the Judge

The original plan was to try and review both FFTA and FFTA2, but I felt that I should go ahead and release what I've completed so far to make up for almost 3 months of absence. It's been a pretty busy summer, and it doesn't help I've been excessively lazy about writing reviews too. I'll try to pick it back up as best I can. Without further ado, my review of Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced.

Final Fantasy Tactics was by far and away one of the best games on the original PlayStation. It had a nice but complex story (made even more difficult to comprehend by a shoddy translation), incredible art, great characters and - the real kicker - absolutely amazing gameplay. The 20 some odd jobs, the job tree, the experience/job point systems, itemization and skills made for insanely addicting tactical gameplay that you could lose yourself in for hours at a time. It received a fair amount of critical acclaim - certainly not as much as the coat tails it attempts to ride on - and sales were healthy for a spinoff title, so it is somewhat surprising that it took Square 6 years to create a true successor to the series. Even more surprising was the news it would be on a Nintendo platform.

Enter Final Fantasty Tactics Advance, considered by some to be Square and Nintendo's attempt to make up for the bad blood that turned up during the N64 era. As the ray of hope that the glory days of the SNES were back, there could be no greater. In the end, it became a confusing but strong portable installment of a beloved series. It certainly had its problems, and was not nearly as well received as it's predecessor (which ALSO had its own set of problems), but I still feel it was a good first attempt at moving tactical games over to portable systems. Understanding the faults and strengths of the original is key to breaking down the operating procedures of the sequel, which I intend to do next.

FFTA's greatest flaw (and, in my opinion, strength) was based around the very convoluted "law" system that was implemented to make each battle play out differently. The idea was that laws would be used to restrict specific actions and reward others in order to make you adapt your playstyle. This was a pretty promising concept - essentially preventing the usual monotony of using the same characters, abilities and skills on every map - and was really something I was looking forward to. As a lover of tactical/strategy games, one of my most annoying pet peeves is when one weapon or one action is so powerful that it becomes 90%+ of your damage. Examples would be things like always just "attacking" in RPGs to do damage, having very simplistic 1-2 spell "dps rotations" in MMOs, or having armies that consist of 1 type of unit in an RTS. It is neither fun nor challenging to the player to include a "hold A to win!" kind of battle system in your game. Which is why this "law" system seemed to be so promising. When described, it sounds exactly like something that would force you to think, plan, and deploy differently each battle and really require you to know how to use your units and maximize their abilities.

Unfortunately, the execution is very awkward and it becomes more frustrating than liberating. The system is enforced by judges that will monitor your actions and assign cards, similar to soccer, where breaking a law (without killing another unit) is a yellow card and breaking a law that results in the death of a unit is an immediate red card. Yellow cards usually bring monetary penalties with them - loss of gil or items - and sometimes even worse outcomes, like permanent stat reduction or loss of equipped items. The benefit of doing "recommended" actions is merely JP which can be used to perform summons later in the game, something almost completely unnecessary considering how easy and/or powerful your characters will be by that time if guided and leveled correctly. This means that breaking the law usually carried with it grave penalties that were sometimes way too harsh without offering any sort of real reward.

And since FFTA is a portable game where you can stop and start at a moment's notice, either by saving mid battle or perhaps just pausing for a few minutes, it was very easy to forget which laws were in effect and accidentally do something that was forbidden. What's worse, you might have a character "accidentally" break the law, by perhaps being confused or berserked by enemy players, adding significant frustration to an otherwise well planned battle. As the game continued on, it could stack 2 or even 3 laws in the same battle and perhaps render half or more of your army completely useless. What good is a black mage that can't use magic, or a soldier that can't attack? It's OK to have this happen when there is only 1 law and you can try and adapt your team around it, but when your entire team consists of dragoons because you can't use anyone else without fear of breaking the law, it has gone from a challenge to a nuisance.

What's worse (or better, as some may see it), after a point you were given the ability to change the laws at will with "law cards". At first this makes the system a bit more bearable, because you can cancel out laws that are extremely annoying or detrimental to your strategy. However, after a while it ends up being nothing more than an extra amount of micromanagement and tediousness on top of an already aggravating system. At this point you lose the best part about the system (forcing you to change up your tactics) and instead gain an awkwardly cumbersome card collection mechanic that feels more frustrating than fun. You must now scour the world for new cards, trading and searching and salvaging for a collection of the right ones to nullify an increasingly unbearable system of law.

Once you figure out how to cheese the system it gets a little better, but takes what little difficulty the game once had and just completely throws it out the window. When you can take a difficult level, use a card that makes attacking illegal, throw berserk on all your enemies and watch them all get thrown in prison, you're really not playing a game so much as abusing a mechanic. It takes away the strategy and challenge and replaces it with a completely laughable gimmick. Granted, most "boss" characters are immune to laws, but I'd rather the laws have been fleshed out a little better than having to just make difficult fights artificially difficult by letting bosses do whatever they well please without consequence.

Certain areas of the game are "lawless" zones, where judges and laws don't reach, a nice reprieve from the oppressive restrictions. Of course, we can't have a good thing without a bad, which means that these areas also allow your characters to permanently die if not resurrected quickly. While I'm all for this kind of gameplay element in Fire Emblem, it feels strangely out of place in the FFTA world. Battles and strategies are different between the two games, and FFTA tends to be more high damage, high risk type playing because you (normally) have no fear of character death. While the game is not difficult enough to offer any sort of real threat to your characters, fear of permanence (and infrequency of necessity to go to these areas much) means you generally put up with the laws as a lesser of two evils and avoid the lawless areas as much as possible. You can always get your characters out of prison later for a few gil, but if they die permanently, well, that's not exactly something you can easily come back from.

In the end, the entire law system ends up as a joke, offering no real rewards and, occasionally, punishments of cosmic proportions. You will more than likely find yourself turning off the game and restarting a battle instead of accepting your cruel fate, unless perhaps you love to see your hard work and strategy go down in flames at the hands of a merciless, bumbling AI. I can see where they were trying to go, but frankly that doesn't help when you're seconds away from throwing your GBA across the room because the main character just got a red card and it's "Game Over". It presents you with this strange rollercoaster ride of gameplay that seems to only get worse as you move forward - what is first simple and exciting quickly becomes overbearing and punishing, and when you finally have the ability to "counter" the laws it simply becomes a really tedious chore.

It is sad that the law system manifests the way it does, because I'm convinced that it actually could solve one of the last remaining "great flaws" in the RPG/strategy genres. Needing to adapt your strategy and your team on a fight by fight basis would be a great improvement to an otherwise impossible to balance battle system. It's the reason that so many people like the more fluid character swaps in games like FFX or the Breath of Fire series, and implemented correctly it could do wonders for FFTA. It could really bring a new level of challenge and Tactics to the game and really push you to the limit. Unfortunately here, it does more harm than good.

If you can put up with the law system, FFTA has enough content to keep you busy for quite some time, especially as you go for 100% completion. The jobs, numerous missions, secret characters and system link options give the game really long legs, especially for a portable title. Just don't expect the story to get you through, considering how simplistic and dumbed down the plot is, presumably to help lower the target audience age to better line up with the GBA's demographic. The characters are largely forgettable, unlikely to become true standouts in the series like Cloud or Kefka, the plot is barely even worth paying attention to and none of the side stories stand out or grab you like they did in the original FFT. None of that stopped me from completing the game twice over, though. Being an addictive, portable, pick-up-and-playable game makes it very easy to play in small 10-15 minute intervals over the course of several months. That is, as long as you make sure to pay attention to laws as you come back into battles.

While it is certainly not the strongest product wielding the Final Fantasy name, FFTA still acted as proof of a repairing of relations between Square and Nintendo and set a fair amount of precedent for future titles and releases to come. The law and judge systems even ended up being used/referenced in other Final Fantasy titles, most notable FFXII. The basic system was there, they proved you could make an excellent tactical game work on a small, portable console. Square also showed that they were still willing to give players lots and lots of gameplay to chew on if they so chose. It's just difficult to out-and-out recommend this title. I'm capable of putting up with alot of frustrating nonsense in tactical games, in the same way that some people get a sense of accomplishment constantly dying in Super Ghouls and Ghosts, and I realize that not everyone will be willing to put up with the law system as I was.

Seeing how it was marginally well received by critics and also sold relatively well, it's no surprise that they moved on to create another entry to the series...

...which is why my next post (hopefully out sooner than this one, sorry) will be about the more recent sequel, FFTA2.