Judge not, lest ye be judged

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance had its flaws, but the game was enjoyable and gave Square Enix a great start to something that could turn into a viable series on portable systems. Since I do not own PSP, and as such have not played Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, I had been relegated to patiently waiting for Square-Enix to develop a sequel to FFTA. It took them almost 5 years and a completely different portable system to make one, but the real question is: had they used that time wisely to improve on the faults of the original? It's difficult to answer straight yes or no (but you've come to expect this from me).

Enter Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimore of the Rift. The game is almost identical in looks to the first title, which is more good than bad considering some of the great art and technical marvel Square-Enix puts into its games. Immediately appealing to those new to the game and pleasantly inviting to fans of the original, the environments, characters and monsters are beautifully stylized and really help show how the Nintendo DS can excel when given proper artistic direction. But by now we've all learned that looks aren't everything, right?

Storywise, FFTA2 is very similar to FFTA, which is definitely not a compliment. Not only is it extremely shallow and completely lacking in immersion, but for those returning from the original it is nothing more than a plot rehash with a slightly different "flavor". There is a certain level of fan service vis a vis some character cameos and the like, as well as a more fleshed out tie in to other "Ivalice Alliance" games (FFTA, FFXII, etc), but it feels very uninspired and is not even close to being original and unique. It doesn't turn me off from the game completely, since I'm mostly there to play the game like an excel spreadsheet on steroids, but when I'm not even the least bit bothered that the new 20 missions available to me are going to cause me to not see the story play out for at least another 2 weeks I begin to grow concerned, or at the very least disappointed. Perhaps I am just too spoiled by the huge, epic flair of normal Final Fantasy games, but even the original FFT (for all it's confusion) was bizarre, twisted and interesting. I don't think I should be at fault for hoping that a game's story will at least pique my interest, if not hold it.

It certainly doesn't help that most of the characters are equally as shallow and uninviting. The main character is an almost exact copy from FFTA: lost, helpless and attempting to find his way home. The "love interest" starts out actually being a very curious character, but is later dragged along in normal cliche fashion, presumably for ease of plot integration. The cameos are awkwardly forced and especially bland (although perhaps this is because I've yet to give FFXII it's due diligence) and most of your squad mates are just randomly named, mindless drones that you have no real connection with. This is where Fire Emblem greatly outshines the FFT series - all characters you control are given a story, a life and a purpose and it really helps add in that extra layer of immersion and interest. When your characters are nameless zombies that just happen to be along for the ride, well, they are more like tools than people, and the onus is left on what few story "characters" there are to carry a load they are just simply unable to bear successfully. It is just really hard to build anything of meaning or substance around an entire world of battle fodder.

Design wise, the game comes with just as many improvements on the original as it does new problems. There are still many of the things here that made FFTA so good: an astonishing number of missions, a diversity of mission goals, a large number of available jobs and races, mastering abilities through equipped items, etc. All the basics necessary for a truly extraordinary strategy experience are here, but once again it gets dragged down by absurd design decisions.

First off you have laws. Yes, laws are back, but they have been changed so surely they fixed them, right? Perhaps in word, but not in fact. Maybe Square-Enix only heard people complain about how laws punish you, so instead they flipped the idea on its head and had laws only reward you. "Neat", you might think, "they solved the biggest problem with laws". And at first, I completely agreed. No more jails! No more cards! No more ridiculous fines! And, like before, the first few missions go OK; a few utterly worthless rewards (mostly items you have dozens of already) and a small damage bonus or the like. Nothing to really make you hesitate to break laws, but a huge boon from the "punishable by severe hindrance" that was FFTA.

But where FFTA swings the pendulum too far into punishment, FFTA2 swings too far toward reward. At first it seems like a very contradictory statement - that offering too much reward is somehow 'bad' - but at some point not obtaining the reward becomes the new "severe punishment". You can at one point early in the game earn the ability to increase the AP you earn after a battle substantially. Since AP is used to learn new skills through items, it can generally be considered as a (usually very powerful) form of character progression, like leveling. Unfortunately, the bonus gets so huge that you feel almost hindered by the 'usual' method of leveling, and since breaking a law will lose you this reward it is often times still "better" (from a time spent perspective) to restart a mission and try again than it would be to suffer the consequences.

That is, of course, if you actually CHOSE to break that law. Often times, you do not. I cannot even begin to count the number of times I either accidentally broke a law. For instance, sometimes the law is vague and I'm not quite sure what would qualify. Sometimes I would just completely forget what the law was. Sometimes even randomness or computer controlled characters break laws for me. Crit a mob when you weren't supposed to? Have a character do more than X amount of damage? Sorry, start over. The worst yet is laws that were literally impossible to follow - like preventing higher level characters from attacking lower level ones... in zones where I have completely outleveled the mobs. How is that fun when you don't even have an OPTION to follow the laws? This puts us right back in the same spot we were in FFTA: laws becoming more of an inconvenience than a gameplay enhancing device.

Again, I'd love to have something that causes me to change my strategies that are not "choices" to be determined in a risk vs. reward scenario, because tuning the rewards with the risks is almost impossible to do in a game of this scope. Either the risk is too great and not worth taking or the reward is too little and not worth bothering with. And some of the laws - like "don't use daggers" or other super specific nonsense - require painstaking upkeep of character inventory, which is not really something I like doing outside of the already crazy amount I actually like doing to maximize character stats and abilities. If a min-maxer like myself doesn't like the absurd tediousness of the system, how can your average player have any hope of not becoming absolutely frustrated?

A passive, slight tilt of power in a specific direction that changes from mission to mission would be a significantly better implementation then a "risk/reward" system because it removes the choice aspect (which is near impossible to balance) and instead requires you to rethink your strategy and plan around it. Maybe melee damage is reduced by 25% so you focus a bit more on magic damage, or healing is reduced by 50% so you are required to play more defensively. Don't remove options completely, but shift balances of power just enough that it helps to promote a more adaptive tactical strategy for each fight. Something like this would help remove the monotony of using the same characters with the same moves in the same manners every fight and could really challenge the player to learn and master aspects of the game they previously did not focus on. It could just as easily go to far (i.e. all characters have magic immunity) and become insanely restrictive, but the idea is to not take it that far and still leave some options available to those with strange or unbalanced team builds.

Of course, to achieve this, you would also need to make the game actually difficult. Even playing on "hard" difficulty, the only time I was even remotely challenged by missions were the ones where I was grossly outleveled, i.e. my characters are level 30 and my enemies are level 90+. Strategy games are supposed to be about being mentally challenged, planning new strategies to overcome difficult obstacles and facing new challenges. Instead, FFTA2 is almost entirely devoid of even a modicum of difficulty and proceeding through missions feels tedious because you could win even without really paying attention to what was going on around you. I understand it is possible that my completionist nature and frequent use of Bonus AP 3 caused me to quickly out pace the challenges presented to me in the area of the game I was in, but even if that is the case I would hope they could find some way to scale in difficulty as you progressed. A strategy/tactics game that requires neither to play loses your interest very quickly; it would be like playing an FPS with nothing to shoot or an adventure game with nowhere to go. It just doesn't work.

Some of the new side items and tidbits are interesting, but by and large they do not stand up well over the course of the game. The "Auction" system is a unique minigame that you can play over time to gain control over territories and even win some items, and the 'achievement' style progression is really fun to work towards completing. Eventually, though, you gain the ability to simply buy so many coins that other clans cannot hope to ever win and the winnings no longer hold any real value to you for various reasons, so it falls by the wayside. The restrictions on times available and travel limitations compound frustrations with the system, especially when trying to build up clan power, and likely only act as a way to prevent you from winning everything on your first go.

The bazaar is one of my favorite new inclusions to the game, actually, and helps to add variety and challenges to obtaining new weapons beside amassing large amounts of gold. It also helps to give you small, incremental goals to work on while churning through the hundreds of missions in the game and gives your characters a much smoother progression curve than normal, as you can exert some choice behind how and when you collect the items necessary to create specific items. That being said, an actual guide and/or list of items and where to find them would be nice to have in the game itself. Frustrations with finding specific ones simply lead players to look them up online, which could be solved by at least providing some general direction or guidance for finding items.

My tone thus far might come off as strongly negative, but this is not because the game is completely terrible. Instead, it is because this is twice that I've seen what could otherwise be an extremely fun and interesting concept being mutilated by improper direction. This is clearly the case of Square-Enix trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, and it is not doing their otherwise stellar game justice. I have easily put 90+ hours into FFTA2 over the course of several months and completed over 200 missions, but at one point my interest in the game began to wane. It simply offered no real challenge, provided nothing of intrigue (story, characters or otherwise) and was beginning to feel almost more like a chore than a game. Was it still worth playing? I'd say so. May I go back and finish it one day? Possibly, if I run out of other portable games. Could it have been much better? Yes. Definitely yes.

If you've purchased neither, I would definitely recommend Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (I guess that means I have to review that at some point) over FFTA2, but for anyone who enjoyed the first looking for a game that contains a lifetime and a half of solid (but not stellar) gameplay, FFTA2 would definitely be worth looking into.

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.