There is very little that's more challenging for me than reviewing successors to, or previously unexplored precursors to my favorite games, records, and movies. I'm sure that my recent review for DAMN. falls in this category, as well as my review of Banjo-Kazooie. I probably under appreciate things that fit this category, as I'm blinded by my love for the original, so you'll have to take this review with a grain of salt, and I did my best to give A2 a fair review.
I LOVE Final Fantasy Tactics. The original Playstation game is in my top 10 PS1 games of all time, without question, and I think that Final Fantasy Tactics Advance took a phenomenal game concept and transferred it to handheld in a masterful way. The changing of the gameplay to make it less focused on a central narrative, and more focused on wide ranging missions in a more fun and bright environment made for an excellent handheld experience, and I'm not sure that there's a better Game Boy Advance game, although there are a ton of worthy contenders for the crown on that magnificent system. Also, the (partial) removable of permadeath made the game a bit more fun, and encouraged risk taking.
All of this is to say that reviewing A2 fairly was really tough, so you can feel free to play it yourself and see if I'm right.
A2 is a good game, flawed by a few major departures from FFTA, and similarly flawed by a lack of boldness to improve on its predecessor. Like its predecessors, it is a strategy RPG that takes place on tiles. You maneuver your characters into advantageous locations on the map, and attempt to defeat your opponents with a dizzying array of jobs, abilities, weapons, armor, and sheer grit.
As usual, I'll start with the strengths of the game. It looks and sounds excellent, although the look and sound of it has its weaknesses (I'll get to this later). The controls are excellent. The system by which you switch characters between jobs, learn abilities, and get to customize your character with abilities learned in any job has maintained its excellence from the previous game. They add two new races, with four jobs each, and a few new jobs for each existing race.
The DS version uses the extra screen extremely well, displaying the strengths and weaknesses of the characters on the top screen, as well as the order in which they will act. This allows you to plan out exactly what you're going to do, and to be able to get ahead of your enemy's plans. For example, if you are within range of two enemies, both of whom can be finished in a single attack, you can use the extra screen to look at which of them will act first, and finish them off to avoid taking any unnecessary damage.
The game features an enormous set of missions that you can complete (400), and will certainly eat your time. If you're interested in investing in games which can entertain you for a long time, I only managed to finish a little more than 200 of the missions before beating the end boss, and completing those missions alone ended up with a game time of nearly 60 hours. You can save your game after beating the end boss, and continue your adventures after the game is over, beating the remaining missions at will. I enjoyed the game enough that I plan on doing this, but wanted to write the review now that I have technically beaten the game.
A2 fixes a few competitive balance issues in the game, evening out the distribution of power between races/classes (a bit). For example, one change they made is that instead of beginning each battle with full magic points, and regaining a bit every turn, they changed it so that you now start with 0 at the start of the battle, and gain more per turn. This takes down powerful classes from FFTA like the Illusionist, who could use over 30 MP per turn to hit every enemy on the map with powerful magick. In order to use even one spell, thus, you'll need to wait 3 turns without doing anything, whereas in FFTA, you could use the powerful spells on 3 consecutive turns, at which point the fight was probably over anyway. This comes at a cost, however, of making high MP classes like the Illusionist functionally worthless. I would have liked it, perhaps, if you'd started out with 1/2 MP, or a flat 10 or 20, making using those classes more viable.
I loved the Bazaar/loot system, in which you get loot from enemies, and can trade it in at the store to make newer items available. Very similar to the system in XII, this made grinding for loot rewarding, and the shop experience was much better than in FFTA, where new items became available at the shop as you advanced in the quest.
There were a few negatives for the game, however. First, it felt like the number of recycled assets from the FFTA game were far too many, and this made poor use of the DS' relative power. The sprites for every class, weapon, armor, accessory, and enemy were identical to the last game, which was kind of head scratching. Even updating a few classes and weapons would have been a nice touch, but they went with the lazy approach. The new sprites for new classes and enemies are nice, however, and keep with the aesthetics of FFTA. Some of the new environments looked nice, but rarely did they blow you away compared to FFTA. The new bosses, however, were light years ahead of FFTA, so I have to give them graphical credit there. It was pretty astounding though, given the limited improvement graphically over FFTA, that the game suffered from frequent slowdown, a problem I never would have expected.
The game was also far too easy, as I only struggled with the end boss throughout my playthrough. And by struggled, I mean I came in poorly equipped, restarted, properly equipped, and wiped the floor with the boss.
The laws system feels completely toothless, and while it was an irritating feature of FFTA, it feels like they toned it down too much. In FFTA, violating laws could result in punishments as tame as losing gil, or as severe as having your characters imprisoned and needing to bail them out of jail. Here, the only penalty is that you can't revive your characters during battle (rarely needed with the feeble difficulty level), and won't get some rewards (typically tepid) at the end of battle. But the most frustrating thing about the laws system is that it lacks an internal logic. For example, let's say that the law in a given battle is that I can't use weapons or abilities that use the fire element. If I go up to a person and attack them with a fire elemental sword, I'll break the law and incur the penalty. But if someone attacks me, and I have the counter ability on that character, and I hit them back (not being able to control it), I don't break the law.
This is a perfectly defensible design choice, if it's consistent. But it isn't. There are other times in game where your character doing something that you can't control will violate the law. For example, if the law is that I can't knockback enemies, then if I get hit and counter attack, and my counter attack is a critical hit and the enemy gets knocked back, then I WILL break the law. This makes no sense, and these kinds of contradictions are everywhere in the rules. For example, if your character gets confused or charmed and does things against the law, it will county as breaking the law, despite the fact that you aren't controlling them. Again, it would be fine if involuntary actions broke the laws, as you could game plan for them. If the law prohibited fire weapons including involuntary use of them, I could keep the weapon on, turn off my counter ability, and just use non-fire abilities. But as you can never tell which involuntary abilities will be taboo and which won't, you are left in constant flux as to the what actions are permissible and what precautions you should take to ensure that the law remains unbroken.
Perhaps my biggest pet peeve with the game is the changing up of hit percentages. In both Tactics and FFTA, standard hit percentage from the front is low. Ensuring a hit requires sneaking around behind a character, or to their side in order to increases the likelihood of hitting an enemy. Regardless of where you attack, though, the ability will do the same amount of damage.
In A2, however, hit chance is always high, and it's damage that increases when you go to the side or back. In fact, the damage you do from the back is nearly double that which you do from the front, a stark change. This is, frankly, a dumb change, as not all abilities rely on damage to succeed, but all rely on hit chance. For example, an ability that does no damage but applies a powerful status effect will have the same percent chance of succeeding from the front, back, or side. Basically, this changes the gameplay focus from balancing the risk of going deep behind enemy lines to do damage and inflict status effects and having a high value on positioning for all characters, to an approach which rewards going behind with big damage dealers, hitting one hit KOs, and applying statuses from afar, as your likelihood of success there doesn't rely on position. This completely changes the makeup of the game, and reduces the number of aggressive and tactically risky strategies that you can take with your status dealers.
I also struggled to enjoy the story. It basically rips off the premise from FFTA (boy gets sent to a different land through a magical book, takes up with a clan, and completes quests to try to get home), but missed out on all of the depth of the story of FFTA. In FFTA, the biggest subplot (spoiler alert) is that your wheelchair bound brother and bullied friend also come to the new world with you, and they don't want to come home. The tension between brothers, one of whom wants to come home, and one who wants to stay in the world where he can walk, play, fight, and have fun is palpable, and really makes you think what you would do in the situation. The same is true of the boy and his friend, as the friend is bullied at home, has a loser for a father, lost his mother, and doesn't want anyone to destroy his new world in which he is the prince. FFTA2's story is a mess, revolving around a shadowy syndicate that has a weird villain who isn't developed and who is just basically your mirror opposite. Boring.
Anyway, I am probably being too hard on this game. I genuinely did enjoy it, and think that most people who enjoy games like Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, Disgaea, Final Fantasy Tactics, Ogre Battle, etc. will probably enjoy this one too. It's a fun strategy RPG that's heavy on depth, light on difficulty and story, and long on fun. I'd give it an 8.5/10.
Here's a teaser for my next handheld review...can you guess it?
-TRO
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