Final Fantasy Tactics Advance Review

Of all the skills you will learn, one that can really be helpful is the combo. Each job has one, and you learn it the same way you learn other abilities. But to use them, you have to defeat ennemies or do some rewarding laws. There are forbidden laws, but there are also some good ones, and when you do good, you get judge points. You can have a maximum of 10, and you use them to do combos. As the name implies, combos are attacks performed by multiple characters, and the more judge points you have, the stronger your attacks will be. Another ability you can do with judge points are totemas which are abilities you get by getting stronger. It is some kind of summon magic that will hit every character on screen. They are very devastating attacks and should be used only at critical times.

You can also lure monsters to fight with you. They can learn abilities too, but they are usually less stong than normal characters. I actually didn’t use any to play through the game as I didn’t really like them, but apparently they can be put to good use. Some people like them, some don’t, but they are in the game for some reason anyway!

There are different kinds of missions in this game, as some will stay permanently, while some will only be available for a few days. Some are also called “dispatch” missions. Like the name implies, you have to select one of your characters to dispatch him to do a mission which normally takes a few days. Depending on what level he is, he might succeed or not, so the stronger your character is, the more chances he’ll have of coming back victorious.

Like I said earlier, in the world of Ivalice, there are judges. They are in each battle, except for those that are taking place in certain places where there are no laws. Laws are different in each battle. They are restrictions, restricting you from using certain weaponry or abilities. You might not have the right to use a lance in a battle, or use color magic like White, Red or Black magic. If you don’t obey, then you will get penalties. First time you get a yellow card and normally lose some stats or have to pay a certain amount of money. You can always go to jail and be pardoned so that you get your stats back. When you get a red card though, you are put directly into jail, even if in the middle of a battle, but you can always pay to have you friends released. But like in the real world, people always try to find ways around this! One of the characters in the game creates Anti-Law cards which you can use to stop certain laws from working against you. Can’t use color magic? No problem! Just use a card and you’ll be able to use it as much as you want. But you have to remember that they also affect your ennemies, so if you can’t use white magic to heal, neither can your ennemies. That means you should always think about it twice before using Anti-Law, especially since the good cards can be hard to come by.

There are 300 quests to complete in this game, but you don’t have to do them all in order to finish the game. You can only do the ones that are important, those that will make the story advance. The others are only there to keep you busy longer, and also to help you level up. But when you walk around on the map, you’ll see clans walking around too and if you meet them then you’ll have to fight. So you could potentially just do the main quests and level up by fighting other clans, but at some point they become too easy to defeat and they don’t give much experience point since you are too strong, so doing quests is the best thing to do. Some of them are also multiplayer quests so you’ll have to be playing with a friend to do them.

Since the Game Boy Advance is no Playstation, you can’t move the camera around like in the PS version of the game. Everything is done in 2D, but everything looks good. Character animation is well done, and the drawings are pretty good, especially the character arts. There aren’t some huge effects used in this game that we haven’t seen anywhere else, so there’s not much to tell. It gets the job done, and it’s standard Square stuff, which means that it looks very good for a 2D game. There are some occasional slowdowns, but they don’t happen too often and they don’t distract from the gameplay.

The music though is excellent. You know it has to be good when they release a cd soundtrack of a GBA game! If I remember correctly, the music in this game was composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto and it sounds great! You know the music’s gonna be good when that guy’s in charge as he’s done the soundtrack for the amazing FFT on the PS1. Some of the songs keep playing in my head all the time. Trust me, it really is amazing! It’s not orchestrated due to the limitations of the GBA, and it might not be as good as some of the stuff we heard in Final Fantasy 3, or at least that’s my opinion, but it’s far better than the usual stuff you hear in most GBA games.

So if you are looking for a good RPG on your Game Boy Advance (even though there are already a lot), this is a good choice. It’s a lengthy game and it is very well done so you should have a very good time. It has multiplayer support and if you decide to do all the quests, you’ll easily be playing for over 100 hours, probably 140 hours. There’s a lot to do, there’s great challenge for everybody, the graphics are great, the music is incredible… there really isn’t any reason not to get this game if you are an RPG/strategy fan. If you are only in for the main quest, it takes nearly 40 hours to complete, so whether you like completing everything or just doing the necessary stuff, it is still a lengthy game. My pick for best GBA RPG.