FINAL FANTASY TACTICS ADVANCE: What is going on here?

First let me state that I enjoy playing this game. I'm just not sure why I enjoy playing this game. Let me run down some of the oddities about this GBA title. The story is tissue paper thin. There doesn't seem to be much challenge involved. The main game is immense with over 300 'missions' or quests, many with interesting plots such as "Go get me a flower!" or "I lost my homework!" The main map for the game is essentially blank. When you complete certain missions you get an icon to place on the map, wherever you want, that represents a city or a feature of the terrain. This makes VERY little sense, but the next tidbit is even less logical.

The characters learn battle skills from weapons. That is to say, you equip a weapon to a character and if that character has the correct class to use that weapon it will teach you a certain skill. This is the only way to learn anything in this game. The weapons don't talk, they aren't magical and you can get them in every shop in the game. Now I'm not one for literalism or even strict reality in most cases, but this is really nutty. It is true that I enjoy titles that attempt to inject real world consequences into the gameplay, but here you are just giving things attributes that they could never usually have. You can step back and say, "Oh but the characters are in a story-book and it's how they wanted it cause their helping to write it and..." Yeah ok, but that is never referenced. As a matter of fact it looks more like they are in a fully realized world with it's own rules and customs. Rules, or laws, are actually a major part of the gameplay and the characters are punished for breaking these rules. So the 'I'm writing my own story' idea doesn't really work.

Now this is Final Fantasy, so the game is very polished and is pleasing to look at. Strange systems and rules sorta began with this series here in the west, so it's forgivable. There is a lot of cache coming from the stellar Final Fantasy Tactics for the Playstation as well. So it's part of a series (sort of) and you want to get the whole picture. But what is it that makes it all worth it? Gameplay still consists of moving your dudes next to the enemy dudes and attacking them. The difficulty is such that if you are paying any attention it is hard to go wrong. The only thing I can think of is the complexity of it all. Now I don't mean the tactical complexity of the battles, or the complex enemies you'll face. Actually the opposing forces seem flat and thrown together most of the time.

I am talking about the total stat-overload you are going to experience in reference to your own characters. There are around 25 different interdependent classes, 5 races, and about a million different skills with corresponding weapons for them all. It's so bad I had to put together a crib sheet on my palm pilot to let me know what classes I had planned for who, and what skills I wanted them to get. There's 12 characters in my 'clan' as they call it so it's a lot to remember. Now does all that equal 'fun'? I'm not so sure. Anyhow, I pick this up every so often to counter the back-breaking opus that is Rondo of Swords, so I will have plenty of time to ponder it.