FINAL FANTASY TACTICS ADVANCE: Las Vegas night!

So in continuing my personal search for meaning within the world of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, I am awestruck with the extent the game goes wanting for interesting tidbits to talk about. Or perhaps it's the way that entire portions of the game seem to play themselves.

For example, the player and his party are part of what the gameworld calls a 'clan'. These clans operate like mercenaries, talking on jobs to battle monsters or each other for money. Some of these clans are good and other are less so, so this creates the clan on clan conflict. What is bothering me here is that your clan has eight skill ratings representing things like combat, tracking or magic skills. Each battle or job that you complete gives you a certain number of points, and these points level up your clan level which in turn makes your clan skills go up, and THEN sometimes you get rare items in commemoration of your new skill levels. Sounds interesting at least, right?

The trouble is that when you get these points, you don't have any totals, nor do you even know how many points you may need for the next clan-level. Now just on chance you happen to level up, and your skills go up too... but you don't get to decide where the points go. Even these prizes you may or may not get just seem to come at random. It's just too Pavlovian. You're going to fight battles, you can't avoid them, so when it's all over this little presentation occurs and you get prizes! Yay! Like a slot-machine where all you do is pull the handle (fight a battle). When I see things going on in a game I; A: Want to know why these things are happening, and B: Have some say in how they are happening. The clan system doesn't do either of these things. From what I can tell it's used mainly as a gate against taking missions that you are too weak for, as certain missions require minimum clan skill ratings. All fine and good, but you might have done something simpler and more understandable to do the same thing, like looking at character levels! How about that? Can you do that instead of creating this non-interactive mockery?

Now it is true that there are already a ton of things to keep track of in FFTA, what with all the weapons you have to keep passing around to your characters every three or four battles to make sure that they aren't losing valuable classroom time at Inanimate Object University. I just can't believe that the designers decided to let this little thing run itself to save the player some headaches. The headaches are there. You aren't getting rid of them. If we could control the fate of our clan in some fashion, it would probably have been refreshingly straightforward. What happened here was the design team saying "We want to make the player feel like he's making progress without having to do anything. After all, some other parts of our game are really annoying." Others may coo and giggle at the whirling wheels, but for a sim and war gamer like myself it's a major turn off.

Now it's not enough that clan management is black box, but entire missions are taken out of your hands. These "Dispatch" missions have you choose one member of your team to help some faceless person find a lost cat, or scrape out the bottom of a frying pan. They go off for a number of days or battles, and return with cash and items essentially for free with a quote like, "That was easy!" or "Mission 'Clean My Gutters' was over too soon!" In FFTA, even the battles off screen are easy! Can you frigging believe it? Can't they at least pretend it was hard? I'm not asking for serious prose or anything. How about, "'Eat this Burrito' was really difficult!" Anyway, the decision you have to make about who goes on the mission is important, but it's easy to see who is going to succeed and who is going to fail. At the selection screen the winners get up and dance for you and the losers just sit there, so no chance of stray critical thinking getting in the way there.

Am I going too hard on the lighthearted FFTA? I have to admit the genre, pedigree and review scores all had me thinking this was going to be really great, but so far it's been underwhelming. You could say that I am judging a game clearly aimed at kids with a eye used to more adult strategy fare. You could even say that with only 33 missions completed out of a possible 300, I haven't seen enough of the game to make these sweeping negative statements. Well, you're WRONG.

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.