Sure, the characters and story are both pretty uninteresting, and the battles can take forever with all the unnecessary title cards and entrances. However, it was just fun to play. Learning abilities through weapons actually made it interesting and worthwhile to take an otherwise uninteresting mission for the rewards, location placement gave the sense that you were building the world around you, the class system and equipment trees were fun, and the overall tactical gameplay was enjoyable. It's not a short game, and it could certainly do with some QOL changes, but I had a blast with this one!

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is a game that took drastic changes from the original Final Fantasy Tactics, but I think almost all of those changes made it a worse game than its predecessor.

There’s a couple good changes in the game, don’t get me wrong: you can finally cancel movement meaning that if you realize that moving to a tile isn’t enough to get in range to attack you can just cancel that and move somewhere else, which is the big QoL feature i wanted the most. Random encounters now appear on the map, which is cool! The game also feels like it was made with the GBA in mind: you’ve got a lot of missions (300), and they feel more compact, more designed around a mentality of being quick pick and play missions, which is fitting for a GBA game. The game’s tone is also way more lighthearted than FFT, which again feels more fitting for a GBA game.

Sadly, the story is not great at all. You play as Marche, a young kid who gets teleported in a magical world full of Final Fantasy inspired imagery, along with some of your friends (tho you’re separated from them), and your goal is to find a way back to the real world. A pretty standard isekai scenario, but none of the characters are really good. For example there’s one of your friend whose entire character arc is “i don’t want to go back to the real world because my hair in white in it and i have to dye it red every day”. There’s nothing really interesting or innovative in the story, and i don’t really care for it’s message on escapism which doesn’t even fit with the narrative that much imo.

And the gameplay is a big, huge, massive step back from FFT imo. None of the maps are really that interesting or memorable. The game UI is atrocious, there’s no button to automatically equip your best equipment, i don’t even think there’s a sort button either, seeing if an item is better than what you have equipped is so unintuitive it took me 10 hours to figure out it was a feature, there’s a lot of issues with the menuing in this game and none of it is due to the lack of buttons the GBA has.

Abilities have been reworked too: instead of spending JP to learn an ability of your choice, you learn them from your equipment, like in FF9. This system is awful. It makes sense in FF9 because each character has a specific class (Zidane is a thief, Steiner is a knight, etc..) so this system allows you to build their specific class as you wanted. In FFTA everyone can change job between fights, so it makes no sense. Worse even, some of the best abilities are locked behind equipment you can’t find without following a guide because you need to steal them (which requires getting the right stealing ability) or do specific missions or w/e to find them. I didn’t follow a guide, so i ended up only having the most basic of abilities which sucked.

The game is also very grind heavy. Unlike in FFTA, there’s no level scaling for enemies, and only doing the story missions with a few side ones here and there won’t be enough to have a good enough team for the endgame. I had to grind around 10 levels for it (which isn’t even hard, just boring), and even then the final boss had an attack targeting my entire team that one shot almost everyone.

Overall, this game isn’t really bad, it’s just very forgettable, and a lot of its design wasn’t enjoyable to me, especially coming from FFT. If you enjoy it at least there’s a lot of content in it, but for me, it’s just a disappointing “sequel” to an excellent game

Secondo me questo è il gioco che serve a scardinare quella natura edgy che per via di sto mondo, in quel periodo di formazione che possiamo identificare come il periodo delle medie, tende a formarsi. Le tematiche che vengono fuori sia dalla trama principale, sia che dalle sottotrame che contengono tanti temi abbozzati ma che possono contenere semi su cui poter costruire un ottimo discorso, sono fondamentali per acquisire sempre più consapevolezza sia per il proprio benessere che per il bene dell'altro.
A prescindere da tutto questo mi preme comunque sottolineare quanto il titolo nel suo gameplay sia ottimamente bilanciato, è un'ottima esperienza ancora oggi con tutti gli standard del caso.
Non arrivo purtroppo al capolavoro perché per me la definizione di capolavoro coincide con la spiegazione approfondita di queste tematiche e le implicazioni delle loro criticità nella contemporaneità, ma è un mio banale preconcetto. Come opera di formazione questo final fantasy per me rappresenta un titolo che metterei sulla punta dell'iceberg.

Bundled with Final Fantasy I & II Dawn of Souls as a birthday gift, these were my official first entries to the Final Fantasy franchise (unless I count Chocobo Racing too which played a little earlier).
Be warned however, this isn't the Final Fantasy Tactics on the go people wanted, that would be War of the Lions released years later for the PSP, with some minor (or major, depends on who you ask) changes.

The story plays that Hero's Journey archetype with a flavour of "Isekai", and a dash of escapism philosophy.
The gameplay is great and quite addictif with the missions, and the race/job systems, much like Tactics, without however the Zodiac stats, and much more forgiving in general, it was meant to be play in short sections after all.

I recommended it wholeheartedly.

Is a 1/2 star ranking unfair? Yes...yes, it is. But to me, a 1/2 star it remains.

Sure, the gameplay is reminiscent of the original title on the PS1, but I can never forgive this game as being the sole sequel to the original FFT, which I consider to be a masterpiece.

This game to me is a disgrace and I will never accept it. And no matter what, I cannot help myself to compare it to the original, as it shares its name. This would be like making a sequel to Game of Thrones Season 1, and it ends up being Chronicles of Narnia... it's like, what the hell happened here? The soul of the original was completely eviscerated along with its tone, heavily political backdrop, mature storytelling, etc.

This commercial summarizes the quality of this game...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L65VrvcVNM

This game is an abomination. To this day, I still hold out hope for a proper Tactics sequel...