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

Kinda neat arpg. Mostly interesting in terms of what it accomplishes for its time rather than anything else. You have a pseudo-zelda 1 combat with spells and rpg-lite elements on top, but enemies are pretty slow and not so interesting to fight for a while. The bosses are cool but a lot of the game ends up being rather grindy in terms of pacing, continuously beating easy enemies up as you go (why shouldn't you? it gives you xp) and challenge doesn't really stay consistent.

If you're looking for a retro slice of arpg life it's worth looking at, but of course, it hasn't aged too well now so skippable otherwise.

Crystalis has some good aspects to it, and at the start it seemed like an interesting take on Zelda-esque gameplay with some RPG elements. The intro is also cool as hell, and it has some great music and fun sprite art in places. Unfortunately, the dungeon design is extremely underwhelming, and fighting enemies becomes tedious quickly.

You have a normal Zelda 1 sword stab, but you also have abilities you can charge, and several different elements you can attack with as the game goes on. Eventually every enemy can poison or paralyze you if you touch them, so the game quickly becomes "ok stop and charge your thing, shoot it, ok now go back and charge it, shoot it again, ok do it again". The game also does this I cannot stand in games where it just sort of expects you to know what order to do things in, especially when there is no way you could figure it out. This alongside the annoying combat eventually got to me and I couldn't be bothered to continue. This is the kind of NES game you play after you've played all of the good NES games.

A lot of very cute tricks and brain teasers assembled around a novel gimmick, but the game itself is middling and the interplay between those two halves is not very well-constructed much of the time.

At some point after you hit the big "ah ha" moments (which, it must be said, are quite good - especially if you figure them out before the manual just force-feeds them to you), you realize that the secrets mop-up you've been looking forward to after you've gotten all the items and the knowledge necessary to really do it is going to be a nightmare because of the asinine worldmap and the fact that, for a game that has an in-game instruction book that comes with pre-written notes on it, you actually need to be taking a SHITLOAD of notes SEPARATELY yourself to even begin to remember all the stuff you need to go back to or even where shortcuts are. I love a good Figure-It-Out-'Em-Up and especially one that wants me to write things down, but I didn't realize that to be successful with this one, I essentially needed to be drawing another set of maps on top of the ones the game gives you as like, it's whole thing, and by the time I realized it, it was a bit too late.

But anyway, some fairly big points for effort. Especially the language - although I am conflicted with how that whole thing is integrated, too.

My God This Game Never Shuts Da Hell Up!!!

An absolutely gorgeous looking feast for the eyes, with the camera panning to showcase some truly wondrous vistas. I'm not entirely surprised this thing is beautiful, as Hyper Light Drifter somehow had great looking vistas in pixel art. This team just makes games that look awesome.

What is a surprise is how fucking wordy this game is, as Hyper Light Drifter has NO words. Maybe they felt they needed to compensate by writing three million words, but if you like a ton of boring lore in a go-nowhere story, they have covered their bases!! Also if you want my professional opinion: shut the voices OFF. the voice acting isn't bad, it's just completely inappropriate in a game like this. I think a made-up language like what's in Gravity Rush or Shadow of the Colossus would be much more fitting, and maybe have Rei not QUIP ALL THE TIME and we can make it work. But this is a way too verbose game that tells so much story visually that you have to wonder if this was just them capitulating to someone. That someone barged into the development studio with a AAA game and said, "See, the protagonist comments on everything, you need this in your game."

Also combat mechanics. I have given up my battle against combat mechanics. I am going to have to interrupt my platforming to press square 4 times in front of a generic monster for the rest of my life.

This game is so enjoyable though. I love the boss fights, I love the flow of the game, I cannot believe a smaller indie studio could make something that feels so good to play. I've seen people complaining about the price tag (40 bucks) but this game looks like it was a massive pain in the ass to program so if they want to charge that much for their work they fucking should.