Recently, as I was replaying Final Fantasy X-2 and Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, a friend suggested that I try out his long-finished copy of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. After Disgaea and Phantom Brave I had my “tactics legs” and decided to go ahead and play, even though I had never considered myself a tactics person. Thus, I began a game, not thinking about it one way or another. I played the first battle and put the game down. Not fifteen minutes later I was playing again and it just consumed my free time after that. I even got my co-worker, David, to go out and buy a copy two days after I started playing just so we could battle together.

You begin the game as a member of a small group of outcast school children, recently friends, that live in snowy Ivalice with their various dysfunctional families. One day after school a magical book, a la Never Ending Story, transports you to an Ivalice of desert and tactics-style bounty-loving clan fighting. The sprites are adorable and fun, and the moves are, too, though there’s nothing especially amazing about the classes. Some of the roles are innovative, but there’s nothing completely unexpected if you know you’re walking into a Final Fantasy world-based tactics game. You end up in a clan with a helpful Moogle friend, the adorable Montblanc, and you begin your adventure. Eventually you unravel the secret of desert Ivalice and fight a really amazing looking boss that’s far more logical than the one you dealt with in Crystal Chronicles. The ability to link with ally clans (aka your friends) to unlock new and rare items is extremely fun, even if David kept saying “No Totema!” (special secret attack) and then using his … jerk.

Gender issues? Oh sure, why not? The only “race” of Ivalicians (maybe) that isn’t exclusively male is the Viera, an extreme pretty race of bunny-eared warriors. That means three races are exclusively male with the only female members of the human race being the one that rode over on the book and your friend’s mom. Yeah, so even the human race is all male, sweet. Can you say, “Mother issues?” because this game has them by the fist full. One character is miserable because his mother died, aka “left him,” after which his father gave up on being anything but a beatnik, or so his character art implies. The female character, Ritz, blames her mother for the unhappiness caused by her own self-pity, and your character resents his mother for always paying attention to his crippled brother. Where is your Dad? Who knows, perhaps in the same place Ritz’s dad is, for all you know they joined the French Foreign Legion and were never heard from again. In the end it is one of the central character’s idealized mothers (a figment of the desert Ivalice) that tries to prevent you from restoring reality, making the Oedipal themes in this game shockingly prevalent. Do all of these gender issues keep the game from being fun? No, just from feeling balanced to me, but I still enjoyed it. Happily enough the only time you really notice gender is when you start getting the deliciously useful female-only items, which is pretty sweet. Plus, since it’s a tactics game, you can accept missions, fight, get stuff, unlock things, link with friends, and generally have a good time completely divorced from the plot. Hurray!

Much to my delight there is a sort of new game plus in Tactics Advance as well, which allows you to get all kinds of storyline character as playable units in your clan. Joy! New missions are unlocked as well and you can obsessively keep track of how many missions you have left so you can be a completist if you want to. On the whole I really liked this game, it was completely addictive, extremely fun, and generally engrossing. If you like tactics games, or if you like video games and know how to handle a tactics game, I suggest that you play it immediately.

Reviewed on 04/07/05