Hey Man, well this is Babylon

Add another entry to the Games I Won’t Be Buying category: Final Fantasy Tactics A2, for the Nintendo DS.

I’m sad to say that I’ve just this morning lost interest in Final Fantasy Tactics A2. I was enjoying it, but felt my excitement steadily waning as I “progressed” further in the game’s so-called story. Tactics A2 is another game in the Final Fantasy franchise that features a Job System, wherein you can change each and every character’s array of abilities around and focus them in all different directions at any time. You can specialize, generalize, and even pursue some pretty esoteric combinations of empowerment. Some jobs are better than others, though, and if you spend to long in one of these sub-par jobs you can seriously gimp your character’s long-term play worth. As such, one of the main features to skillful gameplay is effectively strategizing your characters’ jobs and abilities, planning out their builds a bit in advance so as to ensure maximum battlefield efficiency.

Sadly, I’m just not a fan of “build-focused” gameplay. It’s why I can’t stand the D20 role-playing system, why I never got into Magic: The Gathering, why I’m not a player of collectible minis games, and why I can rarely tolerate playing MMORPGs for more than a couple of weeks. When a video game is played better by spending a lot of time away from the game planning how you’re going to play that game, I tend to lose interest. When the game allows you to make choices that can actually seriously hinder your ability to effectively play that game further down the line, the illusion fades even more quickly, especially if those choices can be casually made while exploring the game and all it can do. That was one of the few things about FF 12 that pissed me off, actually: in that game, you can prevent yourself from getting the most powerful weapon in the game just by opening treasure chests you encounter in the early stages.

For me, however, a game’s story can go a long way toward making up for bad game-play. If there’s a good story to back it up, then I can actually find some amount of the more tedious bits of gameplay rewarding, as it gets me closer to my number one objective: the story. The original Final Fantasy Tactics was a build-focused game and I love it dearly, although I don’t think any of the jobs in that version were really all that gimpy. But there was also an extremely interesting (I even daresay compelling) story behind the game. I really wanted to know what was going on behind the scenes, and what would happen to Delita and Ramza and their friends and enemies. It was my love of that story and that made me actually enjoy the character-building of Tactics. Once I got into it, it was pretty easy to get used to, and the simple-yet-versatile array of jobs available made it easy to pick which direction I wanted to take which characters. Plus, I didn’t have to plan out the characters’ abilities in advance, instead getting to custom-choose how I wanted to spend their “job points” and adapt them more easily to the campaign’s current needs. Even better was the simple fact that the “wrong” choices really weren’t all that limiting, and with only a small bit of wandering I could easily correct them once I pegged them.

But with Tactics A2, the plan-as-you go approach isn’t a valid route to success within the game. The invalidation of this style is rooted in the Job-Item character development system. Tactics A2 combines the core concepts of two character advancement mechanics found in previous games of the Final Fantasy franchise, specifically the Job system introduced in FF3 and the Item-Based ability acquisition from FF9. By themselves, both of these systems are pretty nifty and make for good central character-evolution mechanics, but combined, they add an unnecessary level of tedium. The way they’re implemented in A2, you have to plan out what abilities you want your characters to have in advance, and then continue to micro-manage swapping and evolving them after just about every battle and encounter.

As for the story, A2 unfortunately takes the same narrative route as its predecessor Tactics Advance, which is to say that it “Toons it up” to the max. Just like in Tactics Advance, A2 has you playing some little punk-ass kid from the modern world who is thrown through a magical rift into wacky bunny princess fairy story land, where he must become a great leader of a warrior clan and battle his was to ultimate victory. It’s just… uninteresting. After hours and hours of questing, I still don’t feel like I’m anywhere further in the story than when I started, and it’s putting a big damper on my enjoyment of the game’s tedium. I fell in love with the Ivalice setting in the original Tactics and then all over again in Final Fantasy 12, but this installation of the franchise doesn’t have that amazingly epic feel to it at all. It’s just like when I tried to get into FF12: Revenant Wings, also on the DS, and also with the same toony style. If there was at least a good, deep story behind the tooniness, then I could still enjoy it, but sadly, the story in A2 is just as vapid as the premise, and doesn’t make the grinding gameplay that rewarding to me.

Finally, the main reason why original Tactics won me over and this one hasn’t: being a home console system which you connect to your television, the Playstation was more conducive to long-term play than is a handheld system like the DS. With the Playstation, I could comfortably spend hours of me free home-time playing that game, so much that I really raped it a new one, and had a damn awesome time doing so. I had time to focus, to strategize, to arrange my abilities and grind out new ones to custom-build the perfect elite Doom Brigade of super-characters. But for me, the DS is a “play on the bus and during lunch breaks” system. I find I can get really enthralled in the myriad of single-minded games on it, and I can easily waste lunch breaks and short commutes with the mind puzzlers and beat-em-ups. A game with the scale and length of Tactics A2 would be better served on a system more conducive to at-home play. As it is, when I’m at home, there are far more engaging and rewarding games to play on the home consoles, and the idea of sitting in a chair staring at this tiny screen for the hours of investment it requires does not appeal to me.

The final verdict? I just don’t have the time to spend planning in advance to play a game that I only spend time with less than 30 or so minutes a day. If the story were interesting then I might consider otherwise, but the rather airy plot and tedious grind-play of Final Fantasy Tactics A2 leave me pretty dissatisfied with the game.

I hope that someday, a game developer will release a fun and rewarding RPG on the DS with a well-written and engaging story. Until that time, I’m stuck with the remakes. Final Fantasy 4 was just today released in America for the DS in its new version, and I’m eager to check it out in all its remastered glory.