Before I started this whole Final Fantasy endeavour, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was my most-played Final Fantasy game by a long shot. I played it on my platinum Game Boy Advance SP, and I played the daylights out of this game. It’s one of the first times I remember going onto good old GameFAQs to figure out which abilities I needed to unlock the various classes, which, on dial up internet was quite the chore. But I don’t want to launch straight into my nostalgia. Let’s talk about Final Fantasy Tactics Advance itself, what I love about it, and what changed during this most recent playthrough.

The Story Begins

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance opens with a school-sanctioned snowball fight. You play as Marche, the new kid at school. On your team are the weakling Mewt and the strong, confident redheaded Ritz. The teacher gives everyone a little bit of instruction before setting the kids loose to pelt each other with snowballs.

I actually love this as a tutorial. It teaches the player movement, positioning, and attack range, all wrapped up in a scenario that feels surprisingly natural instead of throwing you into a random battle against goblins for no particular reason. Unfortunately, the other team is full of bullies, and they all decide to pick on Mewt. After a couple of rounds of combat, the cutscene takes over, and one of the bullies beans Mewt with a rock hidden inside a snowball. Little jerks. The teacher watching the scene puts an end to the snowball fight and the kids go their separate ways.

After school Mewt says he’s picking up an old book from the bookstore and asks if everyone wants to come over to Marche’s house to read it together. During this conversation you also see Cid across the street getting reprimanded by some adults while looking pathetic and defeated. It’s here you learn that Cid is actually Mewt’s father and that Mewt’s mother has passed away, leaving Cid trying to deal with his own grief while raising his son. It’s not exactly an easy situation, and it’s one of the first hints that beneath this bright, colourful fantasy game there’s something much sadder going on.

The group heads over to Marche’s house, where we meet Marche’s brother Doned, who uses a wheelchair and has been in poor health for quite some time. Then comes a conversation that probably every adolescent nerd who’s ever played video games or read fantasy books has had with their friends. “Wouldn’t it be cool if this fantasy world was real?” and “I’d love to live in a video game.” It’s that childhood dream of escaping into a world where you have power and agency instead of feeling helpless. After this escapist fantasy, Ritz and Mewt depart, and the kids go to bed.

That night, the world changes. The school transforms into a rocky plains crawling with monsters. Your school transforms into a bustling city crawling with various colourful races. Marche is lifted into the air, his pyjamas transform into battle leathers, and suddenly he’s standing in the middle of a fantasy world.

Marche immediately bumps into a Bangaa, a humanoid lizard race, and casually calls him a lizard—which, it turns out, is a terrible slur. Montblanc, the ever-cheerful Moogle, rushes in to save you before the offended Bangaa challenges you to an engagement.

Enagements & The Laws That Govern Them

In Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, every battle is called an engagement, and every engagement is overseen by judges. These judges enforce a different set of laws that everyone in the engagement is expected to obey. One battle might forbid fire magic while rewarding ice attacks. Another battle might prohibit swords entirely. Sometimes the laws will barely affect your party, while others completely cripple a specific character, or essentially render a battle unwinnable. If swords are forbidden, suddenly your soldier class characters are having a very bad day. On the other hand, whenever the law prohibits Control actions, I always cackle because I’ve basically never used Beastmaster’s Control ability, so it’s practically a law-free battle for me.

Usually, breaking a law earns you a yellow card, earning you a fine of some gil or an item that you’ll lose after the engagement. Sometimes characters will get punished by having a certain stat reduced, which feels like a much worse punishment. Break enough laws, though, and you receive a red card, and that unit gets ejected from the engagement entirely, and you’ll need to bail them out of jail for a much larger sum.

From what I remember, this law system is at the centre of a lot of people’s complaints about Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. There are situations where you’ll be fighting five monsters and one of the laws is “Don’t damage monsters.” So… what exactly are you supposed to do? The answer shows up partway through the story when Ezel opens a card shop, allowing you to add or remove laws before battles. At first you might wonder why you’d ever add another law, but it’s important to remember that every law that forbids something will also reward something else. If swords are forbidden, bows earn Judge Points instead. Judge Points, or JP, are awarded for following the rewarded law or for delivering the finishing blow to an enemy. Later in the story those Judge Points can be spent to summon powerful Totemas, dealing large MP or HP damage, depending on the race of the character who summoned it.

I feel that the law system is much more interesting than people often give it credit for. Yes, there are moments where the laws feel arbitrary or downright unfair, but more often than not they push me to think about battles differently or use classes and equipment I might otherwise ignore. It pushes me to diversify my party instead of railroading everyone into one specific path.

Clans, Your Found Family

Montblanc invites Marche to join his newly formed clan, and from there Final Fantasy Tactics Advance opens up. You take on missions, recruit new members to your clan, and explore Ivalice, plonking down new locations on a barren map. Along the way you reunite with Ritz, meet Ezel, who as I said above has figured out how to manipulate the laws, and eventually encounter Prince Mewt. In this fantasy world, Mewt’s mother is alive again, and his disgraced father is now the respected Judge Master. Everything he’s ever wanted exists in this world. Marche, however, is determined to get home because he asserts that this world simply isn’t real. Ritz doesn’t necessarily disagree with him, but she enjoys the freedom and confidence she’s found here and has little interest in helping Marche return to the old world. Prince Mewt actively opposes Marche’s quest, strengthening the laws, sending judges after him, and even placing a bounty on his head. Honestly, it makes perfect sense. Here Mewt has power, privilege, and status. Back home he has almost nothing.

I was telling my wife recently that when I originally played this game, I didn’t agree with Marche. I was firmly on Team Mewt. Why would I ever want to leave this fantasy world and go back to reality? It wasn’t until I stood there and actually spoke those words out loud as an adult that I realized how sad that proposition really is. Only someone who’s deeply unhappy with their real life wants to abandon it entirely for a fantasy. As a kid, I understood Mewt completely. As an adult, I understand Marche and why escaping to a fantasy isn’t healthy. Throughout the story, Marche wavers. While he tracks down the crystals guarded by the Totemas and destroys them one by one, believing that breaking the fifth crystal will unravel this world and send everyone home, he’s riddled with doubt. Is it fair of him to rip Mewt away from his fantasy? Does he even want to go back to being the new kid at a new school, living with a single mother whose attention is spent mostly on his sickly little brother? It’s actually a surprisingly melancholy story when you stop and think about it. Three friends fundamentally disagree about what’s best, and eventually those disagreements are settled through violence because there simply isn’t another option.

Unfortunately for Marche, even after destroying the fifth crystal the world doesn’t simply disappear. It continues to exist because there are still people who genuinely want it to. His brother, Doned is one of them. In the real world he’s sickly and confined to a wheelchair. Here he can run, fight, explore, and live a full life. Of course he doesn’t want to leave. He spends the later half of the game actively sabotaging Marche’s plans because, from his perspective, Marche is trying to destroy the only world where he’s able and happy. It’s an interesting premise because Marche spends the entire game trying to save everyone by dragging them back to reality, while almost everyone he cares about is desperately trying to stop him because they’ve escaped the difficult circumstances back home. As a kid I understood the desire to escape. As an adult I understand why living permanently inside an escapist fantasy isn’t really living at all.

I will say that I find Ritz’s motivation for staying in this world relatively weak. In the real world, her hair is naturally white and she dyes it red every day. In this world, her hair stays red. And that’s about it! At least with Marche, Donad, and Mewt they have much stronger reasons for their conflict. Although I will say Donad coming around to agreeing with Marche to leave this world felt a little too easy. I can’t imagine someone agreeing to give up their ability to walk so easy, but hey, this game is intended for a younger audience. For the most part, the game does a really good job of giving each character their own motivations and showing how they are challenged and grow. Which is more than I can say for the sequel, Final Fantasy Tactics A2, but that’s a tale for another day.

Jobs & Character Customization

What really made me fall in love with Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, though, was the gameplay, and more specifically how the game lets you build your characters. Each character belong to one of five races, and every race has its own collection of jobs, with some overlap.

The Humes are your traditional human characters, beginning as Soldiers and Archers before branching into Defenders, Paladins, Ninjas, White Mages, Black Mages, and Thieves. Every job allows the character to equip different weapons, and most weapons will teach a different ability to the character holding it. Equip a sword with Mindbreak, and your Soldier can immediately use that skill. At the end of each battle, the entire party receives some Ability Points, or AP. Keep that weapon equipped for long enough and eventually you’ll master it, allowing you to continue using the skill even after swapping out the weapon that provides it.

New classes unlock by mastering abilities from previous jobs, so you’re constantly planning several steps ahead. If you want to get your Hume to the Ninja Job, you’ll need to master 2 thief action abilities. If you want access to the powerful Illusionist class that can damage all enemies at once, you’ll need 5 black mage abilities and 3 white mage abilities.

The Moogles lean toward magical and technical roles with the Gadgeteer, Gunner, and Mog Knight classes. The Bangaa focus on brute force with the Templar, Dragoon, and Gladiator classes. The Viera become elegant Archers, Snipers, Assassins, and Red Mages. Then there are the Nu Mou, who are probably my favourite race in the game. They’re these wonderfully melancholy, Eeyore-looking creatures who specialize almost entirely in magic. I’ve honestly never really explored their Beastmaster line because their spellcasting is just so absurdly good. Once you unlock Turbo MP, these little magical Eeyores transform into walking tactical nukes, dropping Firaga’s left and right, and I absolutely love them.

Most of the battles will let you bring 6 characters into battle, with Marche always being included. This means 6 sets of equipment and skills to balance and swap around between each battle. It takes 2 or 3 battles to master some of the cheaper abilities, but with 6 characters all earning AP, it’s pretty likely that at least one character will master an ability every battle. This means between every battle you’ll need to go into the party screen to swap gear to continue unlocking new abilities for your characters.

Doublecast + Summon knocked out all 5 of these enemies in one turn.

I know this level of party management probably sounds tedious to some people, but I absolutely love it. Between almost every battle I’m opening menus, swapping equipment, changing jobs, assigning abilities, and figuring out what everyone should learn next. Sometimes that means intentionally giving someone a weaker weapon because it teaches an ability they haven’t mastered yet. Because I’ve played this game so many times, I inevitably railroad Marche toward Ninja so he can learn Double Sword as soon as possible to wield two blades at once. Likewise, I almost always push a Viera into Sniper and then Assassin so they can combine Concentrate with Last Breath, Ko’ing enemies with an 80% hit rate. That, combined with their absurd speed means I start every battle immedately deleting one opponent from the battlefield before they even get a chance to move.

I do like this system and how it creates an arc for your characters, but there are certainly some downsides. First, it does take a long time to train up a unit to a point where they’re use able. It can be frustrating when you send your main units off on Dispatch missions, using a non-default unit just feels anemic. Also, sometimes grinding abilities just to satisfy prerequisites can feel like wasted time, like needing to learn thief skills to unlock the Ninja. As soon as I unlock the ninja, I never touch those thief skills again. This system sounds like it would reward exploring, but really, once you get every character dialed in on the two classes they’re going to utilize in the end game, then you’re pretty well done building those characters.

Even with my favourite classes dialed in, every time I replay Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, I try to explore at least one or two jobs I usually ignore. This time I invested heavily into turning a Moogle into a Mog Knight, and after getting a decent amount of strength through their level ups, I swapped them over to a gunner, dealing really decent damage from clear across the map. Those were both classes I’d barely touched before.

Unfortunately this playthrough also brought along something I’d never experienced before. I lost Montblanc forever during a battle in the Jagd regions, where the judges don’t exist, the laws don’t apply, and death is permanent. Thinking back, I don’t think I’d ever actually lost a character before.

My Criticisms

Which brings me to one of my biggest criticisms of the game: saving. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance does a remarkably poor job of reminding you to save. In between battles on the map screen, you have to press Start, enter the System menu, and choose to manually save. It’s incredibly easy to forget for literally hours at a time, especially if the device you’re playing on has a decent sleep option, like the Steam Deck has. Back when I played this on my Game Boy Advance SP, I’d just snap the lid shut whenever I was done and rely on sleep mode to pick up where I left off. To really drive this pain point home, if you happen to lose a battle, or if Marche breaks the law and gets a red card, you get a Game Over screen, which kicks you back out to the title screen to load a saved game.

There were definitely times where I lost a battle and ended up losing eight or nine hours of progress because I simply had forgotten to save. Recently I made another equally stupid mistake. I sent almost my entire main party away on dispatch missions, figured I’d just walk around the map until they came back, and accidentally wandered into a new location, which threw me into a hidden engagement. Suddenly Marche was fighting 5 enemies alone. To make matters worse, the battle forbade damaging monsters, and I didn’t have an appropriate Anti-Law card. I had effectively walked straight into an unwinnable situation. Thankfully I’d saved a few missions earlier, so I only lost a little bit of progress instead of an entire evening.

One thing I noticed during this playthrough that I’d never really appreciated before is just how slow this game can be. The only reason I noticed it was because I played almost the entire game with a 2x speed hack enabled. Whenever I turned it off, everything suddenly felt glacial. Animations take much longer than I remember. There’s a noticeable slowness to the actions. Half of the battles are just watching the enemy units take their turns. This is a pretty common problem in every Tactics game though, and after sitting through the absurdly long summon animations of the PS1 era games, I really can’t complain about the “wasted time” here.

I don’t even feel guilty using an emulators speed-up feature anymore. Modern Final Fantasy remasters regularly include fast-forward buttons, encounter toggles, or experience multipliers. At this point it almost feels like an expected quality-of-life feature.

Living in the Shadow of a Giant

While I realize that nostalgia might be playing a role here, I enjoyed Final Fantasy Tactics Advance more than War of the Lions. That statement might be sacrilegious to some people as War of the Lions is routinely touted as one of the best games ever made. Yes, War of the Lions tells a much stronger story. Its political intrigue and complex factions are objectively more sophisticated. But Tactics Advance is simply more approachable. It’s brighter, more colourful, and more fantastical, and the race and job system feels much deeper. And the isekai plot is exactly what thirteen-year-old Alex wanted. Back then I couldn’t appreciate the political maneuvering and power struggles of War of the Lions. While I appreciate that story now, Tactics Advance has a story that spoke to me on a personal level. I also had more gripes for War of the Lions, like not seeing the map while staging your units at the start of a battle, or not being able to take back your movement, or just how absurd the zodiac system was and how consequential your characters star sign would be to how much damage they’d deal to enemies. Now, I know some of those complaints have been fixed in the 2025 remaster, but I didn’t play that version.

I still love Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. It’s bright, colourful, cheerful, and endlessly fun to revisit. The job system on display here remains my favourite iteration of job systems in the entire Final Fantasy series. Unlocking new jobs, mastering abilities, experimenting with different combinations, and not spending 20 minutes throwing rocks at chocobos puts Tactics Advance above War of the Lion for me. Slowly building your perfect squad never stops being satisfying. Yes, the law system can occasionally be frustrating, and yes, forgetting to save can lead to some absolutely brutal losses, but every time I return to this Ivalice I find myself smiling. At the end of the day, I just feel joy while I play Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which is more than I can say about War of the Lions.