Missions

Two of the games I've been trying to play recently have both featured a mechanic where you send off party members on missions. In World of Warcraft the sole purpose of most followers is to go on these missions; in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance it's something you do with characters you can use in your actual fighting party. In both cases it works pretty much the same way. You get given a description of the mission and the rewards for succeeding and have to pick a number of characters to send away. After an amount of time (real life time in WoW, world map movements in FFTA) the characters come back and tell you if they succeeded or not.

In FFTA the odds of succeeding on a mission are based on the level and jobs of the characters you send. You're supposed to use the description to figure out who to send. (Fighter type characters should probably go work in a mine while a mage should go help a librarian.) It's really not an exact science though, and I haven't read up about it but I feel like you need to use the mission system to get the really good items. It may even gate beating the game in some way? In WoW it tells you straight up what your chances of succeeding will be for any given combination of characters. It also tells you explicitly which abilities are going to help increase your odds.

I like the WoW system more than the FFTA system because it actually gives me the information I need to make informed decisions. Maybe that word should be in air quotes though... When you know exactly what you need to maximize your odds you should just do that and move on with your life. It can be a little interesting to make sure you have the right mix of followers with a spread of abilities to always have access to what you need, but once you finish that stage of the process it's just doing the obvious best thing.

In short... The system is pretty cool to explore in the short term but becomes a tedious grind in the long term.

It's even worse in FFTA where I'm pretty sure the grind really is the long term. Chains of missions, no idea what will let you succeed, and limited time when the missions are available. Maybe I would have found it interesting to work out what was best for each mission by playing the game over and over and trying different things. But actually, I bought this game the day it was released and started playing it right away... But I didn't end up playing it enough to beat the game once, let alone play it many times to work out who I want to send on what missions.

I'm not really sure what to do with FFTA. I'm not terribly interested in playing it. I am at least a little interested in moving my marathon along, especially if I can play a game I can stream. Like, say, Final Fantasy XII which I believe is next among the games I actually own. I'll dig into more when I get to that point to see if I can easily acquire things like Kingdom Hearts 2.

But for now, I should really give FFTA more of a chance. But I don't want to worry about the stupid mission system. So I think I'm going to do some reading about missions to see what ones I actually need to worry about and see what I can do about doing just those ones. 

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

I can remember going out and buying this game at Radio Shack of all places right when it first came out. I don't think I'd even played the original Final Fantasy Tactics at the time, but I had heard myths about how rare and awesome a game it was from Josh. I remember it had a job system with the jobs available based on what race your character was. Job systems are awesome, so this game had to be pretty good... But I don't remember liking it very much. I never beat it, or even came close. I remember being particularly frustrated by the law system where the rules of the game would change each fight, but you'd have to go look them up or get arrested. I like the idea that the rules can change, but I think I would have preferred something where you couldn't do things rather than getting in trouble for doing them? Maybe?

Now, I was thinking I was disappointed with this game the first time around, but I went and took a look at my cartridge today and it turns out I'd played it for around 30 hours last time. 30 hours is actually a pretty long time for a console game let alone for a handheld game, so that's actually a pretty good deal. And I didn't even come close to finishing it!

I was disappointed to find out the 3DS doesn't have a GBA port, so I couldn't actually play this game on my handheld. But then my sister came to the rescue with her original GBA! She was sad that she couldn't find the charger cable for it, but then I flipped it over and pointed out that it actually takes AA batteries. That's how old we're talking here! It also doesn't have a backlit screen, which I remember being a pain back in the day. But I'm sure I can find a place to sit that has a good light behind it... Or at least, I hope I can!

As far as a plan for the game goes, I don't really have one. I'd like to beat the game this time around, which I suspect means I need to keep myself from getting too distracted by side quests. That may well be easier said than done. Time will tell I guess...

I am a little sad with the intro to the game. It starts with a bunch of kids talking about how cool it would be if a video game came to life, and one of the kids says his favourite game is 'Final Fantasy'. And then the main character gets teleported to a world where 'Final Fantasy' came to life. Except it's actually nothing like the original Final Fantasy. It has Bhangas and Moogles and those weren't things in the original game at all. I guess they're just using Final Fantasy as a shorthand for some fantasy RPG game in their universe but that title has real meaning to me and I'm annoyed that they misused it. Bah! Bah I say!