When I heard there was going to be a sequel to FF Tactics Advance, for the DS, I was pretty stoked. I pre-ordered it, snapped it up on launch day… all that. Then, according to the timer, I played about 24 hours in and stuck it in its case for nearly two years. Can’t really say why, but better things ended up coming out.

So, randomly, I decided to give it another shot. Maybe just because the Tactics Advance games seem like the red headed stepchild of Final Fantasy spinoffs and nobody other than Gamespite seems to analyze them like gamers do the main chapters, and I needed material. Or I was looking for things to trade in and realized I hadn’t given it much of a chance.

FFTA2 is… Weird, to me. It almost feels like some kind of knockoff or cash-in version made by a a random outside developer for Square. It’s made up of various Final Fantasy related things, but there are little things that feel… off. Like Magic with a K on the end. Which leads to permutations of that like the word ‘magickal’ which doesn’t look right and my spell checker assures me isn’t a word. There’s some new arrangements of old Tactics music- but a few too many as if they couldn’t be bothered to compose too many all new bits. Then there’s the matter of a couple new races just popping out of the woodwork that nobody had mentioned beforehand, even though you’d think that the Gria in particular would stick out, even if Seeq could pass for morbidly obese Bangaa.

So, to cut to the chase, I started playing it again, eating up the enhanced sound and visuals, but there always feels like something lacking. There’s some pluses, sure, and the general pointlessness of the plot seemed to not matter so much after I’d been out of the game long enough to forget what the hell was going on and just consider it a series of unrelated missions to kill time. Then I got to one of the newspaper missions, one of the handful of non combat but still turn based missions of the game.

Dear god.

So turn, by turn, by turn, you have to walk around town asking everyone their New Years resolutions. Not just the stationary NPC’s, but you have to knock on the doors of all the houses in the stage as well. Naturally, you can’t reach them all in one or two turns. And they stay neatly in place, marching in time to the oddly grim battle theme the mission had picked. When all your units had made their moves, then you had the pleasure of sitting through the AI taking three or four seconds per character to decide how best to REMAIN STATIONARY until one of your guys’ turns came up again. Once all of that riveting work was done, one unit has to report back to the newspaper guy, one of those NPC’s I assume was designed to make you love to hate them. He asks you what the most popular resolution of the year is. Now, I was bored out of my MIND just reaching these characters to interact with them, so I didn’t really pay attention to what any of them said (even though two of them were recurring stalkers of a pop band, oddly enough.) I answer wrong.

The mission, which took about 15-20 minutes of violence free, turn based walking is marked a failure, and I’m unable to retry it, presumably until next game ‘year.’