The story of the game is not as complex as the previous tactics game and has been somewhat toned down. It follows the exploits of Marche, a young teenager who moves into a new city known as Ivalice. He makes friends with some kids at his school and one night he invites them to his house where they read a mysterious book. They are strangely transported to an unknown city, which resembles that of Marche’s favourite computer game – Final Fantasy! The story then follows the journey of our hero as he encounters his friends and attempts to free himself from this mysterious world.

Final Fantasy Tactics was all about combat. No roaming around cities or watching 30 minute cut scenes, and its sequel is no different. Combat in this latest instalment is very similar to its predecessor but with some major changes. For a start, the game uses an isometric view and isn’t fully 3D, meaning that you can’t rotate the camera to get a better view of the battle. This isn’t a huge letdown, as the battle maps are well crafted and it is straightforward to see what is going on. The biggest inclusion is that of a Judge, an armoured knight who sits on a chocobo. The Judge sets different laws during each battle and each law has a severity rating. Breaking these laws results in the guilty character been penalized using a yellow card or being given a red card and sent to jail if the crime is great. This makes for an interesting scenario, as you will have to manage your characters in your clan carefully and make sure you have characters from a variety of classes, so that a law won’t make the battles impossible or against your favour. For example, consider a scenario where the Judge has set the law that you can’t use swords and the majority of the characters in your clan are soldiers, what do you do? This makes the Judge systems interesting and the player can also use it to their advantage. The Judge also has recommended laws, which recommend using certain techniques, items and so forth. Doing a recommended law gives your character a Judge Point. Judge points allows you to pull off combo attacks that involve multiple characters and also summon Totema (almost like summons, but each Totema can only be summoned by a certain race). However, over the course of the game, the Judge becomes stricter and adds more laws to each match. However, your characters can later purchase law cards that nullify laws or create new ones. Imagine you are fighting a group of Black Mages, you can then cast a “no colour magic” law card, making the mages commit a breach of law if they cast a spell, swinging the battle in your favour.

Learning abilities is a fantastic experience in FFTA as the game revolves around the Ability Points system. The majority of items you can equip, whether it is a sword, a shield or even a hat have associated abilities with them. Equipping the item allows you to use the abilities, but if you un-equip the item you lose them, unless your learn it! To learn the ability associated with the equipped item, you must earn the AP points required to learn the technique. AP points are earned by winning battles or completing missions. However, some items may have several abilities associated with them and only certain classes may learn them – Black Mages can only learn Black Magic, White Mage’s can only learn Curing magic. However, what if you could learn techniques from a variety of classes? Well, that is also possible! Over the course of the game, you can change the job-class of your character. You may have a Moogle in your clan who is a master of black magic, but is pathetic at physical attacks. To overcome this, you can change his job to a soldier and learn some physical attacks, yet still retain all his magic spells. This is a fantastic feature and provides hours of customising your characters, fiddling with their stats and trying to create a master of all jobs!

The world map has been replicated from The Legend of Mana. Over the course of the game when you complete missions you will be rewarded with a new map location which can be placed anywhere on the initially blank world map. Placing the symbol on certain locations or near current map icons may result in the symbol (and even nearby symbols) rumbling, resulting in a treasure location where you can dig up items. After progressing and forming your own clan, rival clans may challenge your noble team and may even attempt to overtake cities you have freed. Battling them results in your clan having better status and also allowing you to obtain cheaper items at the shops.

As for the presentation, no one can fault Square-Enix. They have taken into consideration that some people may play the game on a standard GBA, a GBAsp or even a Gameboy Player. They have therefore added different colour palates to suit your gaming setup. The character art and graphical affects are crisp and well implemented. The animation and sprites are fantastic bringing the action to life on the tiny GBA screen. As for the music, the tunes are fantastic and are well implemented whether it is a cutscene or battle. They will still be buzzing away in your head when you are away from the game. Any niggles? Well, the story is extremely slow, but does pick up later in the game, but those expecting a Final Fantasy story full of plot twists will be disappointed to hear that the story is simple but still enjoyable. The combat does however become a bit repetitive and fighting battles after battle can get a bit tedious. However, the Judge and Job system make up for this and they provide for an interesting experience.

As with it’s predecessor, the game is huge. There are over 300 missions, making for an engrossing experience that will take at least 60+ hours if attempting just the main missions. However, for those who seek to fiddle with the job-class system, learn the majority of abilities and even raise captured monsters, will find themselves having sleepless nights.

Whether the game topples its predecessor is a different matter. Square-Enix have to be commended for managing to recreate the magic of the old game on the GBA and designing some fantastic sprites, creating great music and implementing a solid ability and job system. The story perhaps remains the most poor aspect of the game and the difficulty has been toned down compared to the previous instalment. At heart it is Final Fantasy Tactics, but even though combat may have got repetitive in the first game, the story was better and gave the player a reason to play on. These niggles are meaningless when compared to the joy the player will gain from the game and fact that you can play Final Fantasy Tactics on the go makes it even better.