Final Fantasy Tactics: a game by any other name

We all know better than to believe the most recent Final Fantasy to be our last, and it’s persistent cast of mages, moogles, and guys named Cid has become far less fantastical than familiar, but the Tactics spinoff has yet to entrench itself so strongly.

But not long enough...

Still only in its third installment, FF Tactics is like an engorged tick on our arm, and only one match to the skin will expose it for the parasitical life sucker it yearns to become.

The word “tactics” is defined as “the branch of military science dealing with detailed maneuvers to achieve objectives set by strategy.” In gaming terms, it evokes a plotting, plodding genre of tanks and hexagons, fog of war and field of influence, risk, reaction, resource management, positioning, and consequential choices.

Final Fantasy Tactics A2, even more so than Tactics Advance or the original Tactics, has none of the above. Nor does it offer the caliber of self-indulgently elliptic femme-boy parable to which this series has made us all over-accustomed. In fact, the already insulting bullshit-to-plot ratio of Tactics Advance has been distilled impossibly further down to “Illiterate sociopath teenager becomes contract killer / delivery boy in magical realm. Keeps journal.”

Don't let his raspberry beret and high heels fool you- this kid is stone boring.

I’ve seen better plots in Grand Theft Auto. And, given that the game now progresses solely by going to the pub to sign up for plot-related missions amongst endless side-quests (pssst! Try picking the one quest that doesn’t have a time limit associated with it!), the comparison isn’t far off. Except that driving ambulances and beating whores is fun, while waiting your turn to chase down a defenseless bloodied bunny rabbit so you can finally learn how to become a Tinker is not. What the fuck good is a tinker anyway?

There aren’t even poisonous marshes anymore! Christ, archers can no longer shoot their friends by mistake (Believe me, I’ve tried.) And you give me 57 new jobs to waste my time earning but take away the Chemist? Becoming that useless item-mongering fuck was the only tough decision we ever had to make in these games! And what’s with all this racial profiling? Where is it written in Ivalice canon that Moogles can’t grow up to be Gladiators, or that No Mou can’t Dance? What would Barack Obama say?

...is a magic-user, surveying points of geological interest, all I might ever be?

Instead of using the Turn Based Strategy genre to remind us how Final Fantasy became a household name in the first place, Square-Enix has taken the same tired formula of lining up to take turns hitting each other and moved it to a square plane with little hills and steppy stones. Which is not to say that positioning your unimpeded merry mercenaries on all four sides of an enemy for a care bear stare curb stomp isn’t a “tactic,” per se, but that there aren’t really any other choices a reasonable mind might make, which I’d argue removes this game from the strategy vein. A more suitable name for it would have been “Final Fantasy Tactic.”

And no. No you can’t skip animations. This is Final Fantasy, after all.

aaand that makes one of us.

Endwar: Makes me proud to be American

Americans haven't had much to gloat about these last eight years, but take heart that we finally now have a game where our boys are the coolest team in town...

...Of course each nation has the same units, with absolutely zero difference between their attributes, and the other guys are Russia and the European Union, so it's not like we have to stack up against Libya or anything...

But the point is that our inter-battle banter is way better than the alternatives. USA! USA!

BTW, I've been meaning to actually write a review of Endwar, but ironically it just will not end...

I’m fucking Napoleon. I’ve got a fucking horse!

I think this title says it all. Do you want to step into the boots of the ultimate revolutionary? Are you ready to experience the real Napoleon, the Napoleon who beat Wellington and never suffered from gout? The Napoleon that only the exalted Gameboy Advance platform could deliver?

Play this game, or the guy in the epaulets dies.

I sure hope so. After last week’s surprisingly popular post on Advance Wars, I felt it was time to give everyone some perspective on what a real tactics game is supposed to be like. Sure, Advance Wars is challenging, with meticulously balanced units, tried-and-true turn-based gameplay, attractive art, convenience-inducing options, and all that rot. You’ll just have to forget all that when you play Napoleon, yessir. This is real time strategy, buster, and you have to get your hands dirty. In the real world we don't take any namby pamby turns!

If you want your troops to attack or move somewhere, you’re just going to have to ride out to them in person and tell them yourself. Napoleon always preferred face-to-face communication. And you can forget about selecting multiple units for a coordinated attack. Sure, you can attach ground units to cavalry, but you’ll still have to command them one at a time to do so.

If only these soldiers had listened to me...

Victory, of course, comes down to getting four of your weakest, slowest, cheapest units to sneak into your opponent’s base in order to steal their red flags, replacing them with more Napoleonic blue ones.

Onward, Redecorators!

This game is definitely an odd bird. I bet you never knew Napoleon employed a crack team of interior decorators, or temporarily enhanced the strength of nearby forces by shouting “Allez!” I’m hopeful this writeup will add something to your Wednesday. As opposed to the games you won’t go out and buy after Yahtzee reviews them, you probably never would have even heard of Napoleon, unless someone else out there is into importing obscure GBA games that only ever got released in Japan or France. I played it on an emulator using a fan translation, but obviously I can’t recommend anyone go that route. At least Napolean never talked to God, right?

Advance Wars - Days of Ruin: Back to basics

Given my disposition, it's strange I was never bothered by the whimsically optimistic tone of Advance Wars. Maybe it's the sociopath in me, but I didn't find it the least bit incongruous to whistle while plotting the extermination of my enemies. I was deeply disturbed though by the turns of this latest installment: A meteor shower blots out the sun, choking off nearly all human life and leaving the few remaining survivors cloaked in shades of pastel.

But seriously, the Advance Wars franchise has consistently managed to create a serious gaming experience that doesn't take itself too seriously. Or perhaps saying that Advance Wars takes its audience seriously would be more accurate: every animation and cutscene is skippable; menus and interface streamlined; quicksaves are left to your discretion; difficulty actually increases as you progress, optional hardcore levels are available, and mission grading is transparent. So who cares if they have a terrible fashion sense and unhealthy fixation on adolescent boys?

really guys, this is getting awkward.

If you accept this premise- that Intelligent Systems takes gamers seriously, not that they're a bunch of creepy pederasts- then you'll be intrigued but not surprised to see that Days of Ruin has improved upon Dual Strike's single player campaign by giving you less toys rather than more.

Tag team is gone. Two-screen levels are gone. Those obnoxious kamikaze bomb units are gone. CO upgrades are gone. CO selection is gone! CO powers remain, but their importance is greatly diminished. The unlock store is gone, and extra maps have been integrated with the mission select map- a subtle change which actually went a long way in getting me to play them.

On the other side of the ledger, we get bike units that can move farther to capture cities but are otherwise rather pussy, and a flare unit for use in fog of war, which is even more vestigial than the bike. We also get a pretty sweet anti-tank gun, temporary air and seaports that can repair but not build, and some different planes and boats and shit.

The only new gameplay tweak is that CO's have a field of influence over other units, but of course this also means that where CO's used to be able to jabber silly platitudes from the sidelines they now have to get in a tank and fight. Their CO power bar only fills when they are personally involved in a skirmish, and if they get blown up the power bar resets. Again, more constraints than Dual Strike, and better results.

Despite their obvious effort to add substance, Days of Ruin's emo plot is just as abysmal as all the others. But someone playing these games for the story would have to be at a 6th grade reading level...or a 6th grader...

mmmmmmmmm, 6th graders...

If anyone ever actually read more than one page of this blog it would be readily apparent how undiscriminating I am when it comes to turn-based strategy games. They've been an obsession of mine since Warsong and Shining Force, and not even a summer of getting my ass kicked in chess by a bunch of unhygienic 12-year olds at gifted kid camp could shake it. As a responsible 8-6 man, they're now the only thing separating me from those commuters that read those large folded inky things.

So it is from a place of authority that I say no tactics game has ever been as satisfying as any part of the Advance Wars series. And that satisfaction comes not from sexy bells and whistles, but compehensive gameplay economy, which in turn could only come from a development team possessing great humility. This isn't rocket science; it's a simple lesson, simply replicated. So why are games designed like this so few and far between?