i have finally completed final fantasy tactics advance. this is my 3rd time playing it really and once before i was reallyyy close to finishing it and just dropped it for whatever reason. however, this time i finally did it. total time spent was 191 hours or roughly 8 days worth of gaming. of course, i played it across several weeks. i ended up clearing 262 out of 300 missions. i tried to be as thorough as possible, but ultimately just finished the game because the remaining missions were not popping up. so maybe i missed out on key missions or there’s some not so obvious ways to solve some of the existing missions.

on that note, i didn’t really read any game faqs or guides for help except for details about the character jobs. i did have to google how to survive one of the earlier battles with llednar because i kept losing the battle.

the story is simple yet interesting as sides form in the conflict. overall, i enjoyed the game…great gameplay, characters, classes, and abilities. the negatives are that there’s a lot of abilities to learn and some take a long time to do so. a _super_ negative is the laws system. i get the point of the laws is to increase your ability to strategize, but past 2 active law cards it just becomes a huge annoyance. i constantly forgot which laws were active between battles and inadvertently broke the law. i was dismayed to find out that the next FF tactics game also has a law system. to me, that was the worst part of the game. for instance, there’s commonly a law that prohibits damage to animals (creatures/beasts) and later on in the game there is almost always a creature in the battles.

my favorite classes were the ninja, sage, and dragoon. the blue mage was disappointing to me.

in depth wiki here:  http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy_Tactics_Advance