I know this blog at this point probably just has 5 or 6 readers at most. And I speak to you 5 or 6 when I say that you guys should not lose hope. I intend to post at least 3 times a week or more, so don’t stop coming!
On to my “review” of FFTA.
I have heard lots of great things about Final Fantasy Tactics. It’s been said to be extremely addictive. Unfortunately I did not become an addict.
After pouring 13 hours and 22 minutes (it says so in the save file) into the game, I’ve grown bored of it.
Before I go on, I shall say that you should take my opinion as exactly that, Mine. I have my own views on games etc, so read the review and decide for yourself.
I love roleplaying games. I spent 3 years playing Ultima Online, and another year playing Everquest, and I could easilly spend my entire time playing Star Wars Galaxies or any other online game set in an interesting universe. Unfortunately I have never played a real paper and pen RPG, my RPG career started with UO in 1997. Living in Russia until 1993 caused me to miss alot of things that people in the western world took for granted. Like Amiga or Nintendo. Although I did have a game boy in 1992 (I was 12)…ahem, end flashback.
I have however realised that I do not love roleplaying games per se, I love the environments, stories and interraction. In other words, I love adventure games with a tactical or rpg element.
All the games I mentioned UO and Everquest, they are of course in a place of their own because they are Online, so there is no story, but there are environments and people, and I love that. The existence of real people in those worlds created countless adventures that are Worthy of Song! I could never get bored of those games. The stories I could tell. (my exgirlfriend could have a thing or two to say about that heheh)
Then we have Final Fantasy X for PS2, that has environment and wonderful story. I love those aspects, however there was one element that I did hate in that game, the constant fighting. FFX follows a standard oldschool japanese RPG pattern where you run into monsters at random while travelling, and can not avoid the encounters. After playing that game for many hours, and encountering the same 3 or 4 monsters over and over again, I personally got really tired. The encounters are not very different. You cast a few spells, heal and cast more. Battle over. Experience gained. I would have preffered weaker bosses and about 70% fewer encounters. The boss fights were fun tho, and many encounters too, but there were just too many. So I never finished that game, I intend to buy it again when I have a PS2 again and finish it for sure!
Action games and fighting games are always fun and can be played many times, so that does not need to be mentioned. I love those. Especially FPS games 
Unfortunately Final Fantasy Tactics Advance has almost no story and no environments. At first you are greeted by an Intro/Tutorial which lasts about 20 minutes and you can not skip it. So starting a new game is almost out of the question. I ended up with my main character named Elaida because I thought he was a girl. I restarted the game right when I found out (after about 2 hours), but after the first 2 hours of play with the new character, it crashed. (it’s crashed a few times since then).
So I ended up going with Elaida. Weird.
Now that I have played the game for 13 hours and 22 minutes, there have been 2 major story elements.
You may think of the game as Heroes of Might and Magic, however this version is much more limited and slow to play.
Basicly you have to pay money to get missions in the pub, and then you go around and do them. Go around means travel around 5 areas that I have unlocked (I believe there are 29 total), the areas a dots on the map and when you get to the dot, you can either select the mission that takes place there, or do nothing. All your traveling is done on the map, you can never move around inside a city or in the wilderness. Boring.
The missions are either battles, or dispatch missions. Dispatch is when you send one crew member to do a mission, and success is dependant on your clan’s skill level. He comes back a few days later and tells you the outcome. The rest is all about fighting.
The fights are dull and slow because for some reason they chose to explain every action that the computer takes, so the computer’s moves always take ages especially if they still have many people alive. It would have been enough to show the movement of the character and display the name of his attack and target. Yet they decided to make the process lengthy and annoying. At this point I just use the Ultimate Totema attack to kill everyone on the field in one shot. It’s more pleasant. (although I can’t even bring myself to play it anymore).
Every attack you do yourself also takes way too many clicks and it could have been lessened with some thought. Like if you move towards an enemy, and he’s the only one in the vicinity, you should only have to confirm that you want to attack him, not first select him and then confirm. You still have to confirm right before performing the attack anyway.
Here’s how one turns goes:
1. Select the action you want to take, the default is Move, so press A and move.
2. Action is selected, so press Action and press again to do the default fight, or browse to magic or another thing.
3. Select the target
4. Confirm
This may not seem like much, but when you have 6 characters and you have to do this ALL the time, it gets boring as hell. It could be streamlined and the 2 currently useless R/L buttons could be used better. Also they insist on making all interface elements slide in and out of the screen (kind like dialogs in Mac OS X), which adds another slowdown to the game since you have to wait for the sliding to finish before your commands are performed.
Then when the computer does his turn:
1. Show what unit is doing the turn, pause for 2 seconds
2. Show the movement grid (1 second)
3. Show the square the unit will move to
4. Show what attack the unit will use (1 second)
5. Show the target grid (1 second)
5. Show the target selection (can be skipped with A)
6. Perform the attack.
7. Show XP gain (can be skipped or turned off)
If you dont click the A button, one computer turn takes 20 seconds!
If you press A all the time, it takes about 15 seconds. Imagine if the computer has 6 units…wow
The annoying part is that if turn off XP gain, you can not see XP gained by you either. I dont really care how much XP the computer gains dude, he’s gonna die in a moment anyway.
Now some people might enjoy these details and I am not saying they are fools. I am just saying that I myself found waiting 15 seconds for every computer turn to be way too long. The best part is when the Judge (present in every battle) has to move, that also takes about 10 seconds. Annoying.
I just think they could have made it all move much faster so every battle would be fun. Since that’s all you do in the game. Fight.
You fight in quake too, but at least in Quake your adrenaline makes up for lack of story. In Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, only your annoyance makes up for it 
Once again, this opinion is only my own and if you like RPGs or statistics game, this is for you. But if you crave STORY and EXPLORATION, stay away from this game, because there is very little of both here.
I am sure there is an RPGer turning in his grave as we speak.