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Remember the good old days when you could just walk into a library, grab a few books and then simply go home?  Well, those days are over, folks: in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2 you take control of Luso, who, forced to clean up the library on the last day of school, is sucked into the world of Ivalice via a not-too-innocent looking book.  Granted, he shouldn’t have told the book that he was the one destined to fill its pages, but c’mon, everyone makes mistakes!



The same basic principals of gameplay from the previous Tactics games are the staple for Tactics Advance 2, as well.  For those that have not played the original Tactics for PlayStation or the first Tactics Advance for GBA, you are given a map on a grid in which to place your characters on and conduct battle.  As a turn-based strategy RPG, you control each of your individual characters, moving, attacking, and then finishing the turn by choosing which way your character will face until their next turn.

Controls are your standard Nintendo A to select and B to cancel, and the D-pad to move.  Pressing Y will bring up more information about whatever your cursor happens to be hovering over, while the X button will bring up the menu (depending on where you are, it changes).

Progression through the game consists of taking a trip to the local pub to accept various quests, going out and doing the quest and gaining the items and experience in order to take harder quests and progress through the story.  On your way through said quests, you can gain new party members, items, jobs, weapons and abilities.

This is where the main bread and butter of Tactics comes in: the party and character customization.  Each character must have a job class equipped. They could be a Blue Mage for example, and some jobs are race specific.  You equip your character with certain weapons and armour that will enable them to learn new and better moves for their specific job class.  On top of that, each character can use in battle the moves from their current job, and moves from one other job they have learned.  This allows for a certain level of experimentation in that players can have, for example, a Thief character with the abilities of a Soldier and so on.



Visuals within the game are nothing fantastic; it looks exactly like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance in terms of graphics, as if nothing has been updated at all.  Characters are the same tiny looking sprites on the map, but one nice thing is that each job class for each race has a distinctly different look. Cinematics take the form of written dialogue flashing up on the screen with a picture of the character (which also changes depending on the current job) beside the text.


The soundtrack has virtually not changed at all from the previous Tactics Advance game; in fact, it is basically the exact same music used in the exact same situations.  As for sound effects, they are there, but they have not changed, either.  When you attack someone with your weapon it still makes the satisfying “thwack” sound, and when someone dies they still have a “death cry” (which is different for each race and/or monster type), but again, it is nothing that hasn’t been done before.



The game is easy to interact with, and flows quite nicely.  The menus are easy to navigate, and everything is relatively simplified in that regard.  Everything necessary to proceed through the game is taught to players early on, so the learning curve can be likened to a relatively straight line; players just need to pay attention and try not to bite off more than they can chew.  Strictly speaking, quests become available that are way out of the player’s league at the very beginning of the game. I suppose if one likes to be trounced, one should accept these wholeheartedly.