Best tactical combat game for GBA?

Yeah, I was insane. I tried to win the game without a single casualty. I didn’t lose a character until Precilla in the last turn of the last battle bit the dust. Never liked her anyways. ;)

-Scott-

FFT:A is an RPG-lite meta-game with some token tactical combat thrown in. The combat outcome is more dependent upon your choice of equipment and class-abilities rather than the actual fighting.

Advance Wars is all about the tactical combat. There isn’t an explicit rock/paper/scissors system, but it sort of works out once you factor in unit cost, movement restrictions, and which unit types they can attack. For a complex system with almost 20 different unit types, it’s surprisingly elegant.

Fire Emblem is somewhere in between. There’s an RPG aspect including unit stats and class upgrades and equipment and the whole bit. The combat involves an axe/sword/lance system as well as a light/dark/elemental magic system thrown in for good measure. (Yes, FE mission 26x was a pain. It took me about ten tries to get through casualty-free because of the pesky end-boss.)

Hmmm, I suddenly have this urge to go load up Panzer General 2 again…

  • Alan

I haven’t gotten too far in it, but i like what i see. It appears to be completely linear; it has a story to tell and you’re going therough it whether you like it or not. After all the running around you had to do with turfs in Tactics Advance though, i don’t mind one bit. No fruity random battles, except for one area. Also appears to have an item creation system based on monster souls or something.

One big difference from FFTA that i’m liking is that each side goes at once instead of taking turns between individual units. Your team goes, then when you’re done, the enemy team goes and so on. It’s kind of fun getting some real formations going with that.

No, because some of the swordsmen have “lancereaver” swords, i.e., they reverse the triangle. This means you have to click on them to inspect what kind of swordsmen they really are. It’s a drag, and adds nothing interesting to the game.

I spent three weeks playing 26x. Anyone who is not a sicko completist should probably skip that side quest.
[/quote]

I’ve beat it a couple of times, but only by losing troops. I refuse to go on until I can beat it without losses, because god only knows what I’ll face next.

There was a lot of love for FFTA on this board until Fire Emblem eclipsed it. I found both games quite fun (though they’re both pretty easy), but for me the fun comes from different things.

In FFTA the fun comes from using multiclassing and ability sets to build a huge and genuinely diverse roster of supercharacters – it’s really more about character-building strategy than tactics. In a lot of RPGs (Nethack being the worst case) the most powerful characters are pretty much indistinguishable from one another; not so here. Working out the details of all the classes and powers is supposed to be a big part of the game – I get the feeling that a lot of players just went and looked all that stuff up, thus cheating themselves of discovery, fun, et al. In the late game the law system, which bans the use of certain powers on a given day, presents all kinds of interesting tactical problems (though most players seem to hate it).

In Fire Emblem the fun comes from the count-the-spaces and calculate-the-odds tactics, and from the permadeath. You’re playing chess with live pieces, and you’ve got a lot invested in some of them, so you care a lot about each move. Permadeath also makes FE very replayable — tactical events are unlikely to repeat themselves, as different characters will be alive or dead and will have different power levels on different plays — whereas by the time you finish FFTA you’ve probably seen all you care to see.

Advance Wars 1 and 2 aren’t RPGs, so units have the anonymity/expendability of wargame units, and there’s a resource-management system in most missions (the resource being money, which is generated by cities). The campaigns in both of these games (especially 2, which has a lot of time limits) tend to set much harder goals than FFTA or FE. They’re probably my favorite of the three.

But they’re all good games, and to some degree they’re attempting different things.

I didnt like it either. The rules completely ruined the game for me.

I liked Fire Emblem a ton, but I also eventually got sick of it and still havent beaten it. I stopped playing on some .X mission, I think 26.X, where the bridges pop up and down on various turns and there are some brutal enemies along the way who can do shit to you before you can do anything to them. The scenario is winnable, and was early on. But, someone always dies for me, it seems, and there are only a handful of characters I am willing to lose, and some have already fallen in previous missions. Very frustrating to get an hour into a mission and then lose a character you dont want to be without for the rest of the game.

olaf

As I recall, you receive very powerful units in each of the remaining missions - I wouldn’t worry about losing a second tier unit.

-Scott-

I’m playing Tactics Ogre right now, and while it’s fun it’s nowhere near the game that Advance Wars 2 is. The limit of 8 characters per battle creates a situation where if you don’t use a character for a couple missions, they become unusable because they are too weak compared to the opposition. You can rectify this with a training battle, by letting your weak characters stab the strong ones in the back for experience, but this is extremely tedious.

:roll:

Jobe, what’s your problem, dude? Don’t agree with my analysis that FFTA > FE and that Ninja Gaiden is yet another infuriating example of developer arrogance? Probably not. You probably haven’t even played any of the games in the thread. But who would know? You have contributed nothing on the topic of this conversation so far.

Nobody listen to this guy.[/quote]

And if we found out who actually originated that quote, it’d be somebody exactly like the people who use it, so what’s the point? There’s a reason we don’t commonly cite aphorisms from Carrot Top. That kind of picture only serves as a good indicator of who’s in need of a banning.

Check the post order. I showed no hostility to anyone til you and your boytoy Gallant appeared. That makes you–brace for it–trolls, who deserve to be banned far more than me, who was bloody minding his own business posting in this thread.

In short, Jobe, you need to STFU.

I don’t think Gallant likes me very much, so that’s a bit off-the-wall. Congratulations on the completing the Ironman triathlon of “______ sucks”, JPEG smackdowns, and “STFU”.

How about next posting that guy from Chips pointing and saying “YOU’RE A FAG!!”

That’s good, but I don’t really care about your sexuality.

Read my first post in defense of myself, slugger, and try and sort out why you decided to post your angry little outburst. It was completely uncalled for and unwarrented, and, like I first pointed out, had nothing to do with this thread.

If you have some personal issues with me, there’s that little “Email” button hovering below every one of my posts. Smack it and cry your heart out. Of course, you wouldn’t get any public attention then, so it’d defeat your harassing me, so I don’t expect a message from you anytime soon.

That being said, I’m done trying to make sense out of you. You’re a lonely jackass with a chip on your shoulder about something I can’t even begin to care about… and that’s as far as I want to understand you. You might think you’re the shit or intellectually superior for your smartass comments, but you’re not. You’re just a smartass.

Check the post order. I showed no hostility to anyone til you and your boytoy Gallant appeared. That makes you–brace for it–trolls, who deserve to be banned far more than me, who was bloody minding his own business posting in this thread.

In short, Jobe, you need to STFU.[/quote]

Ho ho ho! You really -showed- -him-, -Lord Ebonstone-! I hope I’m never on the receiving end of your -rapier wit-! I wouldn’t want to be -cut down- by a -stupid fucking picture quote from something awful-.

Dude… Fire Emblem is nowhere near a disappointment and is easily one of the better games released last year. I wish I had played it in 2003 so I could’ve put it on my Top Ten because it’s right up there.

Matt’s response was kinda funny, kinda right on. Turning people away from Fire Emblem is silly. Just how do you qualify it as a disappointment anyway? What was disappointing?

–Dave

Well, after playing Advance Wars and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Fire Emblem seemed to be the mid-point of those two games–AW’s paper/rock/scissors tactics and FFTA’s item equips, job upgrades, and experience progression.

I thought FE was extremely boring because, to me, it didn’t come close to doing either one of those games’ concepts justice. I think paper/rock/scissors tactics is pretty lame–I mean, how much more generic can you get–but Advance Wars masked it well enough and didn’t throw it in your face like FE did. A MD Tank in AW felt like it had some serious power. A knight in FE, or a good swordsman, didn’t feel like squat, just a piece in the repetitive puzzle of Rock/Paper/Scissors.

In terms of the aspects it shared with FFTA–after playing FFTA for 60 hours and experimenting with all the class combinations, I was happy to learn FE had classes that would level up and change as you progressed. I was not happy to learn how simplistic the premise was. Archers… became Snipers! Infantry… became Swordsmen! Net result? +2 more ATK per level and a different graphic. Snnoooorrre. (and I don’t remember the actual class names, forgive me).

In short, playing FE made me want to either play Advance Wars, or play Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Maybe if Fire Emblem had put “Advance” in its title, it would have appealed to me more. Advanced Fire Emblem. Fire Emblem Advanced.

Basically, I would recommend FE to you if you liked Advanced Wars. I would not recommend FE, however, if you liked Advanced Wars and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. FE just feels like a weak combination of the two, which doesn’t translate to much fun at all.

:looks at topic:

:looks at squat’s post:

:wonders how squat thinks he has a point:

FFTA had three major strikes against it for me.

  1. Poor UI. Vital information hidden three menus deep.

  2. The laws were arbitrary, enforced without warning, and weren’t well integrated in the game.

  3. No tactical thinking is needed after you discover your first real exploit. (i.e. a overpowered ability like arm aim) As much “stuff” FFTA has in the game in the forms of skills, weapons, armor, less than 5% could be considered comparatively relevant. Within that 5% there’s not enough variety to maintain interest over 60+ hours of play.

-Scott-