YMMV / Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • There are those who believe that Marche is really the villain and that he is essentially killing off a world full of people and stripping his family and friends of their hearts' desires in a selfish wish to go home. While the sequel more or less confirms that things worked out pretty well for everyone, it is true that the game isn't great about arguing against this point of view.
  • While Ivalice isn't in the broadest sense a character, the Li-Grim, a personification of the world's being, is. The game seems to portray it as an almost corrupting force that is perfectly willing to allow those within Ivalice to stay locked away in fantasy. However, using Marche as an example of Ivalice succeeding in learning how to better his life through the confidence he gains and the companionship he learns to those he considers his friends, is it possible that Ivalice serves to teach harsh lessons through experience? Li-Grim, despite being the final boss, would come across as something of a harsh mentor instead of a Big Bad trying to maintain its control.
  • It's also interpreted that Shara is actually Cici, the fourth girl from the snowball fight. What helps give credence to this interpretation is that it's actually Cici who ends up talking to Ritz at the end, being the one to not only accept Ritz's hair colour but even talk about it.
• Awesome Music: Hitoshi Sakimoto somehow managed to fit some incredible songs into a Game Boy Advance game.
• Broken Base: The game itself heavily divided fans of the first Tactics game on several aspects:
  • The gameplay was changed significantly; speeding up combat and dividing characters into five races in a way that prevents characters from becoming cookie-cutter duplicates of each other, but also limits customization options in terms of what jobs any given character can take.
  • The plot is much lighter and lacks the political drama of the original. Some prefer the more straightforward plot and see it as having elements of genre deconstruction, while others see it as oversimplified and aimed at a younger audience (especially in terms of a somewhat Anvilicious aesop about not running from reality, which is normally an aesop confined to media for young children).
  • The game made traditional Final Fantasy races far more prominent, with moogles being given a major role as a race (rather than just a cameo in the form of a summon) while introducing a variety of animal-themed fantasy races as well (and playable ones at that). Some fans liked this, while others saw it as aiming the game at a much younger audience than the more serious human-oriented political drama of the original. Final Fantasy XII, despite its flaws, would later prove that both can co-exist if given more thought.
• Common Knowledge:
  • Ritz's reason for staying in Ivalice is not because of a hair colour she doesn't like - it's a physical sign as to how she was othered by her classmates. She was unpopular before Marche met her and Mewt, with supplementary material mentioning she was good in classes and sports, yet others give her a wide berth. Her reasons for staying also point to the fact that Ritz is accepted here for who she is.
  • Marche actually doesn't just beat up his friends into submission to make them want to go home - in fact Doned and Mewt are never fought by Marche at all. He clearly attempts to reason with them, but they don't listen. Even trying to get Marche arrested, sending clans to beat him up, or trying to fight him directly.
• Designated Hero: There are a lot of fans who consider Marche a Villain Protagonist because he decides on his own (and fairly quickly) to destroy Ivalice and restore the real world, without trying to convince his friends or looking for a way other than destruction, although the story paints Ivalice as a Lotus-Eater Machine and gives the Aesop that dealing with your problems is better than hiding from them.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Mewt Randell and the Li-Grim. Neither is necessarily evil, but they qualify in a sense due to people seeing them as more sympathetic as they are, especially considering that Mewt is mainly selfish and willing to make the laws harsher against his subjects' wishes on a whim.
• Fan Nickname: "Genocide Kid" seems to run among Marche's detractors.
• Game-Breaker: Has its own page here.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Archers and Animists early on are nothing but pests that bugs you with status ailments making battles drag on for longer than it should. The same goes for enemy jobs that have skills that revive their allies. Later in the game if you don't have a way to neutralize them they can easily descent into Demonic Spiders territory.
  • Sprites/Titanias (particularly those with White Wind), enemy Gunners or Illusionists (who can hit you from far away), and anything equipped with Damage > MP. The latter ability results in damage reducing the target's MP instead of HP, and, worst of all, as long as the target has any MP, they will not lose HP.
• Goddamned Boss: While the Ultima Crystals are not tough, they love to use a spell that inflicts Charm status. Enjoy having your team rip itself apart instead of actually destroying the crystals for turns on end. Oh and if you brought a healer with the Life skill, prepare to watch them undo all of your work in seconds by reviving the crystals. This can only be prevented by either bringing items that resist Charm (which this early in the game can be hard to accomplish especially if you don't know what's coming) or by progressing the game's clock until a law that forbids using Charm pops up.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The missions to help Nono by getting back at the criminals who attacked him take place in jagds. Jagds are where death is permanent. The first mission is the only one required for the plot, and it explicitly mentions afterwards that Marche's group didn't kill the criminals (he even shares with Nono the reward for turning them in), but there's no such scene for the optional second mission, so Nono may be asking Marche to straight up murder his enemies. Hilariously lampshaded in one Let's Play of the game.
  Marche: Apologize to Nono, and don't do it ever again.
  Orange Fluffy Sheep: ...This is a jagd. They're dead now.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The secret character Cheney the Hunter became a lot funnier three years later.
• Ho Yay:
  • Montblanc and Marche in the Radio Edition, where they are fighting together against most monsters without the help of anyone else, and with only little help from Nono. Marche's name with massive power. Lastly, saying that he will always wait for Marche at a commercial and at the ''very ending''.
  • On the Les Yay side, we have Ritz and Shara who have grown very close to each other by the time Ritz tearfully throws herself into Shara's arms.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Doned does some pretty fucked up things towards his own brother, including destroying a present Marche needed to see Mewt, but at the same time, the wish he gets in the fantasy Ivalice (a body with robust health that can easily move under his own power) is rather big compared to the others. Kinda understandable as to why he loathes the idea of going back.
  • Ritz to a lesser extent, mostly during the time frame when Marche is on the lam. Her reason for not going back is because she hates her albino hair because she's constantly bullied about it. It's possible that being bullied enough has driven her to the point where she mentally broke down, which would justify her desire to not lose her now naturally pink hair. However, being with Shara and the other Viera gave her enough confidence about her white hair and ultimately reached the point where she stopped dyeing it after returning from Ivalice.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Bishops. True, they do get nifty spells to use and have a fairly decent magic power growth, but that is almost immediately sunk by the fact that bangaa in general have the worst magic power stat in the game due to their nature as a physical-oriented race (though recruiting a Bishop, Templar, or White Monk bangaa might alleviate this issue, since the new unit will join as if he leveled exclusively in this job and thus granting them fantastic magic power, they will never be able to have a better magic power stat than other races). Using one isn't bad exactly, but don't expect the same kind of power a nu mou, a viera, or even a hume could produce.
  • Gadgeteers. Their mass-status effect skills are potentially game-changing, but they're also completely random, and potentially hit friendly targets. This can be compensated for by ensuring the team is immune to the conditions they could inflict, but it's a lot of effort for comparatively less value than just using other jobs and having them equip abilities and items that make them better at fighting.
  • Morphers require tons of time and money to train, as you need to first catch monsters with a Hunter, then raise them in the farm. All that effort is not worth it most of the time, since you could simply use a Blue Mage to use enemy skills, or a basic Beastmaster to control monsters directly.
  • Montblanc starts off as a Black Mage, despite statistically being a very poor magic user. Since the game doesn't allow you to boot him out of the clan, some players just kill Montblanc off in a Jagd and replace him with a better fighter.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • While the Alternate Character Interpretation was around as long as the game has been, its popularity exploded with a hastily-drawn webcomic that had Marche proclaiming to the other characters, "FUCK THAT YOU'RE GOIN' HOME"◊
  • "Stupid Sexy Marche!", after it was pointed out how...pronounced Marche's buttocks are.
  • "It's escapism. Can't you see? It's not healthy!", a line from the game that became frequently posted in imageboards - both due to the irony of a videogame from a series called 'Final Fantasy' doing an anti-escapist aesop, or as a reaction image to make fun of people really deep in escapist fantasies.
• Misaimed Fandom: One of the most commonly discussed examples of Marche's Designated Hero status is that he is willing to rip his friends and his brothers dreams and joy away because it "isn't real", with his brother Donned being cited most commonly as a source of this an example due to being unable to walk back in the real world. While its entirely subjective if the themes work, the game makes it clear that, while yes the other kids have happy lives and got what they wanted, they've all changed for the worse because of getting what they wanted: Ritz no longer helps those in need, Donned is willing to put his brother (who had helped take care of him) in danger and even fight him, and Mewt has become a tyrant who has people he hates turned into zombies. They all are running away from their problems instead of working to grow, something that game very clearly paints as wrong. Despite this, people still call Marche a monster and ignore his points.
• Narm: Ritz revealing why she's refusing to help Marche is because of her hair color. No matter what reason both in game and out of game, this comes across as far and away unintentionally funny of a motivation. Even when the game gives moments to try and explain further why, it seems funny when compared to the motivations of the other kids.
• Popular with Furries: It wouldn't be too far-fetched to assume that this game (along with its sequel) would be one of the more notable Final Fantasy games among the Furry Fandom since two-thirds of the game's playable races are all Beast Man types (four-fifth if you could the viera), with the bangaa race being the most popular one to the furries out of all the others.
• Ron the Death Eater: Marche is commonly accused of many things, from selfish disregard for his friends to a desire to commit genocide, that ignore his honest attempts to get them to face their problems and his frequent moral conflict over his course of action, regardless of the rightness or wrongness of his actions.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Here.
• Spiritual Licensee: This is probably the closest we'll ever get to a The Neverending Story video game.
• That One Boss: Llednar Twem and Adrammelech. See here of details.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Fans of Final Fantasy Tactics, expecting a direct sequel, were disappointed by the Lighter and Softer story, kiddy characters, difficulty drop and lack of continuity when this game came out.
• Tough Act to Follow: Had the game maybe not had any association with Final Fantasy Tactics, perhaps some reception would have been better.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Back in 2003, this is how a lot of people felt about the characters. Marche was seen as a Villain Protagonist due to his lack of care for anyone's happiness and desires but his own, Mewt was seen as a selfish kid trying to have a perfect life at the cost of others, and Ritz's "wish" was seen as absolutely petty. On top of it all, the protagonists wished for their classmates to die in the snow. Doned was the only one anyone had much sympathy for due to his status as The Woobie and even then, some of his actions came off as unnecessarily dickish.
• Values Dissonance: Ritz's reason for being bullied because she's good at academics and sports, and being accepted by a group of women who aren't seen as any ''less' feminine for fighting will seem weirder in The New '20s as "tomboys" are less of a Bully Magnet as they were in The '90s and the Turn of the Millennium (when this game was made).
• Viewer Gender Confusion: More or less invoked with just about all of the human characters, especially the generics - for the most part they're all androgynous enough to be interpreted as either male or female without having to make a separate model set for each gender.
• Vindicated by History: As of 2016 with its Virtual Console release on the Wii U, there have been some people who have pointed out that while the plot concept is adolescent (it was mentioned by several magazines it was like The Neverending Story), it actually has a lot of mature themes in it that a lot of people didn't notice in 2003; such as the effects of divorce on children, the stages of grief with the death of a loved one, how disabled kids feel, bullying and the desire to retreat into fantasy as a coping mechanism, etc. This has also caused more people to warm up to Marche and understand him more. Additionally, some people admitted they were too harsh as they had wanted a political thriller similar to Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics, and that they didn't judge the game on its own merits.
• The Woobie:
  • Doned. He had the most reasonable wish out of all the four (which was to be able to walk again). And in the ending, he goes back to being an ill boy in a wheelchair. Despite getting friends, come on...
  • Crosses over with Jerkass Woobie, and it's a similar deal with Mewt - on the one hand, he seriously lacks confidence and self-esteem and misses his mother; on the other, he prioritizes his own comfort and feelings over that of others. Both characters (and even Ritz, to a degree) have understandable desires, but go about them with disregard for anyone who disagrees.
  • Marche himself doesn't exactly have an easy time, since his father divorced his mother and walked out of his life, while his mother neglects him in favor of his disabled younger brother. Perhaps the worst part is that he knows that if he goes home, neither of those problems will get any better. Making matters worse is none of his friends or his brother are on his side during his adventure, which makes it feel like Marche is truly alone against the world as he tries to do what is best for them.

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