While it’s certainly not the game for everyone, “Final Fantasy Tactics Advance” delivers countless hours of strategy role-playing goodness.

The “Tactics” series differs from other games in the “Final Fantasy” series by focusing on a smaller number of much more strategic and time-consuming battles. “Final Fantasy Tactics Advance” is the second game in the series, with the excellent “Final Fantasy Tactics” for PlayStation being the first.

The story in “Advance” is horrible, even by role-playing game standards. The game begins with the hero, Marche, involved in a snowball fight, which teaches you the basics of how to play the game. After losing the fight, Marche and company go to the leader’s house and discuss how they wish the world was like “Final Fantasy.” This (logically) causes Marche to wake up in the Final Fantasy universe, where he spends the rest of the game trying to get home.

Luckily, the actual gameplay in “Tactics” fares much better than the premise. “Advance” provides a deep, complex character customization system, which adds greatly to the fun of its turn-based strategic gameplay.

The player controls a clan that can have up to 24 members, who will join up as the player’s “clan level” rises. The maximum number of characters in a clan in any battle, however, is six. In order to keep someone from simply grabbing six strong characters and using them in every battle, some of the missions in the game are “dispatch” missions in which one clan member must be sent away for a set amount of time. This means, realistically, about 10 decent characters are required to finish the game.

The character skill system is incredibly good, with five races and 35 total classes (about eight per race). The characters learn skills in their current class based on the items they have equipped by earning ability points at the end of each battle. Most of the classes must be unlocked by earning skills in one of the base classes. Each character can use the skills for two classes at any one time, so it is possible, for example, to create a fighter who is also skilled in white (healing) magic. This allows for a huge amount of customization of each character.

Each battle or “engagement” sends the player to a board somewhat like a chess board, where each individual party member is assigned to move separately. Each character can both move and perform an action each round. This causes battles to be quite long, in many cases about 30 minutes. Obviously, this makes dying a very bad thing, especially if you haven’t saved in several hours.

The long battles are both the cornerstone of the series and one of the problems with putting “Advance” on a handheld system. It is not possible to pick up a Game Boy and play this game for a few minutes. This destroys the advantage of being on a portable system.

Each engagement also uses a set of laws that prohibit you from taking certain actions. These rules begin as minor annoyances, and as the game progresses, get more severe. The laws do not add much to the gameplay and are frustrating, specifically because if Marche is sent to jail, the game is over. Thankfully, laws can eventually be nullified by using anti-law cards.

The graphics in the game are also quite good by Game Boy standards. Even while using the Game Boy Player and displaying it on a television, the characters look detailed and the colors are vibrant.

Overall, “Advance” is an excellent game, somewhat hindered by a terrible story. It also offers outstanding replay value due to the skill system and the more than 300 side missions.

People looking for a game they can pick up and play for a few minutes will definitely not enjoy this game. However, fans of “Final Fantasy Tactics” for the PlayStation, or strategy RPGs in general, should definitely pick this one up.