He's just discovered the Start button: Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

(tags game, GameBoy Advance, Final Fantasy)

It's rather strange that this unautomated menu fighter RPG Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (FFTA) has gotten a hold of me. The in-game clock says I've put almost 20 hours on it, but I haven't even got past the sixth default mission yet. There are 300 total missions, and I suspect that only a fraction of that is the story mode.

I figured out in the Equip items menu that on the currently selected item, the Start button shows the improvement (blue) or regression (red) in the stats. Before discovering this I was annoyed with jumping back and forth between menus. Now I can equip with confidence. :-) But then again I also figured out that I shouldn't be reequipping so much. "Abilities" anyone?

Still the game hasn't thrown me any real strategy difficulties at me, yet. I recall that I played most (?) of GameBoy Advance Wars 1 and 2 without finishing the story mode because it started playing out like Chess. Ugh, I suck at Chess.

I also took a peek at a GameFaq guide but I shouldn't have done that. I was wondering what good were those Judgement Points, since most of my characters now have "10". I still didn't figure it out. FFTA has been fun for me partly because of the exploration of the game system. I am not going to glance at another guide until it gets hard.

And yes I've been stealing glances at FFTA-A2 for the Dual Screen. But I rather play a game like this in English.