Final Fantasy Tactics Advance/Headscratchers

• During the battle of Exodus, the objective is to destroy the fruit things. As Marche says that, Babus remarks "and you think we're just going to stand around and let you do that?" and then attacks. Meanwhile, what does Cid do? Stand around and lets Marche do that. He even encourages Marche by dishing out judge points whenever he beats one.
  • Well, he is a Judge. It's not a Judge's place to forbid or approve an engagement, it's his job to referee it. Making a law that forbids engagements is a little counter-productive as well, and there wasn't a law against destroying things that the people (save the main cast) didn't know existed.
  • I found, by the way, if you raise Marche as a Blue Mage and give him HP to MP before hand... Oh yeah...
  • It's probably for the same reason that he stands by and mediates during the first and third battles with Llednar, the battle with Mateus and the battles with Remedi, even though he's on Marche's side in those cases (and in the latter case, he has to abide by the changes Remedi makes to the laws). Presumably, the Judge system mandates that he do things this way.
  • Lawful Stupid. 'nuff said.
• How was Li-Grim defeated by someone who is effectively a whiny kid, when she was able to alter the entire world overnight? Shouldn't she have been able to take him out with a finger snap? (Personally, I thought that I had been playing the villain the whole time and would have liked to see her effortlessly brush him aside.)
  • Since the entire world is one child's dream, she can't recreate the world past what he wants it to be. Also, I don't think she can have any direct impact on any character who actually exists.
    • Also, Li-Grim can take him out with a finger snap (Alpha is quite painful). The whole point of the fight is to keep that from happening.
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu? is a very common trope in both the Final Fantasy series and RPGs in general, where no matter how godly and powerful the villain's One-Winged Angel form is it can always be taken down by hitting it enough times with magical nukes and big fucking swords. If you need an in-story reason, Li-Grim said that "desire is the thread that holds the world together." This sounds like a case of Clap Your Hands If You Believe. Presumably, Marche's desire to defeat Li-Grim and go home was so strong that, combined with his clan's grinding, tactics, and attacks, he was finally able to overpower her in the final battle.
    • The kids' wishes influenced the world (though Mewt has the final word in everything since the book is his). Mewt starts to doubt himself after you defeat him, to the point where he even begins to look more normal(I.E. his hair was slightly less ridiculous and became a color closer to his hair on Earth). Mewt's momentary doubt combined with Marche's desire could have put the odds in Marche's favor.

• What bugs me is that it is explained that in the Jagds, people die for real when knocked out, and your own characters die if you didn't resurrect them during battle, but after the first mission in the Jagd Dorsa, Marche says he "turned them in" and received money for it, while technically they would be dead. Also in a second mission there he says after victory "don't do it ever again" to the dead enemies. Well he can be sure they won't ever do it again.
  • Maybe he resurrected them? He does seem like the kind of guy who'd bring back the bad guys after several bone crushing beatings and a stern reprimand to not do it again.
    • Unless you're also playing as a thief, in which case Marche steals all their valuables, then bone crushes and reprimands.
    • In short, how view the situation is linked entirely to where you sit in the Marche debate.
  • It isn't that people always die in the Jagds, but that they CAN, it is still possible to take someone alive.
    • Yeah, but when you get all your hit points blown off in the Jagds, you are dead unless resurrected. So since Marche killed people during that mission, the problem stands unless he resurrected them (well, it's either that or he is speaking to corpses; your pick).
  • It's also possible that he means he turned in their bodies for money. That wouldn't be surprising.
  • Isn't there a followup mission later, where Montblanc's relative gets into another hit-and-run with the same people? Seems like Marche did, in fact, stabilize them after beating them.
    • They seem to be mostly the same people, although it's hard to tell with generic people.
• So, apparently Llednar Twem's invincibility is caused by a Law Card? That just strikes me as odd; up until that point, the law system seemed pretty simple; you break the Laws, you get sent to jail. Until that point, I had not seen any Laws actually change a guy's stats or the damage caused to him. It just seems odd that that one Law had such a different effect than other Law Cards.
  • Since Llednar only comes into play when you really start to make headway in your quest to dispel the dream/destroy the world, (Take your pick) it could be said that the Li-Grim is bending the rules of the realm to give her Dragon an unfair advantage. Not enough to be downright unfair, (Hence why he's not outright "Invincible") but still enough to be different from everyone else.
    • Then again, it seems odd that while she can change the laws in Phase 2, she can't make herself invulnerable like she could make him.
  • I agree. All the other laws are a bit like real laws; they don't prevent you from committing an action, they just send you to jail if you do. But Llednar Twem's invulnerability law actually changes the physical reality of the world so that he cannot be harmed, even if you are hitting him with a freaking broadsword. That's just out there.
  • Cid puts an "advanced Law" on Ezel that prevents him from doing anything, or else he'll be sent to prison, so that may be the category that Llednar is operating under.
• A game mechanics just-bugs-me: The Viera's Assassin Job is the only Advanced Job in the game whose requirements are learning skills from other Advanced Jobs. Why don't any of the other races have something comparable?
  • They fixed that in Tactics A2, for what it's worth.
• More of a question that's niggling at me, and I can't test as I don't have the game with me. In some missions, using Law Cards are forbidden. What happens if you use a card to nullify the "you can't use law cards" law?
  • Chuck Norris dies.
    • Shut up.
  • No such card exists as this law only came up after Ezel, the maker of the Anti-Law cards is no longer hunted by the Judges.
  • If I recall correctly, it comes up in the "Swimming Meet" missions and others of the sort, in which the law is the entire point of the mission. Furthermore, does any specific unit use a card, since cards are accessed from the start menu and don't consume a turn?
• Why the hell do enemy archers ALWAYS go after your guys that have the ability to block arrows? From a gameplay standpoint, it makes the ability overpowered since it pretty much instantly nullifies enemy archers. From an in-universe standpoint, it means either the enemy archers are the worst warriors in history (choosing to attack the people who are immune to their attack), or, if they don't know their arrows are being blocked, they are the most unlucky people in the world, since the person they choose to focus on for the duration of the battle just happens to be invulnerable against arrows. I mean, okay, I can see that it might be a problem if the enemy archers always avoided your troops with the ability; that would probably make the ability underpowered and it would make the player wonder if it was even working in the first place, since nobody in the enemy team would ever shoot at it for the effect to activate. But what about making the AI blind to the ability so it will try to hit sometimes and not others? Or how about an in-story handwave like "archers do not waste their time attacking people with the ability, preferring instead to target other enemies" or something?
  • In my experience, Archers are blind to Block Arrows use. But obviously I always use my Block Arrows user to pursuit archers, so it's normal that they are targeted more often, and get an easy fight.
  • One would have to wonder what happens if a player has a group of units who all have Block Arrows, especially in missions with many archers, such as story mission 2 and the fights with Clan Dip. The enemy archers couldn't necessarily ignore all the units with it.
    • Similar things happen in the game already. For example, if you fight enemy black mages while colour magic is forbidden, they'll just end up waiting or whacking people with their staff (and being counterattacked to death).
• What happened to Marche's clan members after Babus stopped time and teleported himself and Marche to the throne room? They aren't seen in the cutscene, even when Montblanc was shown accompanying Marche inside and waiting with him.