Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is Square’s tactical RPG for the Game Boy Advance, released in 2003. Marche, a boy who has just moved to the town of St. Ivalice, opens an old book with his friends, and the town turns into Ivalice, a land of clans, Judges and Laws. You recruit Humans, Bangaa, Nu Mou, Viera and Moogles into your clan, take on missions, and learn abilities from the weapons and armor your units equip. If you own the game, Nagori lets you play it on iPhone and iPad.
What you need
- An iPhone or iPad with iOS 17.6 or later.
- Nagori from the App Store. Your first game is free.
- The game file of your copy of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance in
.gbaformat, or a.zipor.rarcontaining it.
No BIOS file is needed.
How to play Final Fantasy Tactics Advance on iPhone
- Install Nagori from the App Store.
- Copy your game’s
.gbafile to the Files app, in iCloud Drive or On My iPhone. - Open Nagori, tap + and select the file. Nagori copies it into its library, so the original isn’t needed afterwards.
- Find Final Fantasy Tactics Advance on the GBA shelf with its box art and press Play.
Controls
Battles are played with a cursor and short menus: the D-pad moves the cursor, A confirms, and B backs out. Each unit moves and acts, then you choose which way it faces. Facing matters, because attacks from the side or behind are harder to dodge.
All of this fits the Standard touch layout. You back out of clan and equipment menus with B all the time, so if you cancel by accident, open Edit Layout in the pause menu and drag A and B further apart.
With a Bluetooth controller that iOS supports, including DualSense, DualShock 4 and Xbox controllers, the left stick works as the D-pad too, and pressing it opens the pause menu.
Saves
Progress you save in the game goes to the cartridge’s save, and Nagori keeps it automatically. On top of that:
- Continue where you stopped. Nagori saves the moment you leave the game, even mid-battle, and Continue in the game menu picks up from there.
- iCloud. Save to iCloud copies your progress to your private iCloud, and Load from iCloud brings it to your iPad.
Laws, Jagds and save states
In most of Ivalice, a Judge watches every battle and enforces Laws that can ban a weapon type, items or a kind of ability. Break one and you get a yellow card, or a red card that sends the unit to jail. Judges also keep fights safe: a unit that’s KO’d recovers once the battle is over.
Jagds are different. These lawless towns have no Judge, and a unit that is KO’d there and not revived before the battle ends is lost for good.
Save states cover both: pause and choose Save before a Jagd battle or a fight with Laws you might break, and if you lose a unit, Load and try again. Nagori keeps your last four saves per game. Continue won’t undo a KO or a red card, because it resumes after them.
300 missions and Fast Forward
The game has 300 missions, taken at pubs. Some are battles; others are dispatch missions, where one clan member goes away for a number of days. Days pass as you move across the world map, and battles can find you along the way. Abilities are learned with AP from winning battles, so you will fight a lot.
Fast Forward runs the game at twice the speed for enemy turns, random battles and the walking back and forth while dispatched units are away. Bind it to a controller button, or add the ×2 button in My Layout.
Best settings
- Picture Smoothing softens the sprites. Turn it off for the crisp pixel art of the GBA screen.
- Full Screen stretches the picture to fill your display. Leave it off to keep the 3:2 shape, so the isometric maps keep their angles.
- Screen Effects adds CRT scanlines, a screen curve or bloom, from Off to Strong.
