Am I alone with this?

I much prefer Advance than FFT in almost every way. Sure, the story if FFT WOTL was amazing but the child like charm of Advance hits me way harder. As far as combat is concerned, Advance is leagues better. I found so many things wrong with WOTL, it really made me question how this game was given such a blatent pass.

-I am all for difficulty, but the level scaling of Tactics was beyond ridonc. The game actively punished you for power leveling characters because if you did enemies would always scale to whomever was the strongest in your party. So my Level 20 with a group of level 10s would be paired against a squad of 25-30s. The only fair battles were story based ones, which ironically were not scaled.

-You can't see what the hell you will even be fighting until the battle has started. Probably the most irksome aspect. This is probably because no matter what your squad is, CPU will trump it with crazy high levels.

-Random Encounter rate was through the roof, making the previous two issues more apparent.

-Number of squad members you can place in battle seemed very small.

-Horrible Slow down after every single attack. I played this on PSP, I realize this issue doesn't exist in orginal release now.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced on the other hand fixed all of my issues with FFT original.

-Battles are not scaled, rather after each big story mission the difficulty goes to the next level. This feels far more balanced to me.

-Its been a while but I am pretty sure you can have more members deployed at once.

-You can see enemies as they appear, and choose to fight or evade them.

-You can see what the hell you are about to fight, and choose your party accordingly.

-The Laws system brought a very refreshing kind of strategy to me. You could be fighting a team of fire flans but law would dictate you can't use magic. Finding new ways to manipulate the laws in your favor was very gratifying. 

-Battles were speedy yet fun.

Your opinions?

I thought this was a well known fact.

Everytime I explain my opinion to people on this subject they usually look at me like I am crazy. Ramza and Co. story was very touching in a whimsical Kingdom Hearts/Disney movie kind of way.

I see you points and I agree with them, its better but i think i just liked wotl better.

Hell yes. Even A2: Grimoire of the Rift is better than WotL to me.

You guys are crazy. As a whole WotLs is much better.

-Scaling is a good thing because if you do any sort of active leveling there'd be no challenge whatsoever in story missions.

-Stat growth is relatively slow as well, with equipment making the most difference in combat, so a level 20 with decent abilities and good gear could hang with enemies from a level 90 encounter.

-Not seeing enemies beforehand was a nice touch because it encourages you to think more strategically from information gleaned from the description, direction it's approached from, and previous visits. Unfortunately, there's a fairly limited number of enemy layouts, but there's usually a secret power battle that occurs rarely,

-Squad size was perfect for the way the game was designed. You could already destroy almost anything as is, so just adding more would do nothing for you. Once you were leveled leveled, geared, and spec'd properly, one character kinda becomes overkill. A no faith, high bravery heavy hitting melee with Shirahadori was a virtually indestructible monster.

If anything, the game becomes too easy way too fast.

The law system was more frustrating to me. It was fairly arbitrary and stupid from a story standpoint, and limiting myself is part of the reason I absolutely HATED the color coded enemies from DmC. The most annoying thing ever is to work on something awesome and then be told not to use it.

Combat was overly simple in the advanced series, especially FFT:A2.

The mature style and atmosphere of Tactics is one of its many strong points.
I dont like "child like charm" in rpgs. Its the one thing in japanese anime/game culture that i dont like.
Somehow the japanese find it fun to combine war and death and killing with children doing the killing.

The difficulty of the original Tactics is great until you get Cidolfus. 
Then it becomes ridiculously easy. Thunder God Cid must be the most overpowered regular character in any rpg.

Yep it was better in a lot of ways. But the story is a lot better in FFT.

For me, FFT had a better story. I think its difficulty was right for its time but Advance had a better system that made everything fun.

The game supports unconventional party dynamics a bit too much. Seeing as the game scales the enemies and I can never see who the hell I am fighting, I would usually keep everyone within a certain level range. I would also choose a rather diverse party to handly most situations. Monk, Dark Knight, White Mage, Black Mage, Alchemist(Item user), maybe one more DD. Whatever I seemed to choose, they always set me up for failure. Not only will the enemies be a lot stronger than mine, but they will also get an entire round of attacks in before my first move, killing half party. The enemies almost always got somekind of tactical advantage terrain wise. Higher terrain points, Or all my characters facing the wrong direction, something to that effect. Now if I go into a battle with an entire team of Samurai, all of a sudden I can breeze through them. This pretty much happens all the time once I get past Level 30 or so if memory serves me right. I just really hate how they set you up for complete and utter failure, and almost restrict using less offensive classes.

I have never played FFT:A2, so I cannot speak on that one. I found Advance plenty challenging and a lot of fun to play from start to finish.