Final Fantasy Tactics:  A Review
by Blake Snortland

          Hello there Psychonobelians!  Greetings.  Most of you are probably wondering who the hell is this Blake Snortland guy?  Well, I am he. You may recognize me from the Psychonoble.com event, The Yellow Badge of Courage: A Story of Nerf, but that's not important.  No.  I'm here to talk to you today about the best Strategy Role-Playing Game ever, in my opinion.

Final Fantasy Tactics

Final Fantasy Tactics - Fight for truth. Fight for fate. Fight for the right to exist.

Everything a RPG gamer could ever want

(except maybe graphics...)

          Final Fantasy Tactics was a departure from the standard RPGs where your characters line up on one side of the screen and the enemies line up on the other and each time it's your turn you run over, hit them, and run back.  In FFT, you place your characters on one part of a big grid. 

Placing the Combatants

          Then once battle begins, you have to physically move the combatants around.  There are advantages to moving in behind your opponents in the game, as in real life.  Usually, if you are behind them or to the side you have a better chance to hit. 

There's usually some trash-talking before story battles

          The game play interface is very simple.  Nothing is complex about it.  Almost, no, everything is done in menus.  And the system of leveling up is awesome.  The Job system allows players to customize each and every character to their will.  If you were annoyed at other games because you wanted to have every character be a thief so they could rob the opponents blind, you can in this game. 

The Main Battle Menu

Where You Can Hit

          Now, it has been argued that with this system you can create cookie-cutter perfect soldiers, and yes, you can.  It is possible to create the perfect invincible warrior.  To explain how I need to explain faith and brave.

          Faith and Brave can be adjusted up or down using different abilities.  Faith is value each character has somewhere between 0 and 100.  It affects how the character uses and is affected by magic.  Higher faith, more magic effect.  Thus magic users deal lots of magic damage, and are also affected by magic easily.  Brave works almost the same way for physical attacks.  Higher brave, more physical damage you deal.  Higher brave also increases the chance of activating your reactionary action.  Let me explain.  Each character has 5 primary sets of abilities: 

Primary Job Skill: (ex. Knight- Battle Skill)

Secondary Job Skill: (ex.  Monk - Punch Art)

Reactionary Action: (ex. Blade Grasp)

Support Ability: (ex. Two Swords)

Move Ability: (ex. Move +2)

          What I have just outlined could be the perfect warrior.  The reactionary action occurs when a certain criteria is dealt against you.  In the case of Blade Grasp it is a physical attack.  If you have a brave of 97 (highest permanent level) you will deflect any physical attack 97% of the time.  If you adjust your faith down to 3 (lowest permanent level) magic attacks against you will only do 3% of the damage, or only have a 3% chance to hit you.  Nothing in the game can damage you.  This is how you could make the perfect character.

          That however is probably the cheapest, stupidest way to go through the game.  That was not how the designers intended the game to be played.  The game's versatility is designed to help you create the character you've always wanted but have never gotten.  It wasn't made so you could spend the first few hours of play getting random battles on the first map location until you are the best character ever.  That is a good example of metagaming or powergaming or both.  These will be topics in an upcoming article I’m planning on writing, but I digress. 

          One other cool thing about the game is along with all the basic classes that anyone can take, you can recruit hero characters along the way, and even monsters!  These characters include:

    In my opinion, most of the hero characters are not that great.  You can make better people using the basic soldiers.  However, the two worth mentioning are Orlandu and Beowulf.  Orlandu is a Holy Swordsman that can use every single sword skill from each swordsman/knight in the game except Beowulf.  If you choose to use Orlandu in your party, you can be assured victory.  He is almost a cheat in himself.  However, some of his attacks are too cool to pass up.  Beowulf is a master dehabilitator.  The attack chicken is enough to use this character.  If a character's brave level drops below 10, he turns into an actual chicken, rendering him powerless and he flees from battle.  Plus, it's a cool bonus to see lots of poisoned, chicken frogs running around the map.  It's a literal zoo.

          There is one thing about me that I hope you all learn about me pretty fast.  In an RPG, I am all about story, story, and story.  A game could have great gameplay, like FF8, and if it's story sucks, ***CoughFF8Cough***, I won't like it and probably won't finish it (FF8).  However, this is nowhere near the case in Final Fantasy Tactics.  The story of Final Fantasy Tactics seems real, like it actually happened.  It is filled with deceit and manipulation, with religion taking over politics, with demons and holy knights.  Also, each of the hero characters has it's own back story that you find out through playing, and going on some side quests.  I'm not going to give away any spoilers, but I will tell you that the story will keep you guessing right up to the end. 

          The music for Final Fantasy Tactics is good, but not great.  It won't get repetitive and annoying, but it's nothing to write home about either.  So, yeah... not like FF7 good, but not bad either.

Ganging Up on the Poor Chemist

          Now on to graphics... well as you could see above... yeah.   So, not the best.  Although, in my opinion the graphics are the least important thing to a game, unless they are so bad that you can't see what you are doing.  Graphics are not necessary to make a good game.  Just take the original Mario Brothers.  2-D jumping on turtle like things.  But, still a great classic game.  Final Fantasy Tactics is the same way, just without the turtle like things.  Yeah.

Gafgarion Laying the Smackdown

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