Final Fantasy Tactics Isn't Very Good

 I caved and bought the remake because I wanted to play on my Xbox, okay? But I'm glad I did because my glasses were rosy as hell I needed a reality check.

Every time I play a tactics-esque game I automatically compare it to Final Fantasy Tactics. It was one of the first ones I've played, and it popularized a specific brand of tactical RPG game that doesn't really have that many entries of note. It came out in 1997 when I was 8, and like the other Final Fantasy games at the time, I was in love with it. When you are a kid, you have so much time to play games, you do not really care if you have to waste time leveling up. You do not know the value of free time yet, so the tedious chore of leveling up feels like part of the game, and you do not realize until later that actually means the game is balanced extremely poorly and simultaneously does not respect your time. I used to play this so often as a kid, I would put on a CD and play for hours as I listened. I actually did this a lot as a kid in general, and I have specific albums I used to listen to while I played specific games. Beck's "Sea Change" always reminds me of Diablo 2, Act 2. Bomberman was accompanied by a little album from AC/DC called "The Razor's Edge," (which was also the first CD I ever bought), and Final Fantasy Tactics was accompanied by System of a Down's "Steal This Album."

 

I can picture exactly where I was. Sitting in my childhood room, which had this weird, fake-wood wall paneling that was emulating some type of oak, I guess. It was white with black accents. I had this thin, red carpet, and there were these brown shelves and cabinets hanging onto the wall. The shelf had a raised edge with a little metal lip, like a half-centimeter half-pipe. My Playstation, TV, and CD player were lined up on that shelf in a row. I would sit cross-legged on my bed, which was a mattress on the floor, and crane my neck to look up at the TV to play. When I would get sick of that, I would play standing up, which is an elite method. I would jam out to an album on repeat and gain as much experience as I could.

 

As a kid, we all discovered the exploits together among friends. In Final Fantasy Tactics, you can only gain experience through doing an action in battle. Each action rewarded you with experience and job points, you did not get anything if you did not participate. However, you could get experience and job points even if you attacked your own teammates, and if you used certain buffs. When we wanted to get a lot of experience, the method was to surround the final enemy so they could not move, then have your team alternate attacking and healing each other. You could spend hours in a single battle if you planned properly. We all knew this because Final Fantasy Tactics REQUIRED it. There are several bottlenecks in this game, and they begin to crop up very early on, which make it nearly impossible to progress without having strong job abilities, or at the very least, having lost the fight once already so you know what you are facing on the second try. It is impossible to even get out of the prologue without doing this. I guaran-damn-tee a new player cannot make it past that final battle of the prologue without either grinding levels or knowing what they are fighting before hand. Later on, as soon as you get to Chapter 1, they hit you with a bunch of crazy scenarios for which you cannot possibly be prepared. You get ambushed by a villain, dope-ly named Gaffgarion, at a gallows, and not only do they have more units than you, Gaffgarion is incredibly strong. The enemy squad has Time Mages buffing them, and you have to defeat every enemy to succeed. Soon after, you face Gaffgarion again, but they start the battle in such a way that you're either forced to 1v1 Gaffgarion with Ramza, or use Ramza to open up a gate in a castle wall to let your team in, who are also fighting people on the outside. Unless you prepared for this specifically, you are most likely fucked. Ramza either does not have the movement to get to the gate control without getting his ass beat by Gaffgarion, or does not have the healing to withstand the attacks. My most recent playthrough on the remaster I just bought, I obviously forgot about this, and after the first time I lost I simply went to recruit a Purple Chocobo, who can fly, so I can get it over the wall to pick up Ramza.

The one most people complain about, quite fairly, is a part later on that you have no way to anticipate, and if you are not prepared, you can get to an unwinnable state, potentially with no other save file. When you go to attack Riovanes castle, you have to fight three battles in a row. The first is fairly standard, and then the game gives you the option to save. You obviously do, why wouldn't you?  That was your first mistake you stupid bastard. This was a PS1 game, they were throwing all kinds of tricks at you back then. Gamers these days (ugh) are crybaby pussies. Anyway, then you have another insane 1v1, but without the caveat from before. You just have to fight Wiegraf and win with only Ramza. If you manage to beat him, he uses a Zodiac stone to turn into a crazy boss beast. You get your team for this section, but he also summons help. Many people simply cannot win this fight with their current squad because they were not prepared for a 1v1 immediately followed by a boss battle. These fights are difficult to plan for even if you are not getting surprised by this bullshit. If you manage to win THAT fight, there is a third fight right after before you can get back to the world map. The craziest thing about this Wiegraf fight, is it can (basically) randomly be a lot easier for you. There is some weird sort of system regarding your characters birth dates. You put yours in when you first start the game. If Ramza is a Pisces, one of Wiegraf's moves does half the damage it normally does. I do not think the game ever explains this system, in any way at all. I only know it exists because people online say it does. I do not know how they figured it out. A sign of a good game-balancing system is to have an entire game-spanning, birthday-based scheme that is never once explained, and you do not even know that you are choosing options for it.

On top of that, another psychotic thing about all of this, is that is the way the game is if you are going in blind, as a new player. If you are playing for the second time, you can grind and prepare, and then the opposite occurs: it is completely trivial. The random battles will have enemies level up with you, but story battles are at set levels. So you spend one or two random battles mastering jobs and leveling up, and you suddenly have a full stack of amazing abilities and job combos. Then you buy whatever you need and have a team that demolishes everything. There is no way to play this game that feels good.

I had not played Final Fantasy Tactics in many years by the time the remake came out, so I forgot all of this. Every time I would play a tactics RPG game, I would think "not as good as Tactics." Turns out, that's correct, but also Tactics is not very good. If you can stomach a grind, it becomes easier, but you have to spend hours leveling up. If you do not want to do that, you still have to min-max like a motherfucker because you cannot get through these battles without gaining precognition. It is a lose-lose. 

The story also starts off in such a cool way. There is this very human, very real idea of birthright vs un-aristocracy. Nobles being given leadership against peasants rising above their station. Then they say fuck all that and go Final Fantasy mode and Ramza's sister is like a type of Jesus and then you fight God. You will be given this story in spoonfuls between hours-long training sessions so it is not digestible. I must have played this game a dozen times when I was a kid and all I can remember is that Delita was pretty cool.

So I played this for a while, got past the Gaffgarion fights and started having devastating flashbacks as the upcoming bullshit fights reconstituted themselves in my memory.  I was pretty strong, plus I knew what to expect, so I resigned myself to blasting through the garbage chute. Then I got into a fight, and another memory fragment of this game that got lost to time reared its head.  In these tactical games, there are obviously a myriad of styles you can play. I do not like to play defensively. I get bored. So I am quite aggressive. This pays off in that if my maneuver succeeds, the risk goes away. For example, I will rush a single character with great movement to the front to try and kill their frontline enemy right away. If I do not kill them right away it means that my character will usually die instead. High risk high reward and so on. Also so forth. So in this particular battle, I take my two Frontline damage dealers and rush them out and attack. Melee classes standing adjacent to the enemy square. The first guy attacks, 82% chance to hit. Miss. The second guy attacks. He has an ability that lets him do two melee attacks in a row as he is double wielding. 84% chance to hit. Both attacks miss. I uninstalled. You're telling me they added a ton of quality of life bullshit for the remake but couldn't figure out a better way to deal with this archaic system? I don't care if The Pope programmed this, it is hellish to experience. I had to bail in that instant. You can argue whatever you want about miss rates, but they mainly are not in the gaming sphere any more for a reason. They fucking eat shit!  It is some sort of Dungeons and Dragons hanger-on. I need a game to put me in the fun zone. What the fuck is "tactical" about a percent chance to miss that I cannot influence? Some limp-dicked weasel usually chimes in about here and to say that 80% is not 100% and that is precisely when I say that they have an 80% chance I am going to cave their skull in within 5 seconds. 

 

 

The Life spell failing to resurrect. Fun!

My main point of this is to highlight a different tactical game that I know consider the successor to Final Fantasy Tactics as the champion of the genre - Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark.  It is a raw upgrade in nearly every way to the main systems of Tactics.  Better starting classes and cooler classes overall, better leveling system, and better environment effects and kills. The art of Fell Seal is unpolished, but it has heart and it gets the job done.  It is the classic gamer ornament of "we don't care about the graphics if the gameplay is good." The environments and world are cool, and since Tactics throws its political story away for some bullshit, I even think Fell Seal does a better job with their story.  Some of the classes they add on top of regular ones like Ranger are Vampire, Werewolf, and Lich.  The spells are way more fun and interesting than the basic, now-tropey, Black-White-Time magic schlock that has been in the Final Fantasy universe. Items are used per battle and do not leave your inventory, so if you have 4 potions, you don't have to buy any more if you think you can win the next battle also with only those.  I love systems like this because it lets the developer balance much more easily by knowing how many items you have, and they have the class, the Peddler, that specializes in using items. The skill system is better in Fell Seal, largely based on the fact that under a single moment's scrutiny, you realize FF Tactic's skill system blows ass.  In Tactics, most abilities on a class fall into two categories: overpowered or useless.  Most classes have one or two abilities that ARE the class, and the rest do not really matter.  In Fell Seal, most skill trees have the same two starting abilities, then the pathway branches to two, and then, intriguingly, it reconnects for the last two.  On paper, it takes a little bit of "choice" away from the player, but when you consider the abilities in FF Tactics are mostly insipid and skippable, it is a much better balance. The quality of life stuff in Fell Seal is so simple and obvious, that you wonder why other games did not have it, even old ones such as Final Fantasy Tactics. Fell Seal shows you exact damage multipliers on abilities, it shows you the enemy passives, statuses, buffs/debuffs, and immunities readily in battle. I do not know how many times I have to say it, for a tactical game, Tactics is wildly unstructured and uninformative.  They leave out half the rules and most of the information.  

 

This shit looks like a teenage furry drew it

Fell Seal felt challenging, but never really gave that "oh that was bullshit," moment that a lot of games will do to the player.  It was fun, possible, and rewarding to try out a bunch of different classes, and they were all diverse and viable.  I have not played Fell Seal since the first and only time I beat it three years ago, and it is a testament to the game that I remember this all still.  

 

Final Fantasy Tactics is not the masterpiece we all remember it as.  It has great art, incredible music, the Final Fantasy charm...and then a million things wrong with it we forgot about.  It does not hold up well and it is not balanced or properly difficult. They nosedive the character-driven story for bogus high fantasy standards. Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark is the modern equivalent which surpasses it in nearly every meaningful metric.  Fell Seal is my new standard for the genre, and I will replace my replay of Tactics with it posthaste. The thing that pisses me off the most about all this is that it very clearly does not require Triple A status to make a good game. Fell Seal was made by TWO people.  Pierre Leclerc and Christina Leclerc. The staff on the FFT Ivalice Chronicles was probably in the dozens. They did not have to make art or a story or balance anything. The remaster therefore added nothing of value to the genre. In a world where remakes constantly fuck up the spirit of the original, they decided not to fuck this one up enough.  The original was great for what it did, but when two people can come in and demolish that standard with gusto, it is time to crown a new king of the genre.