Final Fantasy Tactics

"War. Betrayal. Murder. Every 30 Seconds."

Having finally finished Final Fantasy VII, Little Timmy Gamer looks for something to new to play. Something different from what he just played. But then he realizes that he hates games that do something different and buys Final Fantasy Tactics. After a day of being forced to learn history at school Little Timmy Gamer comes home, eager to play Tactics. But Little Timmy's parents want to know what happened at school. Timmy replies, “Oh, I learned that a long time ago something really boring happened to someone really ugly.” And then Timmy runs off to play through the only moderately boring adventures of the only moderately ugly Ramza.

Ramza is the story's hero. And by “the story's hero”, I don't necessarily mean “FFT's story's hero”. Because Ramza happens to be every generic hero that ever appeared in anything at any point, ever. The cast of characters in Tactics really seems to have been ripped directly out of something else. In the case of every main character, “something else” is really “everything else”. I'm sure this led to some very hilarious auditions, though. “Hello, I'm Delita and I'll be auditioning for Generic Anti-Hero…” These auditions would be roughly one million times more entertaining than the actual plot of FFT. The characters that actually are interesting are overlooked by the plot, due to their extreme case of “severely cool, smart, and strong just until they join the main character” syndrome that seems to be present in everything from video games to television shows nowadays. Take Agrias, for example. She's one of only three female main characters. In the entire game. You could say this is due to the game taking place in an era where men are dominant, but then you'd realize that there are plenty of female generic characters. Agrias is thoroughly interesting when you're viewing her experiences from afar as cutscenes. But once she joins your party she's easily forgotten.

The plot of FFT, following the tradition of ripping something out of something else, decides to draw its inspiration from election time, when a multitude of annoying, unintelligent, and overall villainous politicians argue with a group of equally annoying and unintelligent teenagers. “Wait,” you say, confused, “Is he talking about FFT or election time?”

………Yes.

FFT seems to think the idea of shock value, when someone has a huge change of life (such as loss thereof, or betrayal of his friends), will be better when done as many times as possible. Whereas in some games a huge plot twist can make the game very memorable, for this game, two friends can be talking about the plot and the conversation will go something like: “Hey, remember when Mr. Blah yadda yaddaed?” “You mean, in chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, or during the ending, or during the opening cutscene…” Apparently, in an effort to make the plot more interesting, Square decided to throw out as many plot twists as they could as fast as they could, without stopping for any reason, to such a point where you're expecting any given plot twist to happen to any given character, and trust me, it probably will.

Square also seems to think that no characters have any love interests. Ever. The most meaningful relationship to occur in FFT is between the protagonist and his sister, and even then it's probably supposed to be platonic, because God knows, a little incest might make the plot interesting, and we can't have that.

What we're left with is a tale of sabotage and death that tries to be mature, but ends up reading like a piece of fanfiction written by little Mary Sue. This fanfic is then taken and spliced with every political debate to ever happen since the beginning of time, and the result is what could accurately be described as the adventures of the medieval United Nations. FFT's plot tries to play off The Bible in a number of ways, all the way down to a character's faith in God affecting their stats. This sort of mix of political arguments and blind faith in an omnipotent being who seems to hate every character in the entire story shows exactly why Separation of Church and State should be applied to the video game world.

For all the faults in the story, the actual game plays out very well. You take turns moving your units (characters) across a grid, trying to achieve a goal (usually “defeat all enemies”). Attack from behind for extra damage. Your goal is made easier by the nineteen different classes your units can become, and the hundreds of abilities they can master. These abilities fall into “normal” skills, like casting spells or screaming. “Reaction” abilities, such as blade grasp, allow your character to somehow grab their opponent's sword in midair without hurting themselves at all. And movement abilities, like Walk On Lava, which is fairly self explanatory. These abilities range from very simple to very complex, but it really won't matter, because you'll find yourself using the generic attack command to hit your opponent with your sword/staff/bow/purse instead of bothering to do intricate maneuvers, because the enemy AI is too stupid for it to matter.

Not content for magic to be rendered completely useless due to MP costs, Square went out of the way to make no one ever use any mages, ever, by adding a “charge” time to most spells, where your unit stands in one place with their hands up, waiting for fiery destruction to rain from the sky. It doesn't matter, though. Most enemies are perfectly content to just stand there and attack your incredibly overpowered main character while your Meteor spell charges.

Requiring its own attention is the “Invite” ability. This allows you to call an enemy to your side for the rest of the battle. Then you're given the opportunity to permanently recruit them when the battle is over. This is effectively the most broken ability ever. It's a lot like an auto-death attack, except you get an ally out of it too. Were it not for the horrid hit rate, this would actually make the game's villains surrender before the battles even begin, as they'd be THAT scared of it. In addition to the human enemies you can recruit, you can Invite monsters too. These monsters cannot learn new skills (with the exception of extravagant ability that isn't worth it), and generally have horrid stats. The real purpose for recruiting monsters is so you can kill them later and sell their hides to get items that generally aren't worth it either. And you can ride Chocobos. Yay?

This is not to say the gameplay is BAD, quite the opposite. FFT has some of the best gameplay in all the video games I've ever played, but there's just too much clutter that no one should ever use. You don't really need anything other than a high level monk to beat the entire game, so why bother with stuff like calculators?

The controls work as well as a game working with the PlayStation's controller can. It's not really an action game, so controls don't matter much, but even so, they're good enough to be worth mentioning. No thumb cramps is always a plus.

Unless you like the game enough to just play through the main plot again, there's no replay value. No extras, no “playthrough+”, no Delita playthrough, and no map mode at the end. To some people, this isn't a flaw. To me, it really, really is. It doesn't help that the main game is fairly short, taking only a little over 80 hours to complete.

The graphics were stunning at the time. To the people whose first game was Halo 2, the graphics are horribly dated. To everyone else, they're fine. The character models are well defined, the terrain is very detailed, to a point where it seems excessive, and magic, summons especially, looks great. It is 2D, though, but that's good, not bad.

The sounds aren't that great though. The music serves its purpose, but don't expect me to buy a soundtrack. However, the fact that most spells are given a “whoosh” sound effect even if there's no whooshing in the spell at all hurts. Really hurts. This is why you keep the game muted; you miss out on nothing and it no longer makes your ears yell “damn it, the ability is named ‘scream', not ‘whoosh'!”

The game does hook you, though. You'll say to yourself, “just one more battle”, and before you know it, it's 4 AM. I haven't quite been able to discern what sort of phenomenon causes this, but I know that there is no way to fight it.

So what are we looking at here? Amazingly addictive gameplay with good graphics, iffy sounds, and a story that's completely off-the-wall terrible. But do I recommend it? That depends. If you're a gamer who wants to just play the game, and skips cutscenes whenever he/she can, go for it. Definitely. But if the gameplay is just an obstacle for you to get to the next story installment, you'll be better off with a different game. Or a book. Overall, Final Fantasy Tactics gets a middle of the road five out of ten.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 10/13/05, Updated 10/14/05