Collection essentials #357: Final Fantasy Tactics (PS1)

Here is one of the most notable of the many Final Fantasy spinoffs that exist. Final Fantasy Tactics retains some creatures, spells and items from the series it’s based on, but very much feels like its own thing. In fact, if anything it just as much feels like a spiritual successor to a tactical RPG called Tactics Ogre released by a different company a couple years earlier, and that’s because some of the staff that worked on that game were recruited by Squaresoft to make Final Fantasy Tactics.

The game’s story is quite different from any Final Fantasy released previously, with a sort of fantasy medieval setting. You control Ramza Beoulve, someone born into nobility and living in a tumultuous time when various parties are warring for power. The story is quite complex and features things like class conflict and betrayal.

Final Fantasy Tactics doesn’t involve freely moving your character around exploring the world like regular Final Fantasy games do. Outside of battle, you can choose to move your character from place to place on a map, and in certain locations you have the opportunity to do things like visit a shop and recruit new characters for your army. When you advance to the next location relevant to the story, or if you’re moving through an uninhabited place on the map and a random encounter triggers, a battle will ensue. 

Battling in this game involves taking usually up to five characters into the fight, and you’ll possibly have a computer-controlled guest character on your side as well. Battles basically take place on a square-based grid. Each individual unit gets their own turn, rather than the entire team at a time, and turn order is determined by stats. There are many mechanics to the gameplay and I’m certainly not going to explain all of them here. But I think, despite the many mechanics to be aware of, they did a good job of making the battles themselves not overwhelmingly complicated and they don’t usually drag on for a real long time since there aren’t a large number of units on the field at once.

This game uses a class system similar to Final Fantasy V which is very much a defining feature of the gameplay. All of your characters can be in certain “classes” at a given time such as Knight, Archer and Wizard. When battling as a certain class, the unit will gain “JP” which they can spend to permanently learn abilities of that class. A unit won’t have access to every single thing they’ve ever learned in a given battle, but there’s still a huge variety of skill combinations the player can experiment with once units have accumulated a lot of experience in many classes. This is a big part of the game’s appeal, as it can be very addictive to build up your units and customize them as you see fit.

Final Fantasy Tactics is a wonderful game that managed to build quite a following of enthusiastic fans. However, sadly it is not without flaws. One issue is the uneven difficulty balancing, as there are segments of the game (including one very early on) that are super hard out of nowhere and may require players to grind. Another problem is that the game sometimes offers you to save before certain battles, but this is a problem because if it’s an instance where you can’t exit back to the world map, you might find yourself in an unwinnable situation without even having the opportunity to grind, forcing you to start the game all over again. Of course you can get around this simply by saving your game in multiple save slots, but it sucks that new players who haven’t been informed about this could fall into the trap. Another issue is the lackluster English translation, which for me really bogs down what should be a great and complex story.

As far as my personal history with Final Fantasy Tactics, I was aware of it from a fairly young age and the fact that it’s highly revered. It was one of the first PlayStation games I bought, and I remember getting a copy in the fall of 2003 several months after I got the system. However…I found myself not liking it very much. I had a hard time grasping some of the mechanics, and an infamous early-game difficulty spike really turned me off, so I wound up returning the game and not going back to it until years later. When I eventually gave it another shot and had more patience, I wound up enjoying the game very much, despite some flaws I mentioned above.

Final Fantasy Tactics received a remake some years later that I’ll get to eventually. The remake has some pros and cons that I’ll be talking about at that time. No matter how you choose to play it, this is definitely a game that you need to try if you have any affinity for strategy RPGs. It’s very addictive and plenty worthy of being a collection essential.