Previously, I dabbled in a game by the name of Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, where Final Fantasy met Dungeons & Dragons and all was good - only it wasn't good because I found myself moving away from it, rather than towards it.
Final Fantasy Tactics is to Tactics Ogre what D&D 5th Edition is to Pathfinder: Easier for the newcomers. Developed by the same brains as those who worked on Tactics Ogre and steered in an easier but still tricky enough direction by those who knew the Final Fantasy series, Final Fantasy Tactics is a game I've been looking forward to playing for a while now.
The world of Ivalice is a world of war, and we are but knights in training looking for our place within it. And there might be something about a stone and some Zodiac signs. I really don't know. Time to dive in and find out.
Fun Times
After some text dumps and in-game cutscenes mixing sprites with polygons (sometimes a tiny bit jarring, depending on where everything is placed), we find ourselves outside of a church with an introductory fight.
It's a scene very reminiscent of Tactics Ogre, but I'm pretty sure we've swapped sides and are attacking from the top of the screen. Anyway, that's not important. What is important is navigating these battles, and you do so with plenty of menus and highlighted squares and confirmation boxes.
In the first battle, you control Ramza, a noble-turned-mercenary who fights for justice. Work that one out. Your turn boils down to moving somewhere and doing something, though not necessarily in that order and not necessarily both things.
The more things you do, or perhaps the bigger the task you do, or maybe even the faster you are as a person, the sooner you'll be able to act again, meaning that your turn will probably come up out of nowhere because you've not been keeping track of the turn order.
Whatever happens, the system is easy as pie to get into, but you'll soon see how incompetent you are when fighting next to characters who know what they're doing.
Special attacks dazzle and delight, though perhaps occur too often for my liking, and seemingly everything you do that isn't walking somewhere will reward you with two sets of experience points; those that contribute to your character level, and those that show how good you are at your job.
You level up specific jobs in Final Fantasy Tactics, like classes in D&D, and can switch them out as and when you want, all while retaining some of the skills you learnt previously, allowing for a multiclass character, if you will, suited to your tastes.
We are, however, getting ahead of ourselves, as this is just a battle for the sake of the story, which ends with the kidnapping of the Princess and a flashback.
Frustrations
I'm emulating the PlayStation release here, and I don't know for sure whether the text slowdown is a result of that emulation or not, but sometimes it can get a little sluggish. When playing Tactics Ogre my enemy was... the very frequent pauses in the... middle of sentences as the few characters of text were displayed in the speech bubbles. Final Fantasy Tactics doesn't appear to suffer from that, but it's still a wordy game, full of names and places that you just don't recognise yet.
Luckily for me, however, it appears to be more grounded and historical than a traditional Final Fantasy title, which has me hooked a little bit more. There is such a thing as too much fantasy, and certainly, in my childhood, I felt that Final Fantasy was on the wrong side of that line. This game might just do some good to my views of the franchise as a whole.
If only I could see it...
The first battle where you have near enough full control over as a player is between a bunch of your fellow knights and some of the local riff-raff that stand in your way and mean to do harm.
The clue to how you should approach these battles is practically spelled out to you in the title of the game, though significant party members will be sure to remind you that rushing blindly into the fray isn't the way things are done here.
You start each fight by equipping your party and placing the lucky few on a grid that will match up with some part of the arena that you'll soon find yourself in, so hopefully, you'll have faith in these guys to get the job done no matter what situation they're about to find themselves in.
Armed with the knowledge that this is more like chess than boxing, you'll manoeuvre you and your party around the map, switching the camera around when needed, in order to get the advantage over your foe. Perhaps you want to draw them out into the open or pin them down - whatever approach works for you and your party.
It all sounds very free and liberating, but the first fight you find yourselves in is one where you are sandwiched between buildings that block your view of the action. When the camera is in a decent enough position, the menus get in the way, and in a feature that you can hopefully turn off, confirmation prompts happen for everything you do, just to be sure.
Further Fun Times
In a feature I most definitely don't want to turn off - not right now at least - is the ability to automate the actions of the rest of your party, even down to specific party members, rather than 'everyone but you'.
I wanted my healer to defend me, and my fellow knights to fight the enemy, and after setting that up, they tried to complete their task to the best of their abilities, leaving me free to work out what I wanted to achieve as just me.
It's probably not the best way to play, and will likely lead to failure, but I'm glad it's there to take the burden of responsibility off my shoulders. Why fret with the menus looking for a healing potion when you can just tell someone at the start of the fight to dish them out when they ought to be dished out?
After the fight, a map screen, some slow text, a cutscene and another fight, things looked a little better still, with dialogue options and a more open environment to fight in. I could actually see how a fight unfolded in all its sprite-on-polygon glory, before another cutscene and then back to the map.
At this point, I think I was an hour in. Three fights. I needed to put the game down.
Half of me liked what I saw and wanted to see more, but the other half was still concerned about the way it looked back in that claustrophobic town. I can't quite explain it. Too many camera switches were doing a number on my positional sense, I don't know, I just needed to stop playing Final Fantasy Tactics, even at this early stage.
Then, not long after, I played the PlayStation Portable remake, The War of the Lions.
Animated cutscenes! A complete script re-write! Some teeny tiny camera tweaks! Some slowdown on each and every fancy battle animation! Ok, this PSP version isn't perfect, but it has done more than enough to convince me that I should play it, going forward, than the PlayStation original.
The script is overly flowery in places, I think the party AI is dumber (that or I should have given my chemist a Phoenix Down and orders to revive me, instead of having her just aimlessly wander the arena), and you do lose a little charm by not having all the cutscenes rendered in text boxes and interesting use of sprites, but I'll take all that.
I found it just as much of a hassle to control, probably more so with added camera controls, but I like it and I know what I want to play.
However...
Final Word
Those in the know are aware that this game can be hard as nails. Those in the know will say that it can be frustrating and complicated. Those in the know can even complete and love the game despite not knowing of the systems that are in play - systems like the zodiac signs that each character and party member have.
Each sign has a bonus of some sort, and when working together with the right signs, they can enhance your abilities. In contrast, conflicting signs will give you a harder time - spells might miss, healing might not be as effective and so on.
In a game where saving between important fights isn't guaranteed, and where a single wrong move can spell disaster before you're even aware of what you've done, do you want to have a system that is, for the most part, invisible controlling the outcome of events? I'm perhaps making it sound far worse than it is, but still, it's something that I'm not looking forward to picking apart first hand.
That is, of course, assuming I carry on playing Final Fantasy Tactics. I'm not overly attached to any of the characters yet, and the grand story of this fifty-year war hasn't hooked me yet either, but there is something about this game that intrigues me.
I like that it's easier or more welcoming than I remember Tactics Ogre being. I like that it has a more historical feel than any other Final Fantasy title. I don't like hearing of all these backwards difficulty curves and spikes and strategies that suggest you hurl rocks at your own party members in order to gain experience quicker, but we'll see.
I don't know when we'll see, but I hope to see. If not in person... well you know how often I resort to YouTube by now.
Fun Facts
The dedicated player can recruit Cloud Strife into their party. If you don't know who that is, check back in a couple of posts time for a certain Final Fantasy VII write up...
Final Fantasy Tactics, developed by Squaresoft, first released in 1997.
Versions played: PlayStation, 1998, via emulation.
Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions, PlayStation Portable, 2007, via emulation.