Final Fantasy Tactics

System: Playstation
Release Date: 1997
Published By: SCEA
Reviewed by: Darien
Rating:

I'm going to break from tradition and start by talking about story. Insofar as the story can be read (more on that in a moment), it's a fairly involving tale about political intrigue and machinations. Which is good. But somewhere along the line, the writers became... unhinged, perhaps. What I'm getting at is, why does this game need the giant evil demons from hell? Why does it need that segment where ALL the NPCs in the game turn into demons and get killed? And why on EARTH does it need that whole warped final area where you fight your way through hell to the final battle with Jesus?

Maybe I just don't get it because I can't read half the text. It's in English - or, at least, it's written in the right Alphabet - but the words don't form sentences. Don't waste your time with the in-game tutorial; you'll spend an hour trying to make out what it's telling you, and then you'll end up with less idea of how to play than if you hadn't bothered. For that matter, don't waste your time with any of the text that shows up on the screen - if you need to know something, look it up on the internet.

So. The above is the game's major weakness. Now let's talk about what's good. If you can actually figure out how to play the game, it's an awful lot of fun. You have complete control over how to configure your party, and a long list of classes to choose from (almost all of which require a certain number of levels of other classes first). Don't expect to be doing any role-playing, though; the game is just battle after battle, with interruptions for buying supplies if you head back to town.

Battle is nice and complex. Everybody acts when his CT gauge reaches 100, and every turn gets as many CT points as he has speed. Every character has a list of actions that you can customise somewhat from the party screen, and new actions are learned by spending "job points." The monsters are handled exactly the same way as the party characters, and can in fact be recruited into the party if you please (though it's not really important).

The only other major failing in this game is that it almost depends on its system being obscure to keep the difficulty up in the lategame. Once you've figured out how the game works, and you have your characters developed and equipped with useful skills, and you have good ol' broken-ass Orlandu in the party, the game becomes a series of one-turn battles. But, hey, it's mostly over by then anyhow.

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