An all-time classic in the tactical RPG genre, does Final Fantasy Tactics hold up today?
What Is It? A tactical strategy RPG set in a fantasy world. You take on the role of Ramza Beoulve who gets caught in the middle of a war and will travel a long, winding road of loyalty, family, betrayals, and a lot of memorable friends and foes. As Ramza, you build and maintain a large party of characters to travel through the kingdom of Ivalice. The overworld has fixed point locations, you can travel freely between them most of the time, but random encounters will pop up as you move. Mandatory battles are marked so you know if you’re walking into one.
Once in battle, you select your party and are placed on a gridded terrain seen through an isometric view. Battles are turn- based where characters can generally move and perform an action such as attack, use an item, or use a special ability. Characters are unique through their jobs. The game contains over 20 jobs, each with their own abilities to unlock. Each character can carry abilities from prior jobs as well, so the possibilities are nearly endless.
Performing relevant actions in battles will increase the XP earned, which is used to unlock new abilities. Most battles will simply have you eliminate all enemies, but some will have alternate win conditions, these are usually story fights.
Final Fantasy Tactics provides a strong story with incredibly deep combat and party systems. The game will take roughly 40 hours for a first playthrough but that can vary wildly depending on how much level grinding you choose to do.
The Best Part: Having complete control over your party and their jobs. You can go to the local recruitment center and add a new member, assign them to whichever job you have available, and grow them into whatever you want. This gives FFT some unbelievable depth. It is a game that many people replay over and over to test out new party builds. The game can feel completely different depending on your party makeup. Some of the big mandatory battles have tricks which you may need to exploit to get through, but for the most part, just about any competent party build you throw out there can work.
The Worst Part: The open-endedness can be considered a negative if you prefer a little hand holding. This carries over into some of the big story fights where it might take a few tries to understand the “trick” to get through them. This is compounded by the possibility of being soft locked through a poorly timed save. These are all barriers to entry that can make a first playthrough rough on a new player.
The Verdict: This is a classic game and remains one of the giants of the tactical RPG genre nearly 30 years after its release. It holds up extremely well today, even in its original PlayStation release form.
How to Play: Original release: PS1. FFT: The War of the Lions: iOS, Android, PSP
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