Final Fantasy Tactics

A Review

by Mighty Doom

            I’ll say one thing right now: this is going to be an angry review.  My angry reviews have been known to flatten corn into patterns mistaken by Mel Gibson for alien crop circles.  If you are comfortable with Doom’s anger, I prithee continue….

            Back in the day, believe it or not, Squaresoft used to produce playable games.  Hell, just about everything they produced was a nigh instant classic.  Now, with the advent of next-next-next-next-next-gen systems, Square has no need for interesting storylines, deep characters or any philosophical insight we couldn’t find on Party of Five.  They can re-hire the people who make Final Fantasy VIII, for Christ’s sake, and it’ll sell as long as it looks nice! Square has officially lost its magic, though I will doubtlessly be swiftly clubbed on the back of the head like a baby seal for speaking ill of the company in any regard.

            Let’s hop into Doom’s Time Capsule and take a trip back to the beginning of 1998, when Final Fantasy Tactics, possibly the best game in the series, was released to a fairly lukewarm reception, considering it didn’t have a number in the title.  Tactics is a political story at heart, and for all its fairly cute (though unique) art design, it is a fairly grim 50+ hours of gaming.  At the end of a fifty-year war, a cadet named Ramza and his best friend Delita are drawn into a world of political maneuvering and corruption in both church and state.  There are darker forces at work here as well, but we see little of them until the second half of the game.  Very skillful storytelling here, but hardly uplifting.

            Gameplay is pure turn-based strategy across various isometric battlefields.  The character system is borrowed largely from Final Fantasy V, as players can switch between Jobs (Knight, Mediator, Oracle, etc.), gaining various skills, with other Job classes becoming available as simpler classes are mastered.  Graphically, Tactics is quite simple, falling short of Final Fantasy VII, which was released earlier.  However, its artistic design is very appealing, and gameplay itself is, in this case, enough to keep the boat from sinking.

            I have two major problems with Tactics.  One is the level of difficulty, which is absolutely absurd.  Ye merciful fucking gods, this game is hard.  I haven’t thrown so many things at my TV since I played through as much of Ecco the Dolphin on Dreamcast as I could stand this past winter.  Pray your younger siblings are not in the room when you fight Velius (a demon who uses an attack EVERY GODDAMN TURN that basically kills ever character you have) halfway through the game, because the stream of horrid profanity that will inevitably escape your lips will rend their virgin ears and running to Mom, asking “Mom, what does Motherfuckingshitfuckhell mean?”

            My second problem with Tactics is the translation, though this is, in a sense, part of what makes the game entertaining.  This game was obviously translated by a bunch of retarded two-year-olds using WorldLingo’s machine translator – and filtering Japanese through ten other languages before finally hitting, purely by chance, English.  We have such heartfelt speeches as “Return to the future life again leaving your affection in this life!” and the spell chants will have you laughing your ass off.  “Revenge with dark-evil spell! Demi!” Then there’s the tutorial, which makes so little sense it will simmer your gray matter in the brainpan.  “Charge Time” is explained as follows: “CT is Charge Time.  It’s charged by Speed value in one clock.” Then we have the explanation for “Move,” which should be a simple enough concept, but when filtered through the folks at Square, it becomes: “Move is your moving ability.  You can move on a panel, the face value of the Move.” To quote Gary Oldham in Hannibal, THAT’S SUPER!

            Tactics is indeed a mixed bag; I can’t in good conscience give it an A+.  However, it’s a compelling story with about twenty main characters, as well as a fairly depressing message about our misrepresentation of history and our tendency to perceive its tyrants as heroes.  It is a game that hails from Square’s golden age, before the company’s creative minds started mistaking incoherence for complexity and relying on androgynous, fanfic-friendly villains with no character or motivation to sell copies to the BAKA KAWAII NEKO ^____^ SEMPAI crowd.  We won’t be seeing another Square game of this caliber, as the creative team behind Tactics was disbanded following the relative financial failure of their excellent Vagrant Story.  Well, at least we’ve got a slew of Seymour/Tidus slash to look forward to….

THE GOOD: Everything except THE BAD.

THE BAD: The learning curve is altogether too steep.  The game was translated by monkeys.

THE UGLY: When you finish this game and realize that Square just doesn’t make them like this anymore.

DOOM’S FINAL JUDGMENT: A-