Walkthroughs & Tips

Review by: GenoForPrez

Reviewers Score: 10 / 10

Posted: September 25, 2005

FINAL FANTASY TACTICS
System: GBA
Genre: RPG/Strategy
Score: 10/10

Review:

It's difficult to decide where to begin describing everything good about Final Fantasy Tactics. I honestly believe that this is one of those extremely rare games that has absolutely zero flaws. It is one of those games that you can get lost in, become addicted to, and find yourself still playing at insane hours of the morning when you've got to work in an hour. This is not even to mention its astounding replay value. Just taking my word for it is nothing, though. It's illogical to decide if you will enjoy a game just because someone else did or didn't enjoy it. I'm not going to lie to you. I think this game is gamer's candy, but I will present you with the facts so that you can choose to agree or disagree with me. Apologies if I get a little verbose. Let's start with the battle system.

Battle System: The Basics
The basic battle system used in the game will be all too familiar to a lot of gamers. If you've ever played Treasure Hunter G, YuYu Hakusho, Onimushu Tactics, or Knight of Lodis, it will be nothing new to you. For sake of the first-timers, though, I'll give a brief crash course on how the system works.

The battle system can best be described as a mixture of RPG elements and chess. All player characters and enemies are arranged on a landscape that is set on a grid. The grid lines are invisible unless your character is moving or making an attack, but they are an important part of the battle system. All the standard RPG elements apply: hit points, magic points, physical defense, magic resistance, speed, and experience. However, you also have to move your characters around the map as well. This adds something extra to the game since some characters move more spaces than others (thieves move further than soldiers, for example) and you can receive attack bonuses or penalties depending on whether you attack from the enemies' front, back, or side. Terrain also plays an important part in battle. If you are using an archer, for example, and there is a tree between your archer and the target, there is a good chance that you will miss if you are too close to the tree. Also, characters receive small bonuses from attacking from higher terrain and small penalties from attacking from lower terrain. Some terrain has other effects. Standing in water, for example, causes your character to be unable to attack.

Winning battles in Final Fantasy Tactics requires knowledge of the standard RPG battle system, but also requires the player to strategize his/her movements.

Battle System: Laws

Final Fantasy Tactics adds yet an even more interesting twist to this battle system: The Judge. Throughout the game, you will travel all over the world map and trek across many locations. Every location in the game has its own set of laws which cannot be broken and there are various levels of punishment for breaking the laws.

For example, you may engage in a battle in one location and the laws will state that you are forbidden to use any attacks or spells that are fire elementals. You will also be told which maneuvers are encouraged. Usually these are somehow in contrast to the forbidden maneuvers. If the law prohibited the use of fire, for example, the recommended maneuver might be ice elementals.

If one of your characters breaks a law (casts fire in this case), the judge will immediately penalize that character by dealing him either a yellow or a red card (a red card being a worse punishment than a yellow). If a single character acquires too many card penalties, he will be sent to prison and must be bailed out (yes, that means you'll have to pay Gil) if you want to use him/her again.

Characters who attack/cast using the recommended maneuvers will be rewarded with a Judge Point.

Judge Points are given to characters whenever they perform a recommended maneuver or whenever they KO an opponent. Judge points are used much the same way as MP except that they specifically apply to combat maneuvers that deal high damage. Your judge points, then, limit the number of times you can use a combat maneuver just in the same way that Magic Points limit the number of times you may cast magic spells.

Note: Combat maneuvers are not basic attacks. They are special heavy damage skills that must be learned. Basic attacks are free. Grin

Guilds - part 1:

Once the action of Final Fantasy Tactics is in place, you will immediately be inducted into a guild which you are allowed to give a name of your choice. Your "Guild" basically constitutes the main character and all of his allies. In other words, your guild is your team. Each member of the guild is unique. You start with a few rag tag characters to help you, but as the game progresses and your guild becomes more successful, more characters will request to join your guild. Since characters can level up in hundreds of different ways in this game, one of the more fun aspects of the game is building a guild. The possibilities are nearly infinite. See the discussion on leveling up for a better explanation of how the characters level up. I assure you that it's very sweet.

Getting back to these guilds, though. You'll quickly find that you and your guild are not the only guilds in the game. In traveling around the map to various places, you will sometimes be confronted by other guilds that are randomly generated from time to time on the world map. These play a couple different roles in the game.

First, the rival guilds supply you with battles to level up your characters so that you aren't restricted to leveling them up when completing missions. This is useful since the missions gradually get more difficult, so sometimes leveling up might be necessary before taking on your next mission. More about missions in a moment.

Second, the rival guilds act as a means to improve your guilds' status. By that I mean that not only do your individual characters level up in the game, but also your guild as a whole has an entirely different set of stats that may be leveled up by competing with other guilds. In order to increase these stats, you must challenge other guilds and win over their turf as your own. There also missions you can complete to snuff out the activities of "bad" guilds which will win your guild some stat bonuses. Guild stats are not comprised of hit points, attack, defense, etc. Instead, when your guild levels up, you begin to receive more Gil and better items from battles. You also get appraisal bonuses which means you will receive more Gil for selling items in shops and pay less when purchasing them. You also can receive appraisal bonuses in individual towns for sorting out guild problems there.

Towns and Missions:

Whenever you stop at a town in FFT, there will always be a store and a pub. Some towns have special stops as well such as a monster farm where you can place monsters you have caught if your guild has a hunter as one of its members. Another town has a prison where you can pay to retrieve your team members that have acquired too many penalty cards.

The Shop is pretty much self-explanatory. Go here to buy items, weapons, armor, and accessories.

The Pub is one of the most important places in the game. You can go here to pick up rumors and to find missions.

Rumors are simply tips that will help you play the game better. Missions are important to the games progress, though, and are how the plot of the game unfolds. The entire point of the game is to complete as many missions as possible. Some missions the player fights directly and others are deployment missions in which he deploys one of his characters to go fight alone and must wait a number of days before the results are in. Some missions can be canceled while others cannot. New characters who request membership in your guild will usually appear after you complete a mission, especially a serious one.

Leveling Up Characters - Mastering Skills

Characters level up in the awesomest way in FFT. Not only do your stats increase in the usual way, but characters must also choose and level up the skills they want to master. Skills are chosen by selecting the appropriate weapons, accessories, or armor in The Shop. Let's use a thief as an example. Thieves use knives as their weapon, but there are many knives to choose from and each teaches the thief a new ability. Buying one knife will teach the thief to steal Gil while another knife will teach the thief to steal accessories. The thief can only use that skill while he has the corresponding knife equipped, though. However, if the thief uses the skill enough times to level it up, he will eventually "master" the skill and can use the skill with any other weapon. By continually purchasing new weapons and leveling up the skills associated with them you not only build your characters stats, but you are also building their skill sets. The more skills a character has, the more formidable an opponent they will be.

Note: Skills level up separately from characters.

Armour and accessories also provide skills to the players. For instance, if an archer wears a beret into enough battles, the archer will eventually learn to block arrows so that other archers' attacks will be ineffective.

Leveling up: Jobs

Each character in your guild may be given a variety of jobs based on their race. Humans can start out as soldiers, archers, white mages, black mages, or thieves. The other races have their own sets of jobs they may practice that are different than the jobs of a human. It's fun to experiment with combinations of races and jobs within your guild.

A character may only acquire the skills of the job to which they are currently assigned. A black mage, for example, cannot learn white mage skills while he assigned to black mage duty. If he changes his job to white mage, though, he may learn white mage skills. Also, once a skill has been mastered, they can still be used regardless of a character's job or race. If a black mage masters fire, for instance, he may still cast fire as a white mage. BUT!!! A character may only use two skill sets at a time. A human could not cast white spells, black spells, fire a bow, and use thieving abilities simultaneously. Only two.

Leveling Up - Multiclassing

And now my favorite part of Final Fantasy Tactics. It allows you to multi-class with your characters. I mentioned before that characters can master skills and use skills from two different skill sets in a battle. This is where the game gets most of its replay value and just general fun.

A black mage can master six black spells and then change jobs to a white mage and master six white spells. He could then, theoretically, cast a total of six black and six white spells in any battle. However, if the particular mage is of the Nu Mou race, then learning 5 black spells and 2 white spells unlocks another job. He may now learn Alchemist or Illusionist abilities which are even better. So now there is a choice: alchemist spells with black spells? alchemist spells with white spells? But then again, you could master illusionist spells... but would you keep the white spells for your second set or your black spells? You will find yourself in this type of position a lot playing the game. It makes leveling up the characters extremely addicting and you will find yourself playing turn after turn trying to create the perfect set of characters.

Conclusion:

I hope I've explained the gameplay well enough that you understand how it is so unique and how it has so much replay value. The best thing about my experience with this game is that I knew early on that even when the game was over, I wouldn't be disappointed, because I could simply start over and build an entirely new guild with entirely new characters with entirely new skill sets and have an entirely different experience. I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've sat down with this game and said, "I'll just play a couple of rounds" and before I knew it, six hours had passed. The way I see it is when you can wake up one morning sitting in a chair, loosely clutching a controller in one hand, wearing a bag of cheetohs like a glove on the other, and staring at a screen that has been frozen in place for hours while waiting for you to wake up and complete your turn, then you've found a great game. FFT will do this to you.

If you enjoy RPG's at all, there is a ridiculously high probability that you will definitely enjoy this game. Do check it out.

--MRW