Final Fantasy Tactics

The game starts off with you running guard duty for a princess. Apparently, you suck ass at this kind of thing and she gets kidnapped by someone you think you know. This causes you to have a flashback, and that's basically what the entire first chapter (of four) is all about. After your little flashback, you resume the game at the start of Chapter two.

It's kind of hard to tell what this game is more about, religion or politics, or both. I'm kind of leaning towards both, since they really kind of go hand in hand. I really don't want to reveal more of the plot, because that could possibly lead to spoilers, and I just can't do that. About all I can say is that you lead epic battles, and that there is a lot of betrayal and dark dealings afoot. Complete paraphrasing of the back of the CD case.

There are 19 different jobs to choose from, each having their own abilities. Depending on which job you choose, dictates what abilities you have. There are several slots where you can choose which abilities that you've learned to have equipped. For example, you could have the Job Black Mage, which would give you access to all spells you've learned as a Black Mage, and you could set Time Mage abilities, so you'd also have all spells you've learned as a Time Mage. The combinations are endless.

The battles are pretty straight forward. You're given an objective (defeat all enemies, protect so and so, don't die, find the needle in the hay stack, etc) and you must complete it. When you defeat an enemy, either a crystal or a treasure chest will spawn. If the enemy was a monster, the crystal will replenish your HP and MP. If the enemy was a human, you have a chance to learn a skill that they had if you didn't already have it. The treasure chest is self explainatory.

With each action in battle, you gain experience points and job points. Experience points go towards raising your level. Every 100 and you get a level up. Depending on your level versus your enemy's level, your experience will vary.

You use job points to purchase abilities for that specific job. Depending on your job level (1-8), is how many job points you will get per action. While XP is only earned on the character that performed the action, JP from an action is gained by every character you have deployed. Every other character recieves a fraction of the job points for the job of the character who used an action.

For example. You have an Archer and a Squire deployed. The Squire uses the ability Yell. Both the Archer and the Squire recieve job points for the Squire job. The Squire would recieve more, since he used the ability. My hint for this is to have multiple characters with the same job deployed at once to maximize abilities learned across the jobs.

If, during the course of battle, one of your characters dies, you have three turns to raise him/her form the dead. As I stated before, if you do not, they will turn into either a crystal or a treasure chest. You would do this by either casting Raise or using a Phoenix Down.

Not every character you have has to be a human. In fact, you can recruit animals. The easiest one to get is a chocobo (giant chicken like bird). During one battle, you have the choice to save one. If you do, he joins you. If you have a Mediator, you can use them to convince animals to join you. When you have an animal as part of your group, they will occasionally lay an egg and multiply, causing you to have multiple animals. I, personally, do not like animals since they're pretty limited with what they can do. I normally keep the chocobo around (he's just so damn cute!) and dismiss any eggs he creates.

One thing about the game that I didn't realize my first time around is that all enemies level with you. That's right, there's no reason at all to level your characters any. When you enter a battle (with the exception of forced battles) every enemy is the same level as your highest levelled character. Meaning if you have one character who's level 50, and every other character is level 30, your enemies will be level 50. While this can be nice to catch those other characters up, I find it more of an annoyance.

On one board (I forget which one off hand, I know it when I see it) I have found a trap that delevels you. This trap will be there no matter what (as all squares with special attributes assigned to them are). Whenever I feel that mobs are getting a little out of hand, I'll head to this board, kill off all but one enemy, weaken that enemy, and just start delevelling my party to a managable level. I won't delevel them too far, I still want to be able to kill the last guy. This strategy works out great for me, and has allowed me to start mastering all jobs on Ramza easily and efficiently.

This is quite possibly my favorite Final Fantasy game out of the Playstation series (VII - XII). Even though I've been playing Final Fantasy XI for five years, I still love Tactics more. The story is great, the game play is great, the replay value is very high. The only thing that I disliked about the game was the ending. With that aside, I highly recommend this game to anyone who has not played it yet. If you haven't played this game, WHY THE HELL NOT!