Final Fantasy Tactics Review (PlayStation)
This game has it all…except for noses.
~by tankMage (March 2024)
Score: 8.9/10 (Good)
Final Fantasy Tactics is an excellent PlayStation RPG in terms of story and gameplay. It even has nice graphics. To be honest, I love this game and wanted to give it a 10 out of 10 “Would waste hours of study time playing this again.” score, but it has some really conspicuous problems that hurt the overall experience.
In case you don’t know anything about Final Fantasy Tactics, this game is a tactical RPG where players control up to six characters in strategy based battles. Players have to move their characters around and beat enemies using their skills and terrain to their advantage, hence the “Tactics” in the title. There’s also a really awesome job system that let’s players change the way their heroes fight by teaching them new skills and equipping them with said skills. These jobs include the Knight who can break enemy equipment, Wizards, and even dual wielding Ninjas.
Overall the game is really fun and innovative. As an added bonus, FFT’s story is one of the best ever told in a video game. Even today it puts a lot of RPGs to shame. BUT it has some glaring issues that sour a nearly perfect adventure. There’s issues with game balance, which don’t usually bother me in a one player game, but the balance is really out of whack in FFT. Character portraits lack noses, which is just weird no matter how you try to explain it. And the translation is awful, really awful.
Great story, bad translation.
Story isn’t really something I play games for, but Final Fantasy Tactics has an excellent story that managed to turn my head. The game takes place after a long war that almost destroyed the nation of Ivalice. The war caused all sorts of political, economic, and social problems which were worsened by the fact that the aging king’s only heir is a newborn baby.
Players control Ramza, a knight in training and scion of the illustrious Beoulve family. Ramaza and his friend Delita get swept up in the scheming political machinations of Ramaza’s older brothers as Ivalice plunges into civil war. In the midst of it all, there’s another, even more sinister plot brewing that Ramza will uncover as he travels Ivalice in an attempt to make things right.
Not only is the premise great, but there’s also a mountain (or perhaps iceberg would be a better terms) of lore and character development to go with it. There are very few RPGs with a story that is as thought provoking and entertaining as that of Final Fantasy Tactics. If I have any complaints about the story, it’s that it may actually be too detailed, because there’s a lot of biographical and historical info that can only be dug up by reading the in-game “Brave Story”. Consequently, some players may find the plot confusing or arbitrary if they do not know about the Brave Story.
While the complexity of the story may bog it down, the real problem is the terrible localization. The translation for this game is riddled with errors, bad syntax, and some odd interpretations of terms that have been fairly common to the series for a long time. For example, Dragoons are called “Lancers” and Mindflayers are mistranslated as “Mindflares”. On top of that, the cast is full of bizarre quasi-Romanized names like Dycedarg, Agrias, and (my personal favorite) Zalbag.
Legend has it the translators were angry about their pay, hence the infamous “L I T T L E M O N E Y” text crawl that was thrown into the opening scene. I’m not sure how true the rumor is, but it’s pretty clear FFT had a troubled localization to put it mildly. At this point, it’s all water under the bridge and the rumors surrounding the most prominent of this game’s quirks ultimately add an to its mythos as far as I’m concerned. We also got a far more competent translation in The Lion Wars for PSP. That said, the late 90s version of myself would have appreciated a non-crappy localization.
Top Notch Graphics
Aside from a very obvious issue I’ll cover in the next part of this review, the graphics for Final Fantasy Tactics are beautiful and still hold up today in a PS1 sort of way. Square very wisely set 2D sprites in 3D environments, something they got backwards in Final Fantasy VII, to achieve both a sense of depth and nice looking characters. While the terrain is a bit blocky, it works. On top of that, player controlled units and bad guys all look beautiful. Even sprites that appear only a few times in the game are nicely detailed. That said, I’m not a huge fan of the way they did some of the classes. Summoners in particular pretty goofy looking with unicorn horns stuck to their heads, but I guess you can’t have everything.
The animations for even little things in this game are great. There’s scenes where people get stabbed with swords that look awesome and they even took time to animate Ramza taking things out of his pocket. Magic effects are also really impressive, though you can tell they cut corners on the summons, which were just 2D cutouts. Ironically, summons were one case where it would have been cool to have some 3D character models.
No Nose Goes!
Ok, I gotta talk about why the character portraits lack noses. This is something that has always bothered me. Everyone has a blank spot where their nose should be. Why!!!??? I know this is supposedly a stylistic choice and there’s precedent for it. If you look at a lot of sprites in older FF games, characters just have a head with two eyes and no mouth or nose. However, most Final Fantasy titles going all the way back to the 16-Bit era had detailed character portraits complete with noses in the status screen.
There was a rumor going around in the late 90s that the artist couldn’t draw noses, so they just left them out. I have trouble believing this, because the artwork looks really good aside from the missing nasal passages. Ultimately, I’m sure it was stylistic, since it’s not uncommon for characters to have missing or extremely small noses in anime and manga. Unfortunately, this stylization just doesn’t work for Final Fantasy and it hurt the game for me, which is saying a lot for someone who usually doesn’t worry about graphics.
Gameplay for days, and days, and days, and days!
Tactics does noting but win as far as gameplay is concerned. The core of the game’s design is its job system, which allows players to assign jobs, or classes, to characters. Each job has its own stats and abilities that can be unlocked with Job Points, which are gained by performing actions in combat. If that’s not cool enough, players can further customize their characters by setting skills learned from other jobs. This means you can give an Archer the Knight’s break skill and use it to break the enemy’s equipment from afar assuming you’ve learned the appropriate skills. With somewhere around 24 jobs in total, the possibilities are almost endless.
Outside of its job system, Final Fantasy Tactics is a fairly standard tactical RPG. Players will shuffle their heroes around the battle field trying to out think the computer. Some battles have gimmicks like pushing switches to open a dam, but most are fairly standard “kill everything” type fights. Players can also get into random battles when passing over certain spots on the map, which isn’t always a feature in Tactical RPGs.
One thing I appreciate about this game is how they designed the NPC’s combat behavior. While not perfect, enemies are really “smart”. Enemy units will often go for the weakest members of your party and won’t waste turns performing actions that are bound to fail. Everyone constantly rambles about “AI” these days, but this PS1 game from 1997 puts most modern video game AI to shame.
There’s also a ton of hidden items to find, secret characters, and even a hidden dungeon. If that’s not enough for you, it’s also possible to recruit enemies. This includes monsters as well as human NPCs, which adds even more to the gameplay options.
If there’s one thing I don’t entirely like about Tactics, its the balance. Even basic characters can become incredibly powerful, but there are also special heroes with unique jobs that are insanely powerful. In fact, the devs just give players the most powerful dude in the game in the final chapter. And when I say insanely powerful, I mean it. Even the weakest of the unique characters can blow away entire parties of enemies if used well. The most powerful heroes can just blindly blunder through the final battles and still win.
While many of the high tier heroes and even generic jobs are over powered, it’s important to note that there’s nothing forcing the player to use them. In fact, the beginning of the game may be somewhat tough for many new players, because they probably won’t have the best jobs unlocked. Experienced players can set challenges for themselves by restricting the characters and jobs they use. At the end of the day, I’ve come to terms with the game being kind of unbalanced in the player’s favor, since it gives us the option of choosing not to use the strongest heroes if we do not want to rag-doll every battle.
Sorry, I’ve seen better User Interfaces.
The UI is not not bad, but it is kind of intuitive. It’s hard to explain, but a lot of the button inputs feel like they were mapped backwards. This is particularly true for the menu screens, which require players to press the triangle button to bring up commands. There’s also a lot of menu navigation, but I’m not sure if that could have been fixed, because FFT is complex. More options means more menus, sadly. All in all, the UI is ok, just don’t expect a streamlined system.
Good RPG music, but poor by Final Fantasy standards.
The name “Final Fantasy” sets a high bar when it comes to soundtracks. Tactics has a nice soundtrack, but it’s not quite up to par when compared to the mainline series. This is likely due to the fact that the great Nobuo Uematsu was not involved in it, but I’ll also add that he had already done all of his greatest works by 1997 and I doubt his presence would have helped much. I know, I’m full of spicy opinions. While the music composition is pretty good, there’s just not enough songs to go around. There’s a few tracks for battles and a few for cutscenes…and that’s it. Maybe I’ve dumped too many hours in this game, but the BGM is basically the musical equivalent of wallpaper to me.
While the soundtrack is good, I gotta say I enjoyed the sound effects a lot more even if they aren’t top notch. Weapons make satisfying swish and “thwonk!” sounds when they connect with targets. Spells have nice crackling effects that sound somewhat like whatever they are based on. I’ve also liked the little beep sounds the cursor makes as you navigate the menu. As an added bonus, enemies scream when they are defeated, which is pretty funny, because the effect is so corny.
Play this game, trust me bro.
To wrap up this review I will say that this game is well worth playing. Despite all of its problems it’s still a very good game thanks to an excellent story and innovative gameplay. I recommend starting with the original PlayStation version if you are interested in both releases. Final Fantasy Tactics has a lot of replay value and The Lion Wars adds even more content to the original game, so it’s probably best to save the game that has more discover for last.
Thanks for reading my review of Final Fantasy Tactics on PS1!
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