Video Game Review: Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions

Originally posted on October 11, 2012.

I'm going to be posting two updates this week, in part to make up for missing last week, and in part because I wanted this up to go along with something I'll be posting this Thursday.


If you're a gamer and you're more than 6 years old then you've heard of Final Fantasy Tactics, and if you've known me for any length of time then you know I hate it with a passion. It occurs to me, however, that I've never entirely explained why I hate it. (Aside from when this was first posted 6 and a half years ago, but ignore that.) With that in mind, allow me to present to you the biggest problems I have with Final Fantasy Tactics... or more specifically with the PlayStation Portable remake, The War of the Lions.

Settle in, this is going to be a LONG one.

Gameplay: Too Random, Too Easy to Lose Everything
The main draw of Final Fantasy Tactics has always been the level of customizability for your characters. Even though I know the Job system has been around since the first Final Fantasy, this is the game that established the mix-and-match system that has been used in numerous titles since. You can do a lot here. You want to make a ninja with super jumping and a sword that turns people into frogs? You can do that. You want to make a heavily armored tank who teleports around the battlefield and bonks people with a book? Weird, but you can totally do that too, as long as you're willing to put forth the effort of searching out rare items, grinding out JP - job points - to purchase all of those abilities, and if you save your game compulsively.

See, it's really easy to lose all of the stuff you've worked on getting. Enemy knights can use the Rend skills to destroy your super-rare equipment, and enemy thieves can steal it. There is no protection given to even unique items, and there is no way to get your items back. Ever. Of course, you can just equip your character with the Safeguard skill to prevent item destruction... if you're okay with completely wasting your one and only support ability slot.

You can even lose your characters if you're not careful. When participating in random battles you'll find the game loves to put you up against hordes of massively powerful enemies, but even if it doesn't you can still lose your people. When a unit is reduced to 0 HP in this game, with a few exceptions, they are downed for a 3 count at which point they are dead forever. If you fail to successfully cast Raise or Arise on a fallen ally - which is entirely likely given the pathetic success rate of those spells, which is usually about 50/50 at best - then kiss your hard work good bye!

Speaking of which, that leads us to the bigger issue. Basically everything you can ever do - buffing your allies, hurting your enemies, etc - has only a small percentage chance of actually working. While you'd think this chance would get steadily higher as you become more and more awesome over the course of the game the opposite is actually true, as your enemies also become stronger and gain higher resistances.

The worst is reaction skills. As the name implies these are skills which activate as a reaction to some event, almost always being attacked, like counterattacking an enemy who hits you, or boosting magic power when struck by a damaging spell. Reaction skills, like basically everything else, have only a percentage chance to activate which is higher or lower depending on the skill in question. Skills like your basic counterattack will activate fairly regularly but anything cooler, like Parry (blocks melee attacks) or First Strike (stops enemy attack and attacks first) will activate so rarely you'd might as well not even have them equipped.

That's pretty much the game in a nutshell right there: the cooler what you're trying to do is, the less chance it has of actually working. Anything more badass then a basic character using basic attacks will fail so often they'd might as well not even exist.

Story: Life Sucks, You Suck, Then You Die
Let's get this out of the way: The War of the Lions is a very well told bad story. Anyone who disagrees with that either didn't pay attention to the story, or only played the first chapter.

And yes, the first chapter is really good. You play as Ramza Beoulve, a nobleman even amongst noblemen, from the most prestigious family in the world, charged with fighting against the rebels who intend to tear the kingdom apart. As the chapter goes on, Ramza begins to question the greed and arrogance of the nobles. He realizes it's their inability to discipline themselves that led to the rebellion in the first place. Finally it all comes to a head when Ramza's best friend's sister is killed, essentially for being a "worthless peasant." Ramza finally decides he's had enough; he renounces his birthright and determines to change the world!

Spoiler: He fails.

Except, wait, that's not a spoiler. They tell you that at the beginning of the game. What is a spoiler is HOW he fails. Despite the game heavily implying that Ramza is going to join the rebellion against the nobles... he doesn't. Actually, he does the opposite. He continues working for the nobles, but as a mercenary. He still works exclusively for the nobility, and he still exclusively takes on jobs that pit him against the rebellion, he just doesn't answer to the nobles directly anymore. Basically, we're playing a wishy-washy coward who's too scared to stand for anything. What a wonderful main character.

Long story short: after murdering literally every good and idealistic person in the world, Ramza is killed as well, his name and deeds are stricken from the history books, and the world enters into a 1,000 year Dark Age which it's only just coming out of at the narrator's time.

Oh, and that's not the Bad Ending. It's the ONLY Ending.

Allow me to take this time to give some advice to any aspiring writers. As both a fan and a writer of DARK stories, there's a trick to making them work. Here it is: things suck, but they get better. That's the important part. Things have to get better. If they don't, then why am I bothering to play the game?

That's the reason why Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together (which I have often cited as being better than this game, and for good reason) had a great story, while this game's story is a load of trash. Tactics Ogre starts you off as a member of an oppressed ethnic minority being faced with genocide. You're asked to do a lot of morally questionable things along the way, and a lot of good people get hurt... but in the end you unify the country under its single rightful ruler, and usher in an era of prosperity. Things get better.

In Final Fantasy Tactics the world sucks, you suck, and then you die. The end.

There's Really Not Even That Much Customization
So yeah, I mentioned how you can do a whole lot with your characters, like making a black mage who wears heavy armor and can jump 500 feet in the air. But if you want that armored mage to also have a sword you can go to Hell.

Each character has five ability slots: two skill command slots (one of which is taken up by that class's default command set, for example "Black Magick" for black mages), one reaction skill slot, one support skill slot, and one movement skill slot. Trust me when I say each slot has a lot of good skills for it that you'll probably want to use. Buuuut, you can't.

Even worse, there are skills you need to have to avoid becoming gimped, but that means any other skills are useless. For example, if you're making a character to use for physical attacks then they need to have the Dual Wield skill to attack with two equipped weapons, or else they won't be able to deal enough damage to keep up in the later game. But what if you also want the Defend skill or the Concentrate skill which makes all attacks always hit, or the Arcane Defense skill to resist magic? Too bad. Melee attackers need Dual Wield, period. Oh, and forget about taking the Equip ___ skills so you can use the equipment you want regardless of class, because that's an enormous waste of your one and only precious support skill slot.

Mages have it just as bad. Mages need to have the Manafont skill, which restores some MP to them whenever they move. Without this skill they will run out of points to cast their spells very quickly, even if using the Halve MP skill. But what if you want your white mage to be able to teleport or fly, to get healing or raise spells to an ally who needs it more easily? Too bad because you need Manafont, period.

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As I said, I know I often compare this game unfavorably to Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, but even on its own merits, this game suffers from fundamental, fatal flaws. The thing is, both games were made by the same team... and Tactics Ogre came first! Ogre suffered from poor marketing in the States, the studio shut down, and most of the team were hired by Square-Enix, eventually becoming the Ivalice Alliance.

Final Fantasy Tactics was a huge step backward for this team. That said, they did fix a lot of the problems in later entries in the series, eventually culminating in the actually pretty good Final Fantasy Tactics A2... and then they fell off the face of the Earth.


BAD

PROS:	CONS:
+ Established the mix-and-match Job Class system which would be perfected in other, better games.	- Trying to do anything at all is a complete crapshoot.
	- Delita should have been the main character.
	- Should have been Tactics Ogre.