Final Fantasy Tactics

Thoughts on beating the game for the fifth time across all its versions, from the original PlayStation, to the PSP, and now the modern remake.

There’s the recommended way to play Final Fantasy Tactics. And then there’s the way I play it.

After playing through this amazing real-time tactics RPG, the only question I hadn’t answered was… were we the baddies all the time?

Okay, there’s a lot of gaming stuff going on so I’m just going to go over some of it, briefly.

It was supposed to just be a battle. It turned into a gauntlet.

The original Tactics Ogre returns, updated and improved for a new generation. Any fan of tactical strategy games like Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics should really take a look at the game that inspired them all.

Welcome to the start of my playthrough of LucasArts’ “Gladius”, a tactical arena fighting game for the PlayStation 2. Wow. What to say about this game? I first heard about this game only a couple of weeks ago – I guess I’d entirely missed it when it came out in 2003. I ordered a copy from eBay. It arrived yesterday; popped it into the PCSX2 emulator and it came right up. ...

Before Final Fantasy Tactics, my favorite fantasy tactical battle RPG, there was the Ogre Battle series. I discovered the franchise the other way around, though: after loving and completing FFT on the PlayStation back in the day, I looked around and found Ogre Battle: Let Us Cling Together, the second game in the series, and was again blown away. Both games shared a creator – Yasumi Matsuno – who, along with the Ogre Battle series and Final Fantasy Tactics, also went on to work on Final Fantasy XII, Final Fantasy XIV, and the Vagrant Story PS2 game (which I also found). ...

I was initially a little unsure about playing Banner of the Maid. It has a lot of things in it that I like – deeply tactical gameplay a la Final Fantasy Tactics and Fire Emblem Houses. It’s set in a sort of alternate French Revolution era which isn’t all that familiar to me, though I’m pretty sure Napoleon didn’t have a little sister as one of his generals. But why wouldn’t he? She is, after all, a Maid, a hero that, like* *Jeanne d’Arc, the Maid of Orléans, would rise to save France from her martial ambitions. She and her fellow Maids will command the revolutionary forces throughout their European conquest. ...

Epic battle in my kitchen There’s one game series that stands above all the others, to me. It’s the game series that continually redefines itself in each new game and is always willing to take risks and try new things. Final Fantasy III/VI for the Super Nintendo blew me away. I’m not sure if it was the first Final Fantasy I played – the chronological list I found suggests that Final Fantasy Mystic Quest would have been the first. But it was the first that really redefined for me how great stories and great characters could combine with great gameplay to make something truly obsessive. ...