Retronauts - 726: Final Fantasy Tactics Revisited

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

Jeremy Parish, Kaye Ross, John Learned, and cover artist Greg Melo swear fealty to Lord Matsuno and return to the fray to revisit the isometric battlefields of Final Fantasy Tactics in light of its recent remake as well as [gestures expansively] Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This weekend Retronauts, we celebrate our faith and our birth. Retronauts, I am Jeremy Parrish, and this week we are tackling a topic that we have previously tackled, but I have equipped tackle as one of my skills, and I'm going to do unpredictable variable damage to a target on an adjacent tile when my turn fires off. Yes, we're talking about Final Fantasy Tactics. Again, we have talked about Evil East games before, but I feel like the modern style of retronauts where we go a bit more in-depth and substantial with games lends itself to Final Fantasy Tactics and revisiting this game, discussing it again, because there is a lot of game here, and as the recent remake of it, available now for

pretty much all platforms, the Evil East Chronicles, as that has demonstrated, this game is very beloved, and this game merits a lot of conversation. So, you know, a lot of people have said, wow, this story really hits in this current moment in history, which is true, because history is very cyclical, as George Lucas once said, it's like poetry, it rhymes, and we have found ourselves in a place where Yasumi Matsuno's fixation on class and the evil roles of organized religion and the dangers of balkanization rear their hideous head for Western civilization on planet Earth. And maybe it's good for us to take a step back and say, hey, final fantasy tactics, what kind of learning do you have for us?

Also, I have to say that playing this game after having seen, and read a Game of Thrones, a song of ice and fire. You know, I'm seeing some stuff there and like, oh, this is, you know, like themes and concepts that carry through. So we're going to talk about Final Fantasy Tactics and not just this episode, but also we'll revisit the topic again and kind of work our way through the game in probably three episodes, and then it's time for Tactics Oger. But for now, we're just going to tackle the history of Final Fantasy Tactics.

get into the game, discuss its mechanics, and probably, I make no promises, get through chapter one of the story, which is just kind of this little bite-sized nugget. It's more like a chapter zero compared to, especially chapter four, which is prodigious and massive and probably will be its own episode. But with me here for this wild ride as we spin the camera around and tilt trying to find a good angle on everyone. Oh, no luck. Oh, well. Let's see. See, has anyone here, yeah, Kay, you've been on Retronauts before, surely. I've been on a few times, yeah. Yeah, okay.

So please introduce yourself as the most familiar and familiar of returning faces. Yeah, I've been, so my name is Kay Ross. I'm from the Duckfeet.com. The show you might know us for is watch out for fireballs, kind of a combination like let's play, critique, history kind of thing. and I'm here because I love Final Fantasy Tactics. Whomst Among Us, really? Yeah.

Let's see. The other two, I feel like, John, you have been on the show before? Yes, I've been on a lot of the fighting game stuff with Diamond. Okay. I knew you hadn't been on any of my episodes, but you have been on the show. So please introduce yourself, again, for people who only listen to Jeremy Parrish-hosted episodes. Thank you very much. Hi, I'm John Lernid

I suppose the flail sicko of the podcast That's not really true Because no one uses flails, don't do that But my I prefer purses actually Perses, yeah Or axes, they're amazing Yeah, I've been on a few of the fighting game episodes with Diamond

I'm a Final Fantasy Sicko Is Final Fantasy Tactics sicko as Jeremy wished for upon Blue Sky. More of a Matsunosiko if I had to sort of, like, you know, gun to my head choose one. But very, very excited to be here and talk about this. And then finally, someone who has contributed significantly to Retronauts over the past few years. But I don't know that you've actually been on a pot. You have been on one podcast.

I've been on one. I was with Nadia talking about Dragon Strike. Ah, okay. Well, there you go. Yeah. This is a very different video game. I mean, there are dragons, and you do strike some of them. Yeah, that's true.

You know, in a way, isn't this a simulator? We're all building up to Reese. Yeah. Yeah. My name is Greg Mello. I'm an illustrator for Retro Nuts on occasion. I would say pretty regularly. It's been once or twice a month, I would say.

Yeah, we're coming up on six years, which is crazy. Yeah, I know. And I am both a Final Fantasy Siko and a Matsuno Siko. And I have a lot of opinions on Final Fantasy and tactics and tactics over there. Yeah. Yeah, I am also in the same boat as everyone else. I love me some Final Fantasy tactics and also some Matsuno. And one of the highlights of my career was the chance to interview Matsuno at Tokyo Game Show a long while back.

Although, unfortunately, it was for Unsung Story, which turned out to be kind of disaster. But this was like at the very, very, you know, the outset where dreams were grand and everything was in good faith. And, you know, I did talk to him about the themes of his games and was like, so tell me about balkanization and why you focus on that. And he was like, maybe you, you know, I feel like you may know too much here. Let's let's change it. So, you know, that's always good. I've got a signed copy of War of the Lions that sits in a dusty pile at the moment. But someday, when I get everything organized, it will be in a place of honor. This is not a place of honor, though. This is a Retronauts podcast. No great deeds have been done here. But we're going to do great deeds. We're going to talk about Final Fantasy tactics. So let me start by saying, and this is an easy one, let me ask you, how much do you love Final Fantasy Tactics? Anyone, jump in. I mean, I love it a lot.

I first approached it through the PlayStation 1 version, and we'll get into it. There's obviously a lot of kind of friction in there, but not just like the localization, but like how it kind of, some of like the tutorialization, some of like the minutia of the system was probably, lost on me at the time. I just didn't have the right brain for it, I don't think. And then it wasn't conveyed the right way. But I loved the style and the setting so much. And then over time, my lover for it has only grown as I've just approached it with, you know, a right kind of brain for his strategy games and just an appreciation for Matsuno and his writing and everything that he brings. And I was so ecstatic when the read, The re-remake was announced.

I was like, yes, my time is, my time is now. Yeah, I mean, all during the Switch's life, there were two games that I kept saying they need to put these on Switch. One of them was Final Fantasy Tactics, and it took until the Switch 2 era to finally get it. But it's here. The other was Symphony in the Night. We're still waiting, Konami. Get your shit together. It's trapped on the PlayStation 4.

That's true. And that's just a PSP game being emulated. That's, it's terrible. It's very sad. Even on Steam, my God. John, John, what's up? What's up with you in Final Fantasy Tactics? Do you love it?

How much do you live? Oh, it's a romance for the ages. Yeah, I encountered it when I was 17 when the game was new. I bounced off it pretty quickly. And, well, I mean, we'll get into that a little bit later, I suppose. But I really do think this is the kind of game that if you do play it when you're younger, even if you do wrap your head around a lot of systems and stuff like that, it's a much easier game to sort of of Lovemore over time because it's so dense, at least for Final Fantasy plots, especially

of the time, I think it's probably the most complex by Miles. So it's something that, like, you can come back to. And if you're really into, like, digging through flavor texts and stuff like that, there's so much of that in this game. And really a lot of his games, Mata No's games. But it is really one of those things that it's a gift that keeps giving. So you can try to steamroll the game, you know, front to back, which is ill-advised. But if you're the kind of person that really wants to dig into the minutia of what's under the hood, you know, as I get older, the more I'm open to sort of tinkering with that stuff too.

Like, I'm not just going to be a monk and steamroll everything anymore, even though that that's kind of the easiest way to play it. But there's just so much to love about this game that it really ages very, very well. Yeah. I bounced off of this to begin with as well because I came to it right from final. Final Fantasy 7, was a real sicko for that. Like, I was like 10 when it came out. And I had really enjoyed a tiny baby. Little, little itty baby, you know, and went to this and I didn't get it.

And it took like a couple years, you know, kind of had to come back to it. But it took. The hook really kind of set in. And gosh, it's hard to say like what I appreciate more, just the story and tone and how it feels like a, you know, a real history. Fantastic,

though it is. But also I think this is the game that gave me a real appreciation for games that let you break them. It was kind of this

one-two punch of this and Final Fantasy 8 that was like, oh, not every game needs to be fair. In fact, if you just do a little bit of work and planning,

you can just clown on it. And that has kind of continued to be my, you know, one of the main axes on which I really enjoy messing around with this. In addition to just as I've grown up and gotten more context for the story and the history, growing to appreciate it more on subsequent playthrus as well. Yeah. So Final Fantasy Tactics, which I love, I'm hosting a podcast about it. I don't feel like I need to give my bona fides. So we can just move along to the next topic.

Final Fantasy Tactics came out a few weeks ago, but really it came out in June of 1997 in Japan and then early the following year, early 1998 in the West. And Final Fantasy 7's specter already looms large over this conversation as well it should, because if you stop and look back, Squares release strategy after conquering the world with the massive planet bestriding colossus, that was Final Fantasy 7 was absolutely wild. They were like, here is role-playing for the mass market. Here is a video game movie that you can play. It looks like nothing else before it.

It's a complex, interesting story with crazy graphics and all kinds of cool stuff to do. Oh, oh, masses of audiences, please enjoy this. Now, we're going to give you Saga. and we're going to give you Final Fantasy Tactics and we're going to give you a Chocobo Racing game

and then we're going to give you the weirdest Final Fantasy of all with Final Fantasy 8. So, you know, they could have just gone the Ubisoft route and just said, let's just regurgitate

this game over and over again and just give the people what they want and go the easy approach and just put a bigger budget into it and more people on to making the same thing over and over again every time. But instead, no, Square said, really, what we're about is just

doing weird shit. And they did. And this was part of that. This was weird in a different way than Saga was weird. And weird in a different way than Final Fantasy 8, a game about amnesiac high school students who battled sorceresses through time by breaking the laws of combat physics. This was a different sort of story. This was a different sort of game. This was chess. After creating the most accessible, crowd-pleasing role-playing game ever made, they followed up and said,

now, what if you had to play 3D chess with your little Final Fantasy guys? And, yeah, a lot of people bought this because they said, oh, look, Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy Tactics, it must be like, you know, a cool spin-off of Final Fantasy 7. It wasn't. It was unrelated. Cloud's in there, but that's just a bonus. That's an Easter egg. What do they call Easter in Evil-Lease? I mean, St. Ajora probably, like, you know, there is some sort of resurrection thing going on, but do they call it Easter? Is this Easter for this universe, his Final Fantasy Tactics, like the resurrection? Maybe Ereth's resurrection.

Well, there is Easter. I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, I'm saying this was not what anyone expected. from the name Final Fantasy 7, if they had played really any Final Fantasy game before it, even if you were like one of the old heads who'd played the NES and Super NES games. It was totally different. It was dense. It was confusing. It was unforgiving. Like you get about four battles in, and the game says, hey, now it's time to see if you understand what you're doing. Oh, you don't. Well, die in the slums. Go fights and goblins. Yes, die in the slum, exactly. Surrender or die in obscurity is that. the lion, I believe.

So, yeah, it was a bold choice for them to release this game hot on the heels of Final Fantasy 7, knowing that it was such a different game. But, you know, it does still belong to the Final Fantasy universe, despite being a very different kind of Final Fantasy game. It has many of the hallmarks, such as the spells, the job system, the monsters, an evil church with a nihilistic god that wants to destroy the universe at the end, you know, it's got everything you want from Final Fantasy, but also it's chess as opposed to active time battle. So it took some getting used to, and that includes for me too. And I think a lot of people did bounce off of it,

but there was something about it, the great graphics, the music, just the fact that there is all this Final Fantasy stuff there. And I want to get to it. I can see. I could see that I could, you know, turn into an orco-looking black mage and cast spells if only I were good enough to use those in battle before I died. So it just, it kind of, it kind of nagged at you and pulled at you. And I feel like through word of mouth, you know, on forums and Usenet at the time, this was before social media. But, you know, IRC chats, ICQ chats, you know, people were out there, they were out there talking about it. They were writing fan fictions, drawing fan art. I might have drawn some fan art. I don't remember. And, you know, eventually it

became enshrined as this stone cold classic. And then once it became popular, there were, of course, the people who were like, oh, Final Fantasy Tactics, that's for babies. What you really want to play is tactics ogre. Oh my God. You plebeians. But, you know, that's just a sign of success. If you're getting that kind of feedback, if you're getting that response, that means something good has happened. And there's someone out there who can't abide good things, so they have to turn it back. So, you know, you take the little grains of salt with the happy sugar. Thank you. Anyway, that's my story, the back story of Final Fantasy Tactics.

So where did you first encounter the game? I mean, did you pick it up because of Final Fantasy 7? Or was it just one of those like, hey, this looks neat. I like these birds on the cover. They're marching to war. I don't see a lot of birds march to war that often. I mean, it probably was forums now that you mention it. And I was thinking on it, too.

It's just people in forums that are like a little older than me. who were, like, more well-versed in RPGs and Final Fantasy, we're really into it. And it's funny, like, looking back now and, like, looking at the state of it now, in some ways, tactics isn't, like, part of, like, the main line. But I feel like the love for it and the reverence for it has made it, like, an honorary mainline in some sort of way, even though it's missing, you know, overworld, you know, random battles. I mean, well, it does have random battles, but, you know, it does have an overworld. It has, like, a lot of the map.

Yeah. Even though it's missing a lot of those things, like I feel like the community has kind of like accepted as like an honorary like mainline game. And I don't know. I love that for it. And you were mentioning earlier how this is like a weird kind of spot to release that game. But the story that I've heard from Sakaguchi is that he wanted to do this way back in 93 and he couldn't make it happen for whatever reason. There are other things going on. And then Matsuno finished Tactics Ogre. He's, left Quest. We'll get it to that more. And Sakaguchi just scooped him up, like, oh, yeah, this is my guy. This is what I need to make, who I need to make this happen. And he brought all his people. I mean, was it a case of he left Quest and Sakaguchi scooped him up? Or did Sakaguchi scoop him up and he leave? He left Quest. Probably the way that you're inferring. I'm relaying it the way that I have read it. I've read it both ways. Yeah. You're probably more correct in that regard but yeah i don't know i i'll let everyone go up but i think that's it's a really interesting game yeah um i got it on a rental um and that was the attempt where i didn't

uh you know kind of catch to it um you know it kind of bounced off and uh to my great shame it was long enough afterward that uh that i you know came back to it that my personal copy of this for playstation is the greatest hits so it's the really ugly bright green spine. It is forever my shame. But again, that's a testament to the popularity of the game that it got a greatest hits reissue. Yes. Yeah. Even if it did have to have that neon green. And I came to it because of the Final Fantasy name, but I think ultimately what has made it feel, you know, maybe a step above a lot of the games in the series is the sense of delayed gratification to it. You know, when you're just a bunch of squires and chemists rolling around, you know,

in Final Fantasy 7, you're casting lightning right out the gate, right? And here I am throwing rocks and potions. It's just really underwhelming. You're doing real small ball, like going after, you know, rebels, you know, kind of things. It is not huge. It's not bombastic. The fact that it does kind of string you along a little bit and make you be patient to see the really cool stuff, I think is a huge thing. It's a huge factor in why it is rooted so deep.

and a lot of people who are appreciated. I have kind of a funny story about coming to this game. So I played a lot of RPGs on the Genesis and the Super Nintendo when I was young and so did my friends. And then Final Fantasy 7 came out. And I thought it was boring, honestly. Like I got about halfway through it and I'm like, I have to force myself through this. I bought this game.

I have to finish it. But another friend of mine was just head over heels for it. So he bought Final Fantasy Tactics. He went all in on the other square stuff. And I think I played this at his house. for like, I don't know, the first couple of missions of the game, the first few story missions, not even knowing that you could grind, grind for levels going back and forth with random encounters.

And then years later, when I finally sort of found myself liking RPGs again, I was in college at the time. I'm like, oh, I have to like get in touch with all of my old friends to see what games that they have because I'm still broke and I need to just borrow stuff from them. So I go to this guy's house who has a, you know, he's got this in Final Fantasy 8. I'm like, hey, man, can I borrow these? And he's like, get them out of my house. Those games are terrible.

Take them away from me. And I play both of them. And I figured out how to play both of them. I'm like, you're a lunatic. What is wrong with you? So, yeah, I've been, once you sort of acquiesce to the way that the game kind of wants you to play it, and Final Fantasy 8 is very much like that, too. There's just so much to love about this.

But I can see how somebody that, you know, if you are really into something like Final Fantasy 7, which is such a streamlined. experience. If you're going from that to this, it's so easy to bounce off of it. Yeah, I think, you know, it's funny because this is, as we've mentioned, the sort of follow-up to Tactics Oger, and that game, that game offers no quarter. It just destroys you from the outset. This has some speed bumps and some places where, oh, you can definitely softlock your game if you're not aware of how to save, you know, in multiple slots. But it does require a pretty significant investment of time and attention.

You have to really think about how to equip your team, how you want to develop your team. You have to know that, oh, I need to go into the menu and tell my, you know, tell my team what abilities to actually have before they will have them. So it requires a lot of upfront friction, but then once you kind of get the hang of it and you start to unlock abilities and figure out how the weight system and things like that work, then, you know, you can pretty easily steamroll it. I mean, especially because unlike in Tactics Ogre, the story battles don't scale with your party. you know, the random battles do, which is why people still have nightmares of, like, running into a bunch of red chocobos, in the, you know, or a bunch of monks on a waterfall. Like, that's, that is the stuff of sweaty, terrified dreams. But, but the story battles, you know, you survive those monk battles. And then you're like, oh, yeah, T.G. Sid and I are just going to roll into the depths of this dungeon and beat the shit out of Jesus. And it's no problem. And, you know, it's a, it's a game that let you know,

you do that. But, you know, the process of getting there, it does require some effort and some commitment. And I think that is a big part of why people love this game so much. It's like, you know, with something like Silk Song or Dark Souls, where you really have to kind of give yourself over to that experience. And you have to say, I'm going to get good at this and learn how to do it because otherwise you're not going to get anywhere in it. And, you know, there is this kind of, I think with video games, this adversity reaction where it either drives you away or it makes you fall more deeply in love. And this is one of those games that I think because of its legacy and its presentation

and the quality of its story and the depth of its mechanics, people are more likely to say, oh, yeah, I'm willing to put up with this and eventually fall in love with it than they would be with, you know, even with Tactics Oger, which, you know, again, many people would say is the better game, but it's not as pretty, it's not as accessible. It's not as, you know, the, the customization is not as extensive. So, you know, I think people tend to lean more toward Final Fantasy. Also, it has the name Final Fantasy in it, which counts for a lot. I think that's one of my favorite things about this game is how they, how well they shoehorned the Final Fantasy stuff into the tactics owner framework. And I really do think, to your point, that really goes a long,

long way. And the Final Fantasy stuff can act as like a libretto for you. If you come to this with any kind of knowledge from earlier games in the series, you can recognize like, oh, this is kind of like the in-game equivalent of like materia or something like that. Like, yes, you know generally what the different, you know, monsters and classes. are going to do. But they found a way to kind of take some of these basic elements and then put them together in a novel way that expanded upon them or made them feel like they had more gravity than just being iconography.

I think, you know, something that did make this game a little harder for people to get into here specifically in the West versus in Japan is that this game, with its Final Fantasy 5-based job system, arrived here before Final Fantasy 5, which didn't come into. Final Fantasy anthology the following year, I believe. Right. So we hadn't, and that was, that was not the best foot forward for that particular game, that particular version. Yeah, so we didn't really have the grounding.

Like, there were, there were hints of job elements in all the Final Fantasies that had come, but every character was locked into them. You look at Final Fantasy 4, and I've described it before as, like, the fan fiction version of Final Fantasy 3, where you have like all the character classes and you turn them into a character and they have a story with romance and betrayal and stuff. Final Fantasy 6, you also have a lot of the Final Fantasy 5 jobs, but turned into like, you know, assigned to characters. And there's a lot of cross-pollinization with the Magocite system. But ultimately that and, you know, Materia in Final Fantasy 7, you still have characters kind of locked down. So the idea of like, hey,

I'm going to get this generic little guy and I'm going to train him up in something for a while and then he's going to become something different but I'm going to pull in some elements from that previous training over and turn this little guy into a steamroller of death. That was still a little bit foreign to us

and we didn't quite know what to make of it. Whereas if you had played Final Fantasy 3 and then 5 and then tactics, you were like, oh, yeah, of course. Like I, a dedicated Final Fantasy fanatic living in Japan, and capable of reading Japanese text and playing Japanese games, get what all of this is about. And now my little Final Fantasy five guys are playing chess and this rules. So, you know, that did take a little bit of training. So we kind of got the introduction to the job system in reverse here.

I mean, we didn't even get Final Fantasy 3 where it debuted until 2006, almost a dead. decade after this game came out, so... Also not a great foot forward for that game. Yeah, I mean, I like the... I don't mind that point. The D.S version gave us Retronauts. How can I... Okay. Sorry. Sorry.

All right, so we keep talking about Final Fantasy 5 and Yasmi Matsuno and things like that and Quest, Tactics Ogre. So why don't we talk about those things? The four key personnel for this game, and I'm leaving out a lot of people, including the composers who did great work. But the people who really kind of led the creative and mechanical development of this game really sort of defined everything that it is in terms of the story and how it plays are Yasumi Matsuno, Hiroyuki Ito, Hiroshi Minigawa, and Akihiko Yoshida. And three of those four people had come to Square very recently from Quest, a developer that had been around for about a decade and had made a lot of minor titles.

They have the distinction of having made the most expensive turbographics game of all time, Magical Chase is now selling for like $15,000 because it was the last turbographics game. And, you know, you've got little witches in there. Like, I feel like the witch that shows up in magical chase also shows up as a, like, the playable witch class in Tactics Oger. I feel like, I feel like there is some, like, creative lineage there. But it's a shooter. It's not at all like this game.

But, you know, they were pretty varied. They worked a lot in the PC space for Japanese PCs, but also on consoles. And for whatever reason, after putting together Ogre Battle and Tactics Oger for Quest in 1993 and 95, respectively, Matsuno, the designer, and Minigawa and Yoshida, the artists, said, all right, Quest, we're taken off. I wouldn't be surprised if they said, why don't we go to a company where we can get a good paycheck because they are very successful, as opposed to Quest, whose games sell for a lot 30 years down the line, but not right now. So, Matano, I have heard some self-describe Matsuno Sikos here, so I'm going to leave this for you Sikos to talk about. What's up with Yasumi Matsuno? I think the really interesting thing about Matsuno is that if you look at tactics, the Ogre Battle series, Tactics Ogar, Ogre Battle, and you look at Final Fantasy Tactics, they are the most him that I think a game could probably be. his one of his original hobbies was world war two diaramas where he would create these battle diaramas and come up with stories for the scenes there is there's a japanese players guide for final fantasy tactics that has a diorama of the very first level of the monastery with a baby chick on it um i don't know who made it part of me thinks that it's him just knowing that that's an obsession for him um so obviously that translates fully um he went to school briefly uh to

study foreign affairs. He was like an economy reporter for a while before joining Quest. So he's got like all these different things. And if you look at his catalog, like they're just such distillations of things that interest him and that he kind of brings to it. And as a creative and other creatives fall in this trap where you kind of like, you only get inspired by the thing that you're like really into. And I think Matano just like brings all this different background that

really gives his work color and texture. Yeah, I'm Matsunosiko. I think it's super important that he is a game designer who brings obsessions and fascinations that are not other games. Yep. Right? And I think the result of that is he cannot tell a straightforward story. And he cannot make a game that doesn't have like a really opinionated, you know,

kind of just kind of like systems twist to it or hook, right? And I'd say this is one of at least maybe at most four Crimson Shroud fans there are. Yeah. Okay. There's another one here. That's us basically. We're all here. Okay. Wow. Wow. Okay. We can never all be on a plane together because if it crashes, that's, that's it for Crimson Shroud fandom. If I ever want Alexander O'Smith to like something that I ever said on Twitter, I would have to just mentioned Crimson Shroud, and he'd be like, you're the one, if you. Yeah. There's at least at least six, because there's him.

And then there's also my co-host, Gary, who also likes Crimson Shroud. But those are kind of my two main points about him as a, as a designer and, you know, somebody who puts together narratives is that he doesn't just study other games. He's very, or at least he seems very tortured artists to me. So, like, you know, as Greg was mentioning earlier, that like, you know, he's really sort of putting on display the things that he's very, very into, and if he's not doing that, and that includes things like managing other people, like these things just don't quite happen or if they happen after he leaves, in the case of Final Fantasy 12 anyway.

So, I mean, he's a guy, I think, that is really driven by system design, even though he didn't do the lion's share of the system design in this game. but I also think that that also sort of is informed by how he approaches story, right? So he's very into history. He likes a lot of minutia. I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of extra flavor text in pretty much every video game that he makes. So that's stuff that you don't need to sort of engage with.

But like the games that he actually designs also have a ton of system minutia in them. They have a lot of under the hood math and mechanics that like aren't supposed to be sort of in your face at all times. And that really is sort of what makes them interesting. And I really think that that's just from the mind of a guy that has a lot of plates spinning. And I really do think this is probably his most accessible game if I had to choose one. And I think, you know, if you're ever doing more deep dives into this, Jeremy, like, you know, this is the Matsunovivir and like we're doing chapter by chapter. This is definitely the best place to start with it.

Because I think it's much more approachable than even vagrant story, which is not really. all that approachable, but it seems like it is on the surface. So, yeah, I do like that he has sort of a cinematic view of a lot of his games, too. And, you know, if we ever do get through Chapter 1 in this podcast, we're going to, we'll see that. That might be the next episode at this point. But, I mean, that informs, like, if you look at the rest of the stuff that he especially did with Square, you can see like a filmmaking sort of view with a lot of the scenes that he writes and how acts end and chapters end and a lot of the stories that we get from those. Yeah, I mean, we'll get to it later when we talk about the story. But Final Fantasy

Tactics begins with a framing device and then immediately you move to another framing device after the prologue battle. So it's like, here's a story that we're looking back into the past. Now, let's look further back into the past of the story. You know, and then you can go into the taverns and you're like, hey, let me tell you about the past that brought us to this point. Yeah, I think, I think Matano is someone who, as you have all sort of correctly, I believe, identified, really works best when he's just focusing on the things that he's really into, which are not your typical video game stuff, which is great. And I think square Square Inix kind of messed up and said, why don't you helm the big transitional Final Fantasy

for us? It's kind of like stepping between the PS2 generation and PS3 generation. And I just feel like the scale of that was the wrong task for him. And, you know, so he hasn't really done a lot since stepping away from Final Fantasy 12. And that's been 20 years. I mean, he's been, he's come back, and he was involved in this. He was involved with the Tactics Ogre remakes. He was involved a lot with Final Fantasy 14's Evil-Ease. I don't even know how that mechanism work. Is it like an alternate world thing?

I don't know, something to do with Evil-Ease. He's been heavily involved in that. He did Crimson Shroud, as you've mentioned. He did Mad World. I don't know about that one. He wrote the script for it. But, you know, I just feel like kind of putting him in charge of such a massive project with so many expectations as Final Fantasy 12, so many moving parts and so much to manage.

I just feel like that's not his strength. I mean, you look at Final Fantasy tactics. It's a pretty small team that actually developed this. And, you know, maybe, well, I was going to say maybe video games can't work at that scale anymore, but that's not true. You have lots of small teams working on things. Maybe video games like Square Inix wants to make can't be produced at that scale. you know, that size of a team. But I would still love to see him, you know, create effectively a follow-up to this and Tactics Oger because, I mean, yeah, we got tactics advanced. But I feel like that wasn't really a him game. It seems like it was something where he was involved sort of on the production side, but it wasn't like, hey, it's me, Matsuno, and here's the stuff I really

love oozing out from every single scene of this game. It just didn't have that vibe to it. So, you know, I want more of that. I want more of the, like, it's me, Matsuno, I'm the sicko. That's what we're here for. I'm hoping, you know, the success of this game, the producer has talked about like, oh, yeah, now we'd love to do tactics advance. No, that's not the correct answer. The correct answer is give this engine and this tech to Matsuno, put him with the people

that he works with, and just do another one of these damn games. Please, thank you. Scale it back. Make it modest. Think double A. I think upscale indie, please. Yeah, I mean, like the sprite work in this game, even with the, you know, the Evil East Chronicles filters on it, they did a really good job of making the filters tasteful.

It looks much better on the Switch 2 screen than, you know, as big as that is. That's how I've been playing it than I expected. There's like the, the upscaling uses this kind of texture quality to it. It almost reminds me of like when you play. something through S-video and the comb filter is a little messed up. It kind of gives you this like analog kind of toothy texture, almost like a grid. And then they put a little bit of a depth of field element on the battlefield. So stuff in the distance, even other units kind of fade out a little bit and blur a bit. But it's not excessive. It's not like, hey, it's 2D or HD2D. It's

not like looking into the shoebox diorama video game. It's a more subtle approach that I think really, really works. Like, just put him with the sprite artists for this game, hook him up with Ito. I don't know if Ito has even done anything since that Kingsglave. What has he done since then? I don't know. Like, they're just sitting around, get them out of the corner offices, make them make a cool video game. That's my demand. That is what I want from Evil East Chronicles. That and, you know, to actually finish the game. But I'll get there. Hi, I'm sorry, and I'm quite excited, and I'm quite excited. The Unofficial Companion to the Nez and its Games is live now on Kickstarter.

As the lead writer on the book, I can tell you it's going to be a gorgeous, eclectic look at your favourites, but also infamous Kusigay, homebrew, hidden gems and licensed games. I hope you'll enjoy it and you'll back it and you'll share it all around the internet with your friends. It's coming from Ninti Media with a foreword by Jeremy Parrish and superb retrospectives from all kinds of writers. That title again, Nez Book, the unofficial companion to the NES and its games live now on Kickstarter. I really think that the visual style of this game at particular lends better to a lot of the HD upscaling games that we've seen in the last few years because it was a 32-bit sprite-based game. it wasn't something like, you know, even the HD2D stuff, like the Octopath Traveler stuff, that's like using the sprites to recreate what it might look like on like a super NES. And it's not the same as like the little action figures that are basically running around in Final Fantasy Tactics.

So I think this game is probably inherently better off for that kind of thing. But even to your point, it's not as smudgy and weird as those other upscaled games are. like it doesn't look like somebody basically just like, you know, breathe really heavily into a window. And that's what we're seeing on the other side of it. Yeah, it's like they looked at the Eagle SAI filters from an emulator and said, let's do the opposite of that. I hate this. Don't do that. And I agree.

Congratulations, you made the right choice. On the topic of ETO and low budget games. Wow. That's right. Dungeon encounters. Dungeon encounters. I need to play that. Yeah.

It's got the budget of like. like a dollar. It's just mechanics. It's brutal. I mean, it does really seem like they took something along the lines of Final Fantasy Tactics, combined it with a dungeon, like the deep dungeon section of Final Fantasy Tactics and said, now do everything through just a menu, basically. Yeah. It's kind of the unlimited saga of Ito's career. So we should talk a little bit about Ito because he's the one guy who didn't come over from Quest. He was already at Square. And I feel like, you know, aside from the hallmarks of like, hey, it's a chocobo and a black mage, wow.

Like his contributions are what really anchor this in the Final Fantasy universe, the either of that system. And that is because he is really the systems designer that created, who created everything that people love about a certain period of Final Fantasy games. Like Final Fantasy four, really, yeah, four. let's say four through nine, if you love those games. Well, that's because of Hirouki Ito. And he designed the act of time battle system for Final Fantasy 4.

He designed and revamped the Final Fantasy 3 job system for Final Fantasy 5. And then he took those elements and said, how can I turn those into chess, basically? And he's another guy who brings his obsessions with not video. games into video games. And I'm happy to have been the one who pulled this out of him in interviews, but he based the systems of Final Fantasy 4, like the Act of Time battle system, on F1 racing and American football, but specifically F1 racing. Like he described it as, you know, you see cars going around the circle, and the faster cars will pull ahead, and eventually they'll catch up and they'll lap the cars that are slower. So what if battles were

like that, where you had characters who had different speed attributes. And instead of, you know, in a turn-based RPG, like the original Final Fantasy, if a character had a lot of speed, like a high speed rating, everyone got one turn per round, no matter what. But a character who had a high speed rating, like a monk, would get, you know, 16 hits in a single action as opposed to one or two hits. So that was kind of how they calculated that. And that's fine, but it doesn't really, like, what does that just?

mean? It means you're just hitting harder. When you have the active time battle system where individual characters move relative to one another based on their speed rating, what you have is more opportunities to take different actions. Instead of just doing one action more, you're giving, you know, the system gives a character with a high speed rating, the opportunity to make other choices. You know, maybe, you know, you have a really fast character who has healing skills. So if a, you know, a character takes a beating in the party, you can say, whoa, I need my healer to take their next turn and heal instead of attacking or casting attack magic. So, you know, that sort of funnels into the system where it is not active time battle. You have as long to make a move and take your turn as you want.

But he figured out a way to kind of make that active time F1 race lapping system. work within the dynamic of with of chess basically like if you know your bishop uh has a faster speed rating than your pawn then the bishop is going to move more frequently than the pawn uh which would you know just totally totally uh mess up gary casparov but but in final fantasy tactics it works great and it's it's a really effective system here and it lends itself to a lot of interesting ideas. And it really, you know, it really changes the dynamic of the combat. I mean, even tactics ogre didn't really manage to do that. Like, if you look at strategy games and tactics games before this, they tend to be like one side, you know, you choose all the actions

for one entire side and then the next side gets to take all of its actions, you know, like a dice and rocky or something like that, fire emblem. But this is different. It's tactics, not strategy because it is very much about the granular actions that individuals take during combat as opposed to like thinking in terms of how do I want my entire team to move where there is some of that too because you're moving around space up and down you know the the the y axis as well as moving around the x axis and the z axis there's a lot of axes in here even if you don't equip axes hey square jo um oh damn i lost my turn anyway but the point is you're not you're not doing the turns by side thing. You are thinking about how your team works together, but also it's really

important to think, what is this one guy going to do that is super important? It leads to such dramatic situations, too, right? Like, I forget if in the original version, if it showed you the timeline of who was going to act, but just like those times when it was just like, I really, really need a healer right now, or I really need somebody who, you know, just whoever's moving up next needs to be able to kill this guy who's going to be a bigger threat to somebody else. You get those really dramatic kind of moments through that. Yeah, the original version didn't have the timeline. I think that's, was that like a Final Fantasy 10 innovation?

That was 10. Yeah. In any game before that, like, that's the first time I remember seeing that. But you could look at individual units and it would show their current charge time. Yeah. which basically is kind of like the reverse of when they get to move. But you couldn't see that holistically. You had to look at each individual unit and say, okay, so that guy over there was 50. And my, you know, Agrius here, she's at 45. So she's going to move a little faster than the guy

at 50. But, you know, when you're looking at a dozen different units and trying to juggle in your head, who moves when? Who had what score? You know, it's not that useful. The new system, you know, with the timeline on the side, makes good use of the widescreen format for a game that wasn't designed for it. So it's a good addition. But it really, you know, like the job system, we haven't even talked about the job system, but, you know, the conversion of ATB into chess is a great, a great innovation by Ito. And then, of course, that links in with the job system, which we'll talk about separately. But like, all the crunchy stuff in this game, that was him. That was Ito. And, you know, I think it was very compatible with.

Matsuno's vision. It does feel very much like the child of Tactics Ogre in a lot of ways, but, you know, that's what It's, that's what Ito brought to, to the game. I really feel that Ito kind of reined in Matsuno here, because tactics, especially in its earliest form on the, like, the Super Nintendo and the PlayStation stuff, it is not a very fun game to play. And I think with the way that Ito's brain probably works and, like, you know, with what you're saying in terms of like how speed would work in a game of chess and also like how we're stacking different abilities on top of each other and then way down the road at the end of the game you have the opportunity to basically manipulate all of the math however you

want so like if you want somebody that's going to have a better permanent counterattack stat you can manipulate that and make it long lasting and I don't think Monsano was probably as interested in that as he was like okay I've made this really complex rule set so basically I wrote Dungeons and Dragons, but I'm more interested in writing the world guide and stuff like that rather than the Players Manual. And I think Ito probably came in and said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, this is a way that we can sort of like take your old ideas and make them, well, yeah, I mean, we've said accessible a few times. It's not super accessible, really. It does take some homework to get down and really kind of crack this wide open.

But at least, like, this is going to give you the appropriate amount of tools that you can figure these things out for yourself. as opposed to your older game, which was not that. Yeah, I think this is as accessible as a game like this can really get. I mean, I guess you could also look at Vandal Hearts, which came out a little before this on PlayStation. But that's, again, the side-based turns, and it's really messy, and I'm not a huge fan of the Vandal Hearts games. Shining Force, I think, is probably, like, the most accessible I can think of

when it comes to this kind of stuff. But, yeah, yeah, I agree. Outside of that, you have to go back to PC games and, like, the Gold Box D&D stuff, something that is more accurately modeling a tabletop system. Yep, yep. And I feel like that's a good point of reference. I feel like Matsuno, you know, sat down and designed first edition. And then Ito came in and was like, hey, let's go on ahead to third or fourth edition. Let's make it popular and accessible and fun.

And God bless them for that. Because Tactics Oger, you know, the remakes have really refined it and made it a much. more manageable game without necessarily defanging it. But it was, you know, I didn't play the Super Nias version, but I played the PlayStation version that came out after tactics, Final Fantasy tactics. And it was, it was tough to coax joy out of that game at times. Really? I would say so for me. I don't know. Maybe I'm just a big baby. But I feel like, you know, everyone talks about the Weigraf battle at Riavani's Castle. and, you know, the, like, the three successive battles that you have to fight with no opportunity to leave, like, that's the entirety of tactics over. You keep getting into these, like, consecutive battles. And also, you don't heal up between battles. So you get into, like, the third battle of a really grueling set. And your entire party is basically just, like, drained of resources on their last legs. And you go up against this, like, crazy barbarian dude who's three levels higher than anyone else in your.

party and he just like takes his football mace and crushes everyone in two turns. It's, you know, it's rough. It's not a forgiving game. And I feel like Final Fantasy tactics does mitigate that a lot, even though it does have its sticking points. And, you know, that is

why some people feel like it is a lesser game because it's simplified and made less punishing. But God, I don't know that this game would have the reputation that it does if they had just said, let's make it Fight like Tactics Oger, but even harder.

See, I have more fun with Tactics Oger, I think. I'm obviously still a lover of Final Fantasy Tactics, but I like the bigger scale of the battles and having more units out. And the PSP remake in particular, I think, smooth out a lot of that stuff, especially with like the rewind feature. Oh, yeah. No, I gave the PSP remake like a 10 out of 10 on one up. by, you know, A-plus, whatever our scoring rubric was at that point.

Like, I feel like that is almost a perfect game. It is phenomenal. But the original is what I'm talking about. Oh, the original, yeah. The straight port to PS1, where in addition to it being, like, pretty much unvarnished, also has the usual, like, oh, everything's taking longer to load, and it's got slowdown, and it's kind of rough. Yeah. So, yeah. No, the Wheel of Fortune.

What was the subtitle of Tactics Oger's for PSP remake in the U.S.? Let Us Clean Together. Oh, it just stuck with the original. Okay. That's why I couldn't remember. Anyway, yeah, like that remake is spectacular. I mean, it's like they looked at the – I'm pretty sure Matsuno looked at the PSP remake of Final Fantasy Tactics, War the Lions, and said, Mm-hmm.

Thanks, Tose, but I have some other thoughts on how you can make this a better game. And those came out in Tactics Oger. and then they were kind of brought back into this. They brought him on an advisory role for the Evil East Chronicles. And, you know, basically didn't change the story, didn't change the characters, didn't change the battles, took out a lot of the stuff that was added for the PSP game, if not all of it, but just polished it up so it's so shiny and, you know, has all the quality of life features that you want from a modern game.

Like if someone dropped this game as a new release in 20, 25, people would be going nuts about it. Like, where did this come from? This is amazing. So that was, that was kind of the approach he took was like, stick to the original vision. Just make it really, really shiny and good. So that's Ito and Matsuno. We should also talk about Minigawa and Yoshida, although I don't think you can really say, ah, yeah, these guys are like also sickos. I mean, they probably are, but they're more responsible for tone and visuals and kind of creating the look of the world. And Minigawa especially, I think, is kind of under-respected. You know, people talk about Yoshida's characters. designs and then sort of assume that translates into everything visual about the games that he worked on. But no, like the uniform consistency of the world in this and vagrant story and Final Fantasy 12 and then, you know, Crimson Shrown. That is Minigawa's style. Like, Yoshida's art style kind of changed a lot from game to game. You got the little weird Disney people of ogre battle and then the realistic looking people.

of Tactics Oger and then somewhere in between for Final Fantasy Tactics. But consistently throughout it, you have just this sort of color and texture and like a real sense of warmth and I don't know how else to describe, but just a look like nothing else, a very baroque art style, but not in the sense like it's, you know, it's not too grim or anything like that. It just feels like, hey, this is, this is medieval life, but with a little dash of magic and light to it. It's like the the nature of the color, I think, that comes across. They're just anything that is like Evolese or, you know, kind of associated with that. You can look at it and say, like, yeah, no, there's a, there's a unifying kind of character to this. I'd be curious to hear,

Greg, if there's something in illustration or color theory that that holds these together. But there's definitely almost like a like not illuminated manuscript, but this feels like, it is of a material that you could find somewhere. Yeah. There's definitely a texture to Evalice that you don't necessarily see in a lot of other Final Fantasy games or even just like a quality of the texture that's unique to Evalice that, you know, you can just really set it apart. You can really just kind of pick it out from a lineup. And it's things like the storybook kind of illustration style. It's the color palettes.

It's the architecture. You compare some of the buildings to like Vagern's story, which is, you know, in that world, even though it doesn't have the Final Fantasy moniker to it, it's, yeah, there is, it's not just like the look and feel and texture. And it's like kind of extends to like culture in a way too. And you just kind of like feel it in the setting. it's it's very unique and it stands out and it's why I was like so excited like when 12 came out to like go back to that world and see it and just like fully realized and it's why I was excited to try vagran story recently for the first time I think last year and you know that's rough but I'm just seeing that setting in like such a cinematic style yeah it's like oh yeah like I've I've been here before or you know this feels like a kind of home I think if you really want to get a, this is a big ask for people, but if you really want to get a sense of sort of what we're talking about when it comes to, like, tone and texture that these specific people put into their games, play some of the non-minigawa, Akihiko Yoshida, evil-ease games that have come out, like Final Fantasy 12 Revenant Wings and tactics A-2, you know, those games, I mean, I think they may have their fans some. somewhere, but they just don't look at all, like what the other games look like. Even Revenant

Wings, which has like the little cheeby kind of people in it, like, you know, Final Fantasy tactics has a little squat. Like I said, action figures kind of look to them too. But like, it's just, there's a difference in tone. Yeah, the bird people don't fit with Evilly's. Like, they don't look like the rest of Final Fantasy 12's world. There's not even a Brian Blessed in there. Like, what are you doing? But they are in, but they are in Let Us Cling together. You get the little bird people like, oh, those guys would make sense. Yeah, he definitely came from Flash Gordon. No, when Luso from A2 shows up in War of the Lions as a cameo character, you're just like, buddy, what are you doing here?

You look so out of place, even, you know, kind of converted into that, that isometric puppet people style that defines all the sprites. He just doesn't fit. His outfit is too busy. And that's a thing, like Yoshida did a really great job of designing looks. not only for the entire cast. And, you know, kind of that, that style that he worked with where no one has a nose, it does fit a little oddly when you have, you know, some of the older characters like Golana, you know, the Duke who is kind of one of the main fomenters of the War of the Lions.

And he's just like, he's got this kind of big saggy face and this droopy lion mustache, but there's no nose to anchor it. What are you doing? But, you know, aside from a couple of those, like, stylistic hiccups, the characters look great, and everyone kind of has their own design. Like, you can tell, you know, even on the little battlefields, you can instantly tell, like, that's Argath, that's Romsa, that's, you know, that's Delita. You can instantly tell classes apart from one another, even if they're not the class, like the characters you're using. Like, you can tell, hey, there's an archer, there's a time mage. all the portraits of the characters have a unique look to them.

There's a male and a female version of each class. They just have a style that ties them with Final Fantasy, but also kind of grounds them and brings them a little closer to the ogre world without going all the way into that more naturalistic style that Yoshida used there. And it kind of, you know, it walks a really tricky line. But even the more ornate classes like Summoner or, Arithmetic, you know, they have a lot of stuff going on with their outfits, but they're not too busy, and it converts down really cleanly into sprites. And so everyone has like a look that is instantly distinguishable. And, you know, you can see that in Evil East Chronicles when you're going to the job system screen and choosing jobs for characters. And you haven't unlocked most of them, but you see the silhouettes and you're like, oh, yeah, I know what this is. It's got the Summiter horn. It's a Summiter. It just, it all, it all, it all, all works. Like, it's just really, really nicely pulled together. And they all fit within the

bigger, more kind of gothic world that, um, that Minigawa created for everyone to live in. There's a lot of like good color silhouetting to the character design where, you know, a black mage just, I mean, that is just natural to like the history of it. But you look at all these classes and it's just like, you can pick them out because like, even if you, like, squint and you just see like the color bubbles, it's like, you can pick them out. It's like, you can pick them out. You know that Time Age has that red, like, triangle cone hat thing, and

but then, like, when you really sit with, like, the artwork and you see, like, oh, you know, they see the little details to, like, the pants, the sleeves. You see the hatching on the shading. It just gives a lot of like, texture and, like, realness to it. There's fun details

in some of the classes, too. Like, the mime, the female mime, is dressed like a kittune, which, you know, if you know Japanese mythology, you're like, oh, okay, So, you know, she's like a trickster. So it's just, you know, lots of fun little details like that that kind of suffuse the character design. And you might not even notice if you're not looking for it. But if you stop and really take the time, then, you know, it kind of gives you a moment where you say, oh, I get it.

Kay, you were saying? What's most impressive to me about Yosh's work here is not the class design, you know, the jobs. although those are really great it is more with the main cast and it is that the designs have just the right level of detail that they can really do a lot of acting with them

like it's kind of easy to forget like because immediately it kind of turns into cartoons but if you think about like what had been done previously you know like Final Fantasy 6 you get a lot by just having Edgar do like the uh uh uh kind of thing with his finger you know here

like having these detailed sprites able to be so expressive without actually needing to go into an actual like cinematic with bespoke, you know, kind of camera angles thrown in and everything, but it still gets everything across does make it feel very stage playlike, but so much has gotten across just in communicating exactly what a shit Argythe is, right? Just by his body language. I was going to say, the animated, you know, delete a punching Argath. You need to have that. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, we all should have a sprite for punching Argath. No, one of the things that has really struck me, and it has always struck me about this game,

but especially now replaying it through the Evil East Chronicles, is that there are a lot of situational sprites, like animations that exist for, you know, kind of minor characters, characters who only show once or twice but for a specific cutscene. So like when you have the death corpse guy, like grabbing someone's tunic and then throwing him to the ground and the, you know, or the, you know, someone thrown to the ground kind of scurries away backing up, you know, on all fours to trying to get away from being stabbed and someone raises their sword at them. Like those, those animations don't exist anywhere else in the game. They're not used elsewhere. Like some of those characters never show up again. But there are a lot of very specific animations created for the

sprites that you just, you don't see in any other game. Like at the time, modern, before this, it's just, there was a lot of thought and care put into how this, this presentation, the sort of, you know, isometric, isometric diorama with sprites would convey the story without needing cutscenes, without needing even really, you know, dialogue animations. You know, and Evil East Chronicles, people have lip flaps now, but they didn't even need that before. Just a lot comes through. And there's some really great sound design, too. Like, the sound of someone's tunic being clutched. It doesn't sound realistic, but it's visceral. It's like this grotting sound. It's this kind of groaning sound, like something's being torn or, you know,

something's being bent almost to the point of destruction, and it really, it makes you feel it, even though it's just like these little Muppet guys threatening each other. And they're tiny on screen. But it just, it all comes together and it works so well. Listen, like, if somebody gets punched in an Indiana Jones movie, I want to hear that sound effect, not like the squat of what your hand would actually sound like if you punch somebody. Exactly. There's an economy of design in this game, too, and that, like, all of the enemies use the exact same. same sprites as your characters are. I mean, basically, like, the mooks that you turn into a monk or a black major, whatever.

So it's not like they had to design, and they did design a ton of sprites for this game, but like you're still using them over and or seeing them over and over again. And that probably freed up a lot of space for them to do bespoke animations like Romsa pulling a sword on somebody, which is, you only see that, I think, once in the entirety of the game. So I think... Well, then Romsa changes his outfit like three times. Yeah, and so does Delita. Yeah, is it like Squire Ramsa pulling a sword, or is it assless pants ROMSA pulling a sword?

It's a different part of the game, different part of the story. All right, so, wow, we've really not gotten very far on these notes. All right. So, well, I feel like a lot of this is we've kind of jumped around a little bit and brought in some other discussion points. But it is worth, I think, at this point, kind of saying, how is this game different from tactics ogre? And what does it take from Tactics Soger? Because, you know, Tactics Soger deserves its own episodes.

But for the moment, just kind of saying, like, where's the starting point and what does this do different? I think kind of helps define what Final Fantasy Tactics is about. Like, fundamentally, they are based on the same thing, which is a three-dimensional chess with RPG elements. And the three-dimensional chess element is apparently based. on European computer games like Solstice and Night lore, like that, what was it, Rare's Cinemation or whatever it was, whatever it was called. Anyway, so, you know, there is,

there is some computer, some video game stuff being brought in as inspiration, but not what you would expect in a Japanese RPG. So that's pretty fun. Tactics Oger covered a lot of the same storyground as Final Fantasy Tactics. You know, the themes of social, stratification within a society, the divide between personal ethics versus social obligations, and even things like warring kingdoms and how race and, you know, the enduring legacy of centuries-old grudges and hatreds can lead to conflict, can lead to balkanization. So, you know, a lot of that shows up, again, in Final Fantasy tactics. And, you know, the central conflict of the protagonist and his best friend turned not exactly enemy, but opposition.

They find themselves on opposite sides. That's very much in line here. Ramsa and Delita are very much an echo of denim and vice from Tactics Oger. And, you know, they've even got the sister element in there. Kachua is kind of finds a place. a little bit in Alma and Tetra, Tietra, Teta, whatever they pronounced or localized her name as most recently. So, you know, kind of taking some themes. But at the same time, Final Fantasy Tactics is much more simplified versus Tactics Oger. There is no branching scenario. In Tactics

Ogre, you have kind of like decision points at several points, parts of the game. And the choices you make will determine, are you on the side of the law? Are you in the side of chaos? You know, the rebels. Your your pal is always going to be your opposition, but your allies will change and, you know, the nature of your standing in society will change, and the story outcomes will change, and you'll fight entirely different battles. There's none of that here. It's just a straight route through Rams's past, as told by Azalazam T.D. Let's see. I feel like those are kind of the main things.

It also kind of skipped over the whole morality system. Like, Ramza kind of starts out on the wrong side unwittingly, and then eventually comes around to saying, oh, maybe social justice is a good thing. And, you know, there's no moral ambiguity in the sense of tactics ogre. the moral ambiguity is pretty straightforward. Like, Ramsa, you know, he's not perfect, but he's basically fighting for what's right and what's good, although Delita also feels like he's fighting for what's right and what's good. But they are very different images of what that's about. I heard somewhere, and I don't know if I can confirm. I was trying to, I put this in the

notes, I couldn't confirm it, but that allegedly we were supposed to see both sides of Ramza Delete a story at some point. And then for time or development or whatever, that was scrapped. And I am so curious about, like, that timeline, not necessarily the timeline in the story of the game, but the timeline of what that game ends up looking like. And if that becomes like a, you know, and there's another world where, you know, you're either Team Ramsa or Team Delita, I think is really interesting because, yeah, to your point, They have similar ideals, and they're fighting for similar things, but they have different means of getting there.

So I just remember that War of the Lions does throw you into a battle or two where you play as Delita, protecting Ovelia at the waterfall, which was not in the original Final Fantasy Tactics. I don't know. I'm not up to Chapter 2 yet in the replay. But I want to say that was added to War of the Lions. So maybe that was pulled from the original plan, or maybe that's, you know, some, some attempt to manifest that. I don't know. That's in Chapter 2. Yeah, right.

I'm not there yet. It is in the original, though. Well, at least it's in the Evil East Chronicles that just came out, because I just went through it like a couple days ago. It has been a long time since I've played the original Final Fantasy Tactics. So, okay, maybe that was not added for War of the Lions. It's, oh, memory. History is long. It is.

I mean, this game came out half my life ago. It's crazy originally. Well, not quite, but close, close. And who are you, and who, and who, and who, are you the proud lord said that i must bow so low only a cat of a different coat that's all the truth i know in a coat of a code of gold a coat is all the truth i know in a coat of gold a coat of red a lion still has clasped and mine are Long and sharp, my lord, as long and sharp as yours. All right. So my thought here is that if Tactics Oger was a novel, Final Fantasy Tactics is the movie.

It's simpler, more accessible, more linear. I do feel like there are inevitably comparisons being made with Game of Thrones, specifically a song of ice and fire, the books, because the first book, in that series did come out in 1996, but I don't think there's any merit to those. In a funny coincidence, when I started playing the Evil East Chronicles, I was on vacation, and at night, my wife decided, I'm going to rewatch Game of Thrones. So totally independent of me playing this, she started watching through season one of Game of Thrones while I'm playing Evely's Chronicles, and I'm like, you know, I am seeing some interesting parallels, but again, I don't think that Monsonon

sat down, read a Game of Thrones and said, ah, yes, this is going to be my next game, because so much of this does come forward from the work that he had done on Tactics Ogre, which predates a song of ice and fire. So I think, again, it is just two history buffs, looking back at European history, bloody conflicts, the causes of war, the long and difficult relationship between kingdoms and noble families, and. kind of coming to some of the same conclusions, to the point where you do have Ramza, who is, you know, the son of a noble house, but only like the half son, basically. Like, same dad as the brothers who are big movers and shakers in politics, but different mom,

and kind of the outcast as a result of that. So they, you know, he's kind of John Snowed a bit. But ultimately, you know, I think it's just, it's not one of those like people copying from the other. It's just this is how history works. And we keep not learning from our stupid, stupid mistakes. They just had similar fascinations and we're working off of very similar notes, I think. Yeah. And, you know, the history of medieval Europe and post-medieval Europe is very interesting and also very accessible.

There was a lot happening in East Asia, too. But that is much harder to come by if you live in the West because it's just not a point of, of, uh, obsession. So I can understand why George R.R.R. Martin was working from that. But also, you know, if Matano was the kind of guy who was really interested in World War II, I mean, you don't get to World War II without millennia of people beating the hell out of each other over land and blood in Eastern or Western Europe. So, you know, it's all kind of cut from, like coming, drawing from the same source. Yeah. The story is that Tactics Ogre is inspired by the Yugoslav War. And then I've heard it inferred, but I don't think confirmed

that Final Fantasy Tactics is inspired by our pulse from The War of the Roses. I don't know if I've heard that one straight from the horse's mouth, but Yugoslav and Tactics Soger, I know for sure. Yeah. So kind of working backward with Final Fantasy Tactics chronologically, going to a much older source. But there is so much happening, you know, narratively, in Final Fantasy tactics. And you can play this game just jumping in and, you know, saying, oh, I'm going to move my little chess people around and they're going to cast spells on the other chess people and it's going to be really cool. But you can also really try to sit down and figure out, like, what are these people all talking about? Why is Delita so mad? Why does he decide that his best friend is kind of

scummy and responsible for his misery? Like, what's going on there? You know, why are these rebels happening, why they keep popping up? What's the deal with the church, et cetera? Like, the deeper you dig into it, the more you can find, because Matsuno put together a lot of notes and stuffed them into all kinds of places in the game. So if you really want to understand it, you kind of need to read, you know, the source material, which is tucked into tavern conversations and rumors and also just straight up profiles and a hidden section of the menu screen. I think Mata's an academic, and he expects you to be an academic while playing these games. So you've got to do your homework, everybody.

He's lucky that I like to read. Yeah, he made a game that found a bunch of the same kind of nerd, I think. Right, right. I mean, I'm not a war nerd by any means. But I do like reading, and I do like seeing how things all kind of fit together and flow and discovering motivations and connections. So there's that. But that is, it has to be said, much easier to appreciate now that they've relocolized. the game a few times, because those supplemental texts in the original PS1 version of the game

were a little hard to process. They were not the most smoothly translated. And that was a big flaw with Final Fantasy tactics. When it first came out, like, there is some good localization, some punchy localization. It doesn't necessarily fit the vibe of the environment and the time. But, you know, there's some great lines like surrender or die in obscurity or, you know, don't blame us, blame yourself or God. Just things like that that really stick out. But it really feels like the game was localized by a few different groups of people. And there was no central editor saying, hey, let's edit for consistency the way that you get with localizations now. This was right before Richard Honeywood joined Square Nix or Squarespace and said, you know, let's really.

try to unify our localizations and make sure they're smooth and read well from start to finish. So the supplemental stuff, I think, kind of got short shrift in Final Fantasy tactics. So like the tutorials that explain how to play the game, courtesy of Professor Daravon or Darlavan, a little challenging, a little hard to kind of understand what he's even saying. So that's rough. And then the supplemental text that explains, like, who is King Oranus the 3rd? It's good to know, but if you try to read this profile in the PS1 version, you're still going to be left wondering a bit. Like, what was that about? There are holes in actual histories, and there are disparate voices and disparate kind of like

consistencies in different texts, but in a work of fiction where you have control and can use it to be cohesive, you should. Well, I think if you want to have, you know, unreliable narrators and, you know, to Roshamon history, that's great. But, you know, if it's a deliberate choice. You should do it on purpose. It's so funny that it happens in this game with where that's the theme, like of all the games that happen. Let me, let me make sense of this, this inconsistency in history. Oh, buddy, you didn't pull it off. Yeah. But it's, it's all good now. You know, the war of the lions localization, I think they tried to be Alexander Smith without actually being Alexander Smith. And I like it, but I do feel like it doesn't always quite hit the mark

in places. The new localization seems much stronger. I've seen some people complaining because it uses phrases that do definitely come from Game of Thrones like Bin the Knee. But I mean, you know, that's just part of kind of the pop culture of parlance. It's what people expect from that era. But everything reads smoothly. And the voice work, like the voices that they hired, are so good, and just like the accents that the characters use, you can immediately place like, this person is Highborn, this person is clearly, you know, rough and tumble, this person is, you know, maybe northern. Like, they really kind of worked all around the UK, essentially, and pulled in a lot of different, a lot of dialects and accents, and they all work together really well

with what's actually being said. I was ready to kill the voiceover on, just like on site of anything that annoyed me. And it won me over. So it was a map that I was on where I had an enemy down to one hit point. And Argath just threw a stone at it and killed them and took my experience and just goes, I earned this. He just blurred that out.

And man, I learned to hate them all over again. Yeah. Yeah, the one great regret that I have is that they will have taken out the battle with zombie Argath that they added to War the Lions. It was, it was, it was totally superfluous and didn't do anything to move the story. But just the opportunity to kill Argath again, it's like, oh yeah, thank you. You know exactly what I play this game for. Go play hundreds of hours of Final Fantasy 14 so you can kill Arguson again.

One more time. I mean, that's a lot of a commitment, but knowing that I can do that, I might, I might Just try it. My favorite thing about the voice acting in the new version is that who they assigned a voice actor to for the hired mercenaries that you get is totally random, right? So, like, I had, I had gotten somebody that had a 70 fate stat from the recruitment. So, perfect. This will be my white mage. But he's got this crazy deep voice, like, I was born for this whenever he gets onto the field.

And it sounds so out of place for my little guy in the white robe. It's, it, I chuckle like a chumper. He's channeling Ronfar from Lunar 2. The, the criminal white mage. I mean, no, Ronfar is great because it's one of the few white mage, like male white mages who's just like a straight up, you know, usually that kind of role gets assigned to a female character. Yeah. But Ronfar is just like this scummy, uh, jackass of a gambler, just totally degenerate, but also a white mage. dude. And it's, it's so, it's, I, I love that character because he's just so

playing against type. It's a little bro-y for, yeah. Yeah, so, so I'd say, you know, just rename that character. Rename him Ron Farr and you're good to go. Taking you up on that. All right, so the other big thing we haven't really talked about in terms of systems and world for Final Fantasy tactics is how much it owes to Final Fantasy 5 and exactly how the job system works. Because it is so good. It has, like, maybe this was the first game, I think, where I ever really experienced that compulsive one more battle. sensation because you start earning job points for characters and you're so close to unlocking this ability you want or unlocking the next job or something. And you're like, you know what? I really got to go to bed. I got work in the morning. But okay, I'm going to do one more random

battle and I hope it's not monks at the waterfall because I want to just get my team over. Like, I want to get this one character over the hump. But then as soon as you do that, you get that character over that hump, and you realize, oh, this other character, you know, that monk is about to unlock Jamedo, and I really need that skill. So, okay, I guess I could do one more fight tonight. And before you know it, it's 3 a.m. and your next day is just completely a loss, just a total write-off because of Final Fantasy tactics. And that's down to the job system. So I'm going to, I've been talking a lot. I'm going to let someone else take it away. Go for it, someone else. So like the job system that I mean it's it's classes it's classes from D&D is is what it is you know different characters with their different base stats are better suited for you know individual roles on the battlefield and it is kind of pulling from these fantasy archetypes you know knights thieves different kinds of mages in order to specialize.

each kind of person that you have on the battlefield. And as you perform actions as those classes, you gain special experience, which can be spent just on skills for that class that will unlock things you can do as that class when you are remaining as them, but also give you the ability to take those skills and perform them as a secondary action when you are another class. So, Kay, you mentioned base stats. Do you want to talk about Brave and Faith, which we have mentioned before? I feel like it's important for people to know about.

Fundamental. Yeah. It's such an important factor in how hard you hit, how hard you get hit, how much damage you take for magic, and whether or not you decide, you know what, I'm going to go become a nun and leave this party. And it doesn't explain it at all. You have to dig in so hard. Your character wanders off. You're like, yes, I got her faith up so high. She's going to be the ultimate white mage.

Oh, now she's gone. Yeah. Has somebody else want to take the brave and faith? So there are two, each character in the game, good, evil and monster has a staff that dictates basically their physical damage and their, what would be like magical or sub-damage if we want to think of it that way. And that's like giving and receiving. So bravery dictates, like, how often counterattacks are triggered. So a higher bravery will mean like you're going to hit harder physically. You're going to be hit harder physically.

If you have some sort of counter attack attached to whatever class you have, how often that's going to trigger versus faith, which will dictate how hard magical attacks will hit. I don't think it has anything to do with how fast they're cast. I can, Greg, you guys might. I don't believe so. But it does affect how much healing you take from spells. So it's not just attacking, but it's like how often will a buff or a debuff land? Like having a high faith is good and bad because you can get all the perks but also take all the damage. And like you may not revive somebody because your white mage may have a faith stat that's too low for it to work as consistently as you want, things like that.

So again, it's just more under the hood math. But so when you can, we alluded to this earlier too, that you can hire help or you can get other new characters, but they come with an assigned faith and bravery stat. So when you're building a team and when you're building this individual character, you should, you should not, you know, you're not required to do this, but like you're sort of encouraged to build them toward a specific path. So like if I got somebody that's got a higher bravery stat, they're going to be a great monk someday because they'll come. counterattack everything. Or a higher faith stat, they're going to heal when I want them to heal and it's going to work. That's what I want. Yeah. And from the very outset, you have two base classes. There's basically the brave class, which is Squire, and the faith class, which is Kimmist, which maybe a little counterintuitively, chemist unlocks all the magic branches. And there are

some jobs, more advanced jobs. It require high levels in both like fields. You know, you need to go down both pathways. So if you want, say, Romsa to be the ultimate bruiser, okay, sure, you don't want to put him out on the front lines as a mage because they're very delicate, but you're not going to be able to unlock, you know, some of the stuff that you really want. Like, samurai, I think, needs magic. You know, there's some really great high-level classes, advanced classes that are practically game-breaking. But, you know, you need to, you can't overly.

specialize. You have to sort of diversify. I think that is demanded by the low headcount that you have, you know, the maximum of six, and that's including gas. You know, having hybrids does, you know, serve you well, I think. Something very important at the beginning, you will get just a handful of Merck's that you have with you, just random guys. Whether they are a squire or a chemist has nothing to do with their starting brave or faith. throw out whatever they gave you, go in and reassign them based on those numbers, and you'll have a much better time in Chapter 1. Make sure you get everybody's astrological sign, too. Yes.

You know, I never pay attention to that stuff. I don't think anyone really does, but just the fact that it's in there and explained not very well, and then when you look up the chart for how that works, and it's completely obtuse. Yeah, it's just one of those things where you really only care about it when you're assigning Ramza's birth date because if you put the wrong date for Ramza, they could have a really bad time with Weigriff. So you want to avoid that. But we'll talk about that in a future episode because that is that is the rough spot. Yeah, so jobs, basically there are magic jobs, physical jobs, hybrid jobs. But there's a lot that you can do with jobs. And again, this is based pretty heavily

on the Final Fantasy 5 system, most of the classes come from 5. There are a few new ones, and there are some that kind of combine competencies, I believe. And some of the skills you may not think, like this is a very useful job. Like Geomancer does not initially seem like the greatest way to invest your job points. But the thing about jobs is that you have the job that you are currently active in, but then you also have the ability to assign secondary abilities and additional skills that you pull from other jobs. And so you're not just like, you know, I'm a white mage, so all I can do is cast healing magic. You could also say cast time magic or cast, you know, like elemental buffs on your party or summon monsters or, you know, you could be a white mage ninja

if for some reason you thought that was a good idea. It's possible. I don't think that is a good idea. But anything is out there for you to do. And unfortunately, this doesn't give you the best thing about the Final Fantasy 5 job system, which is that when you mastered a job in 5, you gained a permanent passive buff for your character who had that job mastered to carry into any other job. So there were all these little subtle elements that you could basically,

acquire and really turn yourself into a massive death-dealing death machine. But you can't do that here. Instead, you can basically have your current job and the skill set from a second job, and you have to unlock skills within that set in order to use them. And then you have three passive abilities, basically, the reaction, the essentially like the stat buff, the like, like the, what do you even call that? Like, it's reaction, um, there's like movement and.

Reaction passive. Uh, reflux. Uh, reflux is, yeah, reflex is, yeah. Oh, yeah. Reflect is reaction. Yeah, yeah. So, so basically anything you unlock from any job, you can stick that on your character if they fall into those categories.

So, you know, right away, it's great for your Squire characters to ignore rush and throwing rocks and stuff and just go for, bonus JP. So you get extra job points on any character who has that passive skill equipped for as long as they have it equipped. That is an amazing thing about Squire. And any Squire can do that. And any character who has learned that as a squire can become any other class and carry forward the job point bonus when they're in combat. Now you'll get into a point later in the game where you're like, you know, I actually need some more useful passive skills than just getting

extra job points. I'm more concerned about surviving here than I am about buffing up my skills for the future. So you can swap them around any time, but there's a lot of stuff you can do. You know, you may decide I want my ninja to be able to equip shields. So not only, oh, I guess you don't want to that because they're two-handed. But, you know, some kind of fragile, fragile physical class, like thief, thief is a good one to put shields on. Shield will parry and attack. a lot, especially if you have high bravery. So you put that on a very delicate physical class, and suddenly they become a lot more survivable. And it works against physical attacks and magical attacks. Shields are very useful. So, you know, maybe you don't want the equip JP, maybe you

or the bonus JP. Maybe you want to equip shields instead. And that's, that's your choice for you to do with your party as you see fit, because you are Ramsa, the little man telling everyone how to go out and die. And that's why Delita hate you. The Super Squire. Yeah. He is the Super Squire. There's so much cool stuff that you can do as a squire with Ramza that no other squire can do, which is not obvious from the outset of the game. You don't necessarily realize it. But some of the best things you can do for your character for your party is to just keep Ramza as a squire and learn all these crazy abilities,

like screaming at people. So the fact that you can mix a match, you know, basically through the entire, you know, job history of an individual character, means that you can plan a specific approach. Do you want to shore up weaknesses? Do you want to double down on advantages? And I love that capacity for planning, not just, you know, looking up on game facts and getting the flow chart of what you need to unlock what, but just to understand. like, I don't know, I always like get points in Ninja and Dragoon because I do not want to have a wall stop me from going where I want to go on the map. I want to just be able to hop on top of that thing. You can break so many battles that way just by advancing through the order of operations

that the map was designed for. Like, you get, you get the ability to just mess with so many things that are just like taken for granted in the design. of the scenarios. Now you're talking like a pro. But something we have not discussed is that there is the 3D component to this chess. And maybe that should be our final discussion for this episode, which did not get us to Chapter 1, but I don't want this to drag on all night.

So do you want to talk about how is this game of chess 3D and what difference does that make for combat? So a lot of strategy RPGs have terrain as a deciding factor, as far as like adding and subtracting attack bonuses, evasion bonuses and things like that. But because this is sort of diorama base, as Greg mentioned earlier, a lot of the environment has height requirements. So there could be like two to three steps higher than what you could normally basically hop up on unless you had the corresponding movement skill unlocked in a class. So like the dragoon has, I think it's called ignore elevation. So they can't sort of just hop up on anything. But a squire or a chemist, they can't just, like, go up a waterfall at will.

The maps are designed to have elevation be a real factor here. So in planning where you want to move your units and in conjunction to where you think the enemy AI is going to move their units, there's going to be a time where you move somebody sort of on the side around a map because you think that you can flank. the enemy soldiers around, say, like a town square or something like that. But by the time you get to that end of the map, you may not be able to have the height movement requirement to get up to basically meet those guys, but they can shoot down at you. And that's something that you often have to learn the hard way. A lot of the job classes have ways to mitigate this. We mentioned the Degroon's got to ignore elevation.

There's a teleport that's very, very finicky. I've still never really wrapped my head around exactly how it works. But, you know, thinking in terms of not only, like, distance but height is really how a lot of the more difficult battles play out. Something that happens in Chapter 1, this is sort of the notorious you have to be this tall to ride this ride moment is the daughter slums where there's an archer that goes way up into, like, on the top of the building, fairly close to where this is a really well-designed fight. So, like, the archer goes way up into a building that's close to where your units are to start. And this should be sort of a sign for the player that, okay, this enemy character can shoot you from wherever you, almost wherever you are on the map. But we're giving you enough space that within two turns you can run this guy down. And that's what you should be doing.

This is something that you should be thinking in terms of now because it's not just where you are. It's where basically everybody is with the height disadvantages and disadvantages. disadvantages and who can play around those, those sort of limitations. Yeah. It also takes line of sight into consideration. I love that archer in the door to slums because he has a long bow, which not only does more damage when it fires from higher than somebody and they can get more range, but like he can shoot somebody who is behind another building in the slums, which is super important.

There's another archer there. This is probably before you've unlocked archers yourself. there's another archer who has a crossbow who needs line of sight, and you get this demonstration of the ways that those work. But you probably already noticed this with throwing stones or throwing potions where you were trying to hit somebody. And then, you know, when you brought it up, when you targeted that person and said, hey, no chance to hit. Well, there's somebody standing in front of them, dummy. It's going to hit this other person instead. And you can game that to hit people you otherwise wouldn't be able to hit.

but it is 3D even to that degree where even a chemist who is not directly in combat will benefit from being higher up just because of line of sight. Yeah. Oh, go ahead. No, I was going to say,

the other thing that I really like about it, so obviously there's so much you can do with a 3D map that you can't do and a 2D map like in Tactics Ogre. The other thing that I just really like is that a lot of these maps have a sense of place and have like a, bring a feeling to them. And like when you're in chapter one, when you're kind of chasing down the corpse brigade, you know, there are a few maps where

they're kind of like positioned in like a hideout. You've kind of got them cornered. And in those moments, it kind of marries with the story of like you feel, you start to realize that you're, if you don't realize at this point that you're the baddies, like you really do feel like you're just kicking down their door. And like, yeah, like John mentioned, you can like flank them. You know, there's like a couple different inferences that you can kind of slip in. So if you want to like block the front door and have another guy go around back, you can do that. And so on top of just what it unlocks in terms of just strategy, like there's just like such a feeling to some of these places.

And I'm looking at the, there's a website where you can look at different Final Fantasy maps and pan through them in like full 3D. And like, you know, I'm looking at like the execution site. I'm looking at the falls and everything. Like, these battles aren't just, I'm in a chess board and some spaces are higher. Some spaces are lower. You know, there's a narrative element to it, too, that is just really engaging and memorable. And you remember those kinds of moments. And also, yeah, that one sniper chapter one, it's just a real bastard.

Yeah, I mean, that is really kind of the winnowing rod. But you mentioned the sand rat cellar, or whatever they're calling it now, the hideout there. That's another space where you kind of learn, if you've built your party right, that you can ignore line of sight a little bit. If you have a mage, you can bring a mage right up to the wall, and you can basically hit everyone inside of the fortress. If you target someone at the beginning at the turn and then move, basically you can pull your mage away from any danger and have them fire off a spell that's going to hit, you know, a couple of CTs later and leave you completely safe while you've got them boxed in and possibly hit multiple characters with a single spell.

And think about how, like, terrifying that is. aren't shy about doing that to you also, but in that case, like, that, I feel like that battle is kind of a gimmee where they're just like, hey, how do you want to go in and slaughter a bunch of guys? Like, what's your trick now? These guys are pretty squishy. Go for it. Have fun. But later, they're going to do this to you. Yeah. And think about, like, how terrifying that is. If you're, you're cooped up in your hideout and you've got the entrances boarded and you've got a guy here, you got a guy here, and suddenly the inside of your house is on fire, like that, and you're just getting steamrolled by these nobles. Like, it's, yeah, it stirs up feelings in me, which is, is, is, that's interesting that I get that from like the mechanics and like the level design and that kind of interplay, I think is just really interesting and fascinating.

What if Santa Ana's forces could cook the people inside the Alamo alive? Yeah, that's Oh Things got dark Alamo Yeah, Alamo fandom would have a very different I would not go to a movie theater

called the Alamo If that's how it would be You're not allowed to yell fire In a crowded theater So, you know, it's just It's problems But the daughter slums teaches you this too

Because it has two enemy black mages Yeah, so like once you Yeah, you come to terms With the fact that there's There's height in distance with archers and what they can do to you, but like, you also have to on the fly get ready for the fact that around the corner a black mage is going to cook you and they can do that unless you figured out how to use a black mage at this point, which I guess I think all four

of us have probably more than unlocked a black mage by the time we get to that fight. But like a first-side player. I usually go with archers and a knight with like plus one movement. That brings me in close range to the black mages. And they, yeah, may not even. I think this time. I played through, they did not actually get a spell off. I, you know, no quarter.

Eldigweil. Do it. Yes. I concur. Okay. So, so Final Fantasy Tactics. What a cool game. that we've barely even scratched the surface on with this conversation.

We got about, as is usual, for most Retronauts episodes these days, halfway through my planned conversation. We are on page, let's see. Five of 12. Five of 12. Right on. Okay. So, folks, there is another episode about Final Fantasy Tactics cooking.

It is simmering on the stove right as we speak. Yes, we'll be regrouping before too long. Just play the former party music right here. Yep, just imagine that. And that's your podcast lineup for next time. So I don't know when that will be, but probably not too long from now. I don't want to overload people on Final Fantasy Tactics, but I also don't want the conversation to get stale.

So we'll be talking more about the story and many of the complexities and design choices that they made with Final Fantasy Tactics. I still think we can get through this series in three episodes, but I don't know. Chapter one's short. It is. It's just like a little, you know, on Wikipedia, that would be a stub. It would need expansion. So, I think with this, I will let all of you go and get about your Sunday evening, maybe probably to go play more Final Fantasy Tactics. In the meantime, I will let you, the listener, go, but I want you to do. I want you to to know that we love you all for your support. This has been a Retronauts episode, and Retronauts is a community-supported show. Sometimes we have ads, but let's be honest, the ad market these

days, garbage, not making a lot of money for us. So we rely on your support through Patreon to justify us getting together on a Sunday evening and talking about video games. I mean, it's probably something we would do anyway, but we wouldn't, like, publish it to the internet. That's crazy. That's what Patreon is for. So check us out at patreon.com slash retronauts. If in this current era and hard economic climate as the 50 years war dwindles, we don't want to drive you to join the Corps Brigade. So feel free to listen to us on the free public feeds also. Pretty much any platform that is not Spotify contains Retronauts these days. You can enjoy us there. Listen to us for free. It's okay. We are just grateful for your support, for your enthusiasm, and for your ears.

So retronauts, patreon.com slash retronauts. Also the internet. Anywhere you want to go, we're out there. Ah, so that's it for the show and our sales pitch. Let's work through the crew this time and everyone else can give their bona fides. Kay, let's start with you. As I said at the beginning, you can find my work, too many podcasts that I do on duckfeed.tv, and you can follow me on Blue Sky at K-a-e-Zone, K-A-Y-E-O-Zone. John? Hi. I have a YouTube page called Anitated Games, where I take one game and basically break it

apart into many, many, many pieces to look at the various reasons it came to be, the religious, just the pop culture references, everything that's inside of it. Recently, I've turned to making those into shorts, so lots of Symphony in the Night Shorts over the last year. So you can find me on YouTube at John Lernet. You can also find me a blue sky at John Lernet as well. And Greg? I will be doing the cover art for this episode,

so you can check that out, or you'll already be checking that out. I do a web comic called Monsters and Mysteries at MNM Comic.comic. It is inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, RPGs, and no particular group of teenagers and their pet dog. It is a mystery of that machine of yours. Yeah. And I'm on Blue Sky at Let It Mellow, M-E-L-O. I post a lot of Final Fantasy opinions on there. As one should.

And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, here on Retronauts. Also on the internet. You can find me on Blue Sky as Jay Parry. Parrish, what are in Parrish, thank you, J-P-A-R-I-S-H dot B-S-K-Y dot social. You can find me on YouTube, masquerading as Jeremy Parrish, where I talk about video games, not Final Fantasy Tactics yet, maybe someday. And also, I do a lot of stuff with limited run games. Perhaps you own some of it already because you buy cool collector's editions of cool video games and I make cool things that go inside. So please check that out, or just some of the standalone books we publish.

again, nothing on Final Fantasy Tactics, but now I kind of want to do that. So look forward to that, I guess, and look forward to a future episode talking about more Final Fantasy Tactics. In the meantime, we will let you go play Final Fantasy Tactics because that is what every right-thinking person should be doing with their spare time. Thanks everyone for your participation. Thanks everyone listening for your listening. And I guess this is where we play the little fanfare and we decide who is the best performing combatant this episode. I'll leave that as an exercise to the listener. Thank you.