Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 233: Final Fantasy Tactics

Episode Date: July 15, 2019

Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, Kat Bailey, and Shivam Bhatt equip their Dictionaries and set their Reaction Skills to "Podcast Debate" as they form up into a squad and take on Final Fantasy's all-time greatest spin-off: 1998's Final Fantasy Tactics for PS1.

This week in Retronauts, we opened the podcast with faith. Inside, we found insightful conversation. This episode is a gift from God. This is the way. Hi, everyone, welcome to an episode of Retronauts that is a podcast that you're listening to right now. It's about old games. In fact, it is about an old game called Final Fantasy Tactics this week. I am Jeremy Parrish.

I am old. I like games, and therefore, I am hosting Retronauts this week. But who else is here in this closed, non-ventilated box with me, Jeremy Parrish? Hey, it's Bob Mackie, and I had a good feeling unrelated to this podcast. Is it something you can talk about in Play Company? I cannot. I'm sorry. Historical heretic, Cat Bailey.

I wanted to have a good feeling, too. This is Shivamput, and the stars were in alignment. There you go. All right. Well, now we've made lots of video game references, and we can call it a day. But instead of doing that, we're going to keep talking. Because this episode is another Final Fantasy Deep dive episode, and it's about one of the great ones. It is about Final Fantasy tactics.

Chris Kohler doesn't agree that it's one of the great. great ones. That's why he's not here and you are, Sheva. He also thinks Final Fantasy 5 is the best Final Fantasy. I mean, it's up there. If he likes 5, he should like tactics. I know, it's weird, right? Tactics is literally 5-2. No, it's not. It's very much in the spirit.

It's a very slow, isometric tactics RPG, which by the way, I like that, but if it's not, if that kind of strategy thing is not to your taste, I can understand we don't like it. Well, why don't we talk about that? Because Final Fantasy Tactics was Squares curveball. This was the

first game to bear the Final Fantasy name to come out in both Japan and especially America after Final Fantasy 7. And, you know, Final Fantasy 7 was big in Japan, but Final Fantasy was already popular over there. But Final Fantasy was not really a big thing here. It was very much sort of a niche appeal sort of game sort of series that had been very spotty and inconsistent with its localizations. Some of the games didn't make it over and so on and so forth. But then Seven came along and just blew the doors off in terms of fine. of sales. It's, I think, the second or third best-selling game on PlayStation worldwide, right after

like Grand Turismo. So it was just a massive hit. And it really awakened a lot of people to the existence of role-playing games, people who, you know, wouldn't have given RPGs the time of day before that. So when another game came out six months later, bearing the name Final Fantasy, people sat up and took notice. And then they played Final Fantasy tactics. and it was absolutely nothing like Final Fantasy 7.

It was as far away from Final Fantasy 7 as you could possibly have gotten. They both shared some Final Fantasy trademark elements in common, but boy, it was just like, you know, for most people, it must have just been a real what-the-hell moment. I mean, to be fair, the Final Fantasy tactics, even for old school Final Fantasy players who had just come back to the series, They were still looking like this is nothing like the 16 or 8 games, I remember. Yeah, well, I came in through Final Fantasy 6, but this was circa 1999. And so just playing a term-based RPG was a big leap for me. And playing a term-based, isometric tactics game with grids and everything was even an even bigger leap. And it was several years before I would really get into that through Fire Emblem.

So I saw Final Fantasy Tactics on the store shelf, and I said, oh, no, I'm not going to play that. There weren't really a lot of localized precedents to Final Fantasy tactics. There was, I guess, Vandal Hearts from Konami was kind of the same thing, but it, you know, it worked more in the Shining Force system where you didn't move, like player by player, character by character, but rather side by side. And, you know, Shining Force worked the same way. I don't think a tactical RPG had come to the U.S. before. And, you know, in fairness, there weren't a lot of them. The precedent for this game was Tactics Oger by Quest and Inix, and that did not get localized until the PlayStation remake, which came out after Final Fantasy tactics. Well, no.

Was it? No, it came out on PlayStation. Atlas released it here in the U.S. About a year after Final Fantasy Tactics. The best Americans really got were like the SSI Gold Box games in the late 80s. They got the Shining Force games, Ultima. Yeah, see, I was going to say that the... The biggest antecedent that FF tactics had was Dungeons and Dragons.

I mean, that's how I found it because when I was in high school and all my friends at PlayStation's and I didn't, my friend came by and was like, dude, shoot me, you've got to check this out. He showed me the manual to FF tactics. And the first thing I saw was, A, it looked like the old white wizard and black wizard from Final Fantasy I again, which was immediately pleasing to me. But two, it was like our D&D campaign came to life. Yeah, I mean, I didn't have the D&D background. I did have a Final Fantasy background, so having played all the Final Fantasy games to have come to America to that point, I had a lot of uncertainty about this. And I didn't initially buy it.

Like, I usually buy Final Fantasy games at launch. But this one, you know, even though I was in the kind of a point in life where I could buy the games I wanted on launch day, certainly I did that with Final Fantasy 7. This one I passed on for about a month until I finally was just like that. like, you know, it's Final Fantasy. I should buy it. By the time I bought it, it was somewhat rare, unfortunately. I think I had a pre-order for this game.

And my experience with strategy RPGs were like Shining Force. And there was like a Godzilla game for the NES. That was like a strategy game where you moved around. Yeah, yeah. Those are my two existing experiences with this genre. But I was reading about it on like, I think, Alt, Final Fantasy or whatever news group. Because it was out in Japan like a year before it came out in America.

And I was like, oh, all my favorites are here. And this game is a lot like five, which I believe I just played the ROM translation of. So I was super excited about it. And I was on board, like, day one, even though I was still, like, very new to this, had no idea what tactics ogre was. I played Ogre Battle, but was very bad at it. Oh, yeah, Ogre Battle, too. Yeah. And I got this with the strategy guide that you have right there, not to spoil anything.

Right. We did get Ogre Battle before F.F. Tactics. But that's, I consider that game nothing at all like Final Fantasy Tactics. No, it's not. But it's still a top-down kind of strategy. sort of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I feel like those, you know, they have the map in common, basically. And then you get into the battles and they're totally different. But, you know, even though I was kind of like, I don't know about this, I picked it up and started playing it and was like, this is actually very interesting. And then I got to, I believe, Dordor Trade City. Is that the one? And the black wizards destroyed me. And I started over and it clicked. And I guess, that could have been, that could have been the, like, the wall, like that, that first battle where you fight against wizards, that could have been the wall where I just said,

I don't, I don't like this. But I think the combination of the visuals and the amazing music and just the fact that it did kind of have that, like, classic final fantasy vibe in some sense, I was like, you know, I'm going to figure this out. And I ended up playing it all the way through, and I love it. I think tactics was probably the best expression of being able to get people who play traditional RPGs into a tactical wargamer space that you could possibly have because of the fact that it had all the Final Fantasy vocabulary, right? It had things like Fire, Ferraga. Well, sort of.

I mean, sort of. It had the Final Fantasy vocabulary like muddled through inconsistent translations. Sudo-fogative, right? You had like mall balls and things. But it had at least the visual language that if you played a Final Fantasy game before, you understood, and you could at least use that. as to ease your way into the actual meat of this game, which is the depth of tactical strategy, because you didn't have the hump to overcome of trying to understand all the

low-level vocabulary on the way there. Yeah, I mean, if the first tactical RPG I'd played had been based on, like, you know, Shinemagame Tensei, I'd be like, what is a boo-foo? Yeah, exactly. But, yeah, I knew what ice and ice two were. That's fine. I've got those. That makes sense.

Yeah. I'd absolutely agree. So I personally came into Final Fantasy Tactics. through advance because, yeah. Hey, I like that game. I also like that game. It's got some problems, but I played it for like 100 hours. It's fine.

I would not play it again. I skipped the original Final Fantasy Tactics, and it wasn't until years later that I picked up Advance Wars, and then it all clicked, and I was like, oh, I like this term-based, top-down strategy type thing, and that got me into Fire Emblem, loved Fire Emblem to death, and so I was like, okay, then obviously I'm going to like Final Fantasy Tactics.

And I went into Final Fantasy Tactics, and it was extremely different from Fire Embleman. For one thing, Fire Emblem has way more characters on the screen. For another, you can move them all in one phase. And finally, Final Fantasy, Fire Emblem is way more tactical, whereas Final Fantasy Tactics is way more about customizing your individual characters. Yes, there are tactical elements in Final Fantasy Tactics for sure, but you can steamroll that game with the right character build and the tactics don't even really matter. It's more strategic. I feel like Fire Elm is more strategic, and Final Fantasy Tactics.

In what sense? I mean, it's like moment to moment to solving a map. To me, strategic is more about like the kind of taking the overall view of things. Sure. Yeah. And to me, there's a lot more of that in... Customizing your character and building them up through the jobs and everything, getting the abilities together, and then basically breaking the game.

Whereas in the Fire Emblem, you equip a weapon and you are arranging them in formations and trying to basically outflank the enemies and use the map to your advantage. You do that in tactics. but more so in Fire and Blum. But I think one of the things about tactics especially is that when you're talking, it's a single-player game, right? This is a game made for one player, and the designers of the game know that. So they give you the ability, if you want to,

to break the game in half and just go to town with your calculator and steamroll and knock everything out. Well, and also, it's not like the game is only story battles. The story battles are fixed, but there are random encounters that scale according to your levels. Oh, yeah. And if you, you know, if you go crazy and, like, totally break the game, you're going to end up with a battle against, like, level 99 monks that are just going to annihilate. Oh, yeah, the black chocobos and the red chocobo battle encounters, like, oh, Lord. But at the same time, you can grind yourself up a lot and then go against enemies that have high level equipment early, steal their equipment, and all of a sudden you're just annihilating the game. But that's fine.

The game is built to let you do that. It's like Final Fantasy 8 in that regard. That's why I like it more than Fire Emblem. Yeah, I mean, I feel like Fire Emblem is really kind of like puzzle solving. It's like especially like, you know, I feel like it's even more the case with Advance Wars actually. But the Fire Emblem does that a lot too, where it's like each turn of the battle is sort of prescribed according to a kind of like a predefined script. And you can you can respond to that. but, you know, really to be able to succeed in Fire Emblem, you just need to play, lose, figure out what you're going to need to do in that battle, hit it again.

I actually strongly disagree with that sentiment. But I like Fire Emblem. I like Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics for different reasons. Sure. So I think they're both marvelous games. Just, I came into Final Fantasy Tactics true Fire Enblem, and that's my perspective, I suppose. That's fine. I make a point of not getting into semantic battles about video game terminology.

So I'm going to agree to disagree with you here. Fair enough. But in any case, we can agree that Final Fantasy Tactics was nothing like Final Fantasy 7, which was a traditional turn-based RPG in the console style that gave you 3D characters and, you know, spell effects and stuff on pre-rendered or, you know, drawn out, fixed backgrounds. Whereas Final Fantasy Tactics was the opposite. It gave you hand-drawn characters and spell effects, some of which were polygonal, pliginal. but they were all on 3D backgrounds that rotated like little tiny diaramas and they gave you the ability to manage height and depth and distance

and like all of these things factored into gameplay in a way that they did not in a normal final fantasy system where you had three or four characters or five if you were playing four and they were just lined up in a row and you hit each other and that was it you could not do that in final fantasy tactics you needed to really think about battlefield positioning elevation, your proximity to other characters, your proximity to your own team, you're positioning relative to the enemy characters, like are you in front of them, are you behind them? All these things matter.

Light of sight. The prototypical Final Fantasy Tactics map in my mind is the one that has basically a mountain with an archer standing on top, and they fire an arrow, and it goes, do you. That's daughter trade city. You've got the archers up high. You've got the wizards down below. They're just going to wreck you. Or if you're going to your gunner and you put your no height on, go to the hangman or the site with the guillotine on it, go to the top and just start going in the 90s term postal and sniping people out.

In that regard, it is very tactical and I do like that element. Now, the thing is all those things you mentioned, line of sight view, your range, the weapons, like when you throw a spell, it's got four or five like blocks it, highlighted to say this is where the spell will actually hit the target. All of these things to me were just like, it's literally D&D rules come into play. And I've always held that Final Fantasy is basically the Dungeons and Dragons fanfic from the first game onwards. Like the first game was literally you could map it to the D&D like players handbook. Right.

Well, this game has mind flares, which are supposed to be mind flares, but hey, whatever. This game also has like one of the worst translations next to Sigodend in history. Doesn't it also have Prima Death? It does. Yeah. Talk about that. But it just was immediately, like, unlike any JRP, this was the first game that I didn't need to have a translation of, like, systems translation to understand how to process this game. Like, as a D&D player, I understood what weapon speed meant and why this player can go twice this turn before the other guy gets to actually catch his spell.

And it would, it felt like, it really just felt like I got to. to finally play the D&D games I've always dreamed of, and it was a Final Fantasy game. That's really interesting because I think of D&D as, you know, a dungeon crawler, right? And with a lot of conversations back and forth. But I can totally see where you're coming from because when you're in D&D, you've got the map and you have encounters are very tactical and you're using the layout of the whatever space the DM has created to be able to visualize the encounter. So you're seeing D&D-style encounters being visualized by the fantasy tactics.

Like D&D came from chain mail, a tabletop war game, right? So the whole point of the first few editions was like your character can move six inches forward and your radius of your fireball is like, you know, eight inches across that you can launch and throw. And that was meant to map to your actual grid that you're playing on your table. So when I sit there and I use BN and he's a black mage and he casts fire two going three miles away and you can see exactly how many squares is going to hit the height and everything. like, oh, my God, this is everything I've waited my whole life to be able to do. Pre-usual, everything is D&D.

You know, I have a type. Every RPG is D&D. Yeah. Like, it all goes back to D&D. So in this case, the prehistory of Final Fantasy tactics, the origins are kind of, you know, they start outside of Square and outside of Final Fantasy. There was a company called Quest, which emerged out of a PC developer called BothTech, or BothTech. and, you know, they kind of struggled to sort of find their voice and eventually had some minor hits. And the most successful games they came out with were Oger Battle, which was a like kind of, it was very much a strategy game and had this morality system.

And we've talked about it before. And then that had a sequel in the form of tactics ogre, which is very much Final Fantasy Tactics, but without the proper 3D polygonal space, for combat. It was, you know, fixed graphics because it was on Super NES, Super Famicom. And also, it was a much bigger and more challenging game because in Final Fantasy Tactics, you can only field five characters. In Tactics Ogre, you could field 10. And every battle scaled according to your lead characters level. So eventually, you know, that came out. It was a moderate success in Japan. And the lead creative team on it left Quest and went up and joined with Square. I don't know if they were poached or they just got sick of working with Quest.

So what I was reading was that Matsuno had actually looked up to Sakaguchi and company when, you know, in the 80s. Because Monsonoh was fairly young at this time. And he actually took the test, I guess, to apply to work over at SquareSoft and ultimately started working with them. Okay. So the people in question here are Yasumi Matsuno, the director, and kind of lead visionary for the story and everything. the artist, illustrator, Akihiko Yoshida, who did all the character designs and the key art. And finally, art director Hiroshi Minigawa, who is responsible for the overall look of the world and the kind of vibe, the sort of medieval quality. And they would go on to work together on many other things, including vagrant story and Final Fantasy 12. But they were, you know, the ones who sort of immigrated over from Quest to Square, and they basically were paradigm.

up with Hiroyuki Ito, who had been the battle designer, the battle system designer for Final Fantasy 4 and 5, and it'd come up with the job system for Final Fantasy 3 and 5. And so they combined the two of them, and you got Final Fantasy

Tactics, which was a fusion of Tactics Ogre and basically the mechanics, the class systems of Final Fantasy 5. And it's great. Can we talk about Tactics ogre for one second? Yeah. Because I don't feel like I don't feel like we'll talk about it more after just mentioning where the predecessor was,

but I have to say that if you're looking for what feels to me like a sequel to Tactics, the Tactics Oger remake is the closest thing you'll ever get. And it's a shame that is locked to the PSP and Vita because it is just a very more thoughtful. It's like the third iteration of that same idea where they build a save scumming into the game, which is like every game should do that, even XCOM should do that, I think. And they also, instead of leveling up characters, you level up classes, like in Valkyria Chronicles, which is another great idea. So you're not, like, you know, doing stupid stuff with your healer to get them to level up. Yeah, the original Thragger, yeah, like, between every battle, you had to, like, stop and do a training battle, which just involved, like, having Canopus fly out there and then have everyone throw rocks at him so that they could get, you know, the high level experience points for attacking a high level character.

But even in Final Fantasy Tactics, certain characters will go underlevel because. they don't get enough experience. They're not doing enough battle action, so you'll need to, you know, do things with them that might be stupid moves in any other contexts. Like, this, the healer needs to kill this guy, so I'm going to move him up to kill this guy, but then you're putting them at risk.

So by leveling up classes instead of individual characters, it gets rid of that problem. Like, it solves every problem of this genre, and it's only on PSP and Vita. Yes. If you don't mind me plugging my podcast, Axel of the Blood God, Jeremy was actually on the episode.

It's number 24 on our top 25 RPG countdown. down. Oh, Shameda. Sorry, Tactics Oger. Let us cling together. Let us cling together. That's what good ogres do. Also, archers are just OP in that game.

They really are. It's like Dynasty Warriors level. They'll just shoot an arrow across the stage and you die. That's just the end of the game. I mean, that's how arrows work in real life. So, yeah, I will say that Final Fantasy Tactics is a much simpler game than Tactics Oger. Tactics Oger has more teeth to it. to having, you know, being able to field only half as many characters,

Final Fantasy Tactics doesn't have a variable storyline. It has a story and you travel through that story and, you know, Chapter 4, the story is like half the game. It's the final chapter and it has all this extra stuff you can do in it, but those are all side quests. And if you get into like the deep dungeon, then it's even longer. But Tactics Oger is very much about player choice and about kind of steering your direction through the story and so it has branching story points the remake does a great job

of integrating that into like the core systems. At any point you can say, hmm, I wonder what would have happened if I had explored a different outcome and made a different choice there and so you can jump around. There's none of that in Final Fantasy tactics. The only issue with that is that there's

I feel like they added some more problems to the game in that there's bad crafting which was a very popular, a very monster-hundred-thing of that era and also there's a weird faction system that's very hard to read so a lot of the endings will just be assassinated for no reason like you pissed off this group

and so you're the king and now you're dead like I got the worst ending but I still had a good time with the king it's like I did not pay attention to this faction system at all yeah I've played now Final Fighties tactics on three different systems and something like anywhere from 800 to a thousand hours each I have yet to beat the game

oh my gosh I've got like my save on my Vita right now is basically right before the final dungeons and stuff and I don't know that I'm ever going to do it because I think that's like

Jeremy and Final Fantasy 12 have you finished 12 yet? No I'm waiting for Switch. If I never made it a new game? Yeah, why not? If you love the game, why not?

That's true. I mean, I might as well. It's been 13 years, you know, so I don't remember where I was when I left off playing Final Fantasy 12. I mean, I went back and played a bunch of it on the PS4 remake,

but I didn't make it that far into it. So, yeah. You'll restart it on Switch 2. Yeah. I mean Switch number two. Oh, Switch 2. Yeah, sure. Anyway, so, yeah, that's kind of, you know, what Final Fantasy Tactics

loses compared to its predecessor. But I feel like it gains a lot. It gains accessibility. You know, in Tactics Oger, you have a lot of limitations on what each character can do, which is okay because you're fielding 10 characters. So you have a lot of sort of, sort of, freedom to have skills and character assignments to complement one another. You also have a lot of named characters in Tactics Oger who are unique, so that gives you

the opportunity to put more of them out there. Final Fantasy Tactics, you have to have, you have to make much harder decisions about what your party makeup will be because you can only have five characters, but complementing that, you have the Final Fantasy Five job system, and you can choose to have your characters multi-class. There's a great deal of customization beyond even that. And so your characters become more versatile and more capable so that you have basically a full complement on the battlefield, you know, with a smaller cast of characters. So, you know, people who really love Tactics Oger and other strategy games, tactics

games, sometimes complain that Final Fantasy Tactics is simplified too much and is dumbed down. And, you know, that's fair. but it's also, I think, a great introduction to this genre because, again, it does have the Final Fantasy vocabulary, but also it's just much less for you to manage and juggle. And I feel like, you know, they made a lot of smart design choices with this game that really helped kind of keep things going. I think more than any other game I've ever played,

the skill system in tactics has this really amazing sense of, oh, just one more battle, because you're constantly earning job points for the job that you currently are equipped in or, you know, set up in like you're specializing in. And it always seems like there's just another skill that you can unlock just around the corner and you start like looking and, to Kat's point, strategizing about like, well, let's see if I give my ninja the ability to like break armor, then I would have two swords breaking armor, which would double my chances of break. breaking armor, or maybe I can put two swords on my knight so that they can have like a, you know, like the monks, Hmedo and Perry everything that comes at them and cause damage to everyone whenever they're attacked without needing a shield. And they can have two swords and do twice as much damage and break all kinds of, yeah. So you really start getting, like, hooked on this. Do you ever tell you about my Ramza, who was a monk ninja, who walked up to the Vygraf bottle, pumped up his brave and literally killed that dude in one punch?

because the way I attacked him out is one of the greatest moments in my gaming history. You know, when you talk about the game being stripped down, I think it was by design because Ito was kind of not a fan of tactics games from what I was able to understand. He liked the kind of much faster, faster-paced, more intense kind of battle. So I think when he looked at the systems with Matsuno, he wanted to have a smaller group of people on smaller maps. So the action was perhaps a little more intense. I think it's a really good idea, both from streamlining and speed terms, but also in terms of when you think about in America especially or even in Japan, people who are not tactics players or not war gamers could look at this game and use it as a stepping stone into things that would later get them into things like Descaya or whatever, like crazy hardcore super tactics. But every genre needs to have that one beginning thing that will step you in.

And I think that tactics has so much depth underneath the surface that even though it's an easy game that you can steamroll, you can walk through, there's so much challenge and depth beneath it that if you want to, if you get into it, you can go just ham on this game and, like, create this incredibly deep in robots experience that is infinitely replayable. So I will say that we keep saying it's easy, but it's not. Keep in mind that unless you sit down and just grind for levels, and I know you love doing that, Shevo. That is my favorite thing. You love to grind, but not everyone does. And if you don't do that, if you play it through it kind of like the intended pace, it's actually really challenging, especially up in the front. It's kind of lopsided. Like I mentioned, you know, the Trade City.

It's like the fifth battle, the fifth story battle in the game. Maybe not even that. Is it third, fourth? Okay, there you go. It's a fourth story battle in the game. and you don't have a lot of opportunity before that to twink your characters. Like they are pretty much going to be

sort of your stock characters. You've got your squires and your chemists and maybe you've unlocked another class at that point. But it's like you might have a baby wizard who has like one spell. And that's going to be it. And you're up against these characters who have range.

They have maneuverability. They have archers, which are level three. Right. The archers have range. And they're very powerful. They can hit you from a great distance. They have the high ground. So just like Anakin, you're going to get your legs cut off. Oh, my God.

That's hard. That battle is so hard. And then you have the wizards who don't have a lot of range, but they hit so hard with their magic spells. And if you're lucky, their spells will miss because there is that opportunity, like the percentage chance for them to miss, but probably not. They're probably going to fry you. And, you know, because spells have area of attack, you probably don't realize that yet.

So you're going to cluster up your characters. And then they're going to hit three of your guys for two-thirds of their damage each. And wow, then the archers are going to pick you off one by one. Wow, game over. What the hell? I didn't even make it to turn three. I really enjoy games with a good trial-by-fire moment. That's fair.

Where it's like, okay, you have to do this. You have to know this. Or we will not let you continue. And I feel like not enough games are brave enough to do that. to, like, shut you out unless you're willing to meet it on its own terms. I feel like that battle is, you know, the equivalent of persona or Shumagamei Tensi's 3's, Matador, or something along those lines. Yeah, I was thinking, like, Resident Evil 4, the first big village scene where you fight a few people

at once and it's like, okay, you have to handle an entire, like, village worth of people coming at you and use everything at your disposal to get away. Otherwise, you can't keep playing this game. But I also appreciate that they put this so early in the game that, like, look, you can spend two, three hours, go through the first couple of battles. And you get to this battle. And if you don't like it, fine. Get out. You didn't waste too much of your life playing this. But if you're

sitting there like furious that you just got wrecked and you didn't even get to the rooftop of that thing, then this game is just giving you the biggest incentive you have to want to go back and grind in Swigi Woods, grind on the planes, back and forth until you've got like a night or two. Or figure out how to do it without that.

I guess. I mean, yeah, you could theoretically. You could use your rock throwing to get range, whatever. But it's such a wonderful, enticing hook to teach you that this game is going places. It's going to be hard. And you're going to have to learn to think differently than you've thought before in gaming in terms of how do I do this? How do I overcome this? And it's not just that battle, but there's like one or two of those kind of battles in like every act. Yeah. Every chapter has some battles that are just like, oh, you think you're good at this.

Well, surprise, actually, you didn't think about this. You're a little baby and you're going to die like a baby. And one thing I'll give them credit for is they never have a battle where it's like, oh, you didn't max out this class, well, you're not going to pass this level. You can beat any stage with any class combination with enough like elbow grease and work. Almost. Riavane's castle, maybe

not. Okay, that battle is just mean though. But... I feel like that is the one nasty wrinkle. And in the remake of the game for PSP, they even put like a little warning in there like, hey, you're about to go get wrecked. and you won't be able to get out of here once you save.

So you want to save a separate file? It might be a good idea to do that right now. But the game also gives you a cheat code in Sid. It does, but you have to get Hassryvon A's before you get Sid. Sid comes at the very sort of, you know, it's in Chapter 4. You don't get him until the latter half of the game. The Thunder God. Good old TG.

Yep. And, you know, up until that point, you do keep coming across these battles. You know, some of them are like special conditional battles, like the one. in at the gate I think you mentioned that before where all of a sudden you have to fight against the Black Knight who was Ramza's buddy quote unquote for a while.

And you're shut off with a gate and you have to like in addition to fending off what's his name Gaffgarian you have to open up the gate so that your party can reunite. And that moment felt so cool because you're like you got to maneuver your dude to the

trigger panel that will open up the gate that will let the rest of your party in because when you're setting up the parties in a battle here, you've given this black and white, just kind of empty grid, and you're like, these are those places you can start your unit. And you're like, oh, there's one over there and there's two over here. I don't understand, okay, I'll just put some guys here. And then you go in and you're like, oh, crap, we're going to die

unless he can run as fast as he can to that gate. And it feels so dramatic and so epic. I mean, it feels like the Dungeons and Dragons scene. You can also break a sword, though, and just random completely impotent. If you're very lucky, it's really, it's really, it's really hard to do that because he has a very high defense. He's a knight, so he's very good at fending off attacks. Like, I've spent many battles going whack with my break abilities, and he just goes,

and deflex them. And it's so frustrating. And when you get that to stick, it's great. But if you can't get it, then it's, you know, frustrating. And there are some enemies who have the ability called maintenance, which makes it impossible to break through gear. Yeah. And that's actually, there was like a bug in the original version. where you could steal all the Genji gear from, what's his face.

The vampire lord. Yeah, whatever his name was, the guy who looks like Sephiroth on top of the castle. But you're going to look at it up. But in the remake, they were like, no, no, that wasn't supposed to happen. So they gave him maintenance. That was the worst, by the way. I hate that so much that they gave him maintenance. Like, how am I going to take Genji away from me, man?

Come on. So, yeah, so there's just a lot to keep in mind. And every, like Shevim said, every chapter has a couple of battles. Elmdor, that's it. Yeah. Yeah, they're just going to say, you know, the gloves are off this time. This is an important battle, and you have to figure it out. Yeah, there are the four-part battles where you can accidentally save yourself

and not be able to beat the final boss. Yes. Yeah, good times. So there are some, what's that? Oh, no, fair, go ahead. There are a few places where, you know, they kind of made some macro design choices like meta design choices that are not good. And they did fix that in the remakes. But aside from those moments, which can be very frustrating and have gained a fair amount of infamy for good reason, I think it's a very pretty fair game, like challenging, but then as you gain more and more abilities, it becomes easier.

I think there aren't very many battles in this game where you lose and you sit there and feel like you were cheated, right? Right. Like when you lose... Rob's a solo battle against Weigriff. Okay, the first time you play against Weigraf and you get like crushed, yeah, that does feel really mean.

But a lot of the times you're like, okay, if I go back and I reconfigure my party slightly, then I totally could have done this. I find the first third of the game to be pretty slow. Turns take a while to play out. It takes a while to level up your characters enough that you can start to unlock the different abilities and the different jobs. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but when you first get started out, you feel extremely weak. Remember there's a point in the midgame where everything suddenly clicks and you got a decently powerful party and you're like, okay, now I'm into this.

And now you're killing enemies in one shot. And you're like, all right. And then you get to Riavane's and you realize, oh, no, I knew nothing. Because even if you can beat Uigriff one-on-one, then you have to beat. Velius, the zodiac beast. And then you have to go up on the roof and you have to beat Elmdor and his stupid little enchantress ladies who just while trying to protect two idiot characters who are just like rushing around trying to die.

And their powers are so pathetic. Well, they did get tweaked in the remake. Yeah. In War of the Lions, like Rafa and Malik, are actually pretty damn awesome. I was impressed by how good they are. The War of the Lions was the version that I ended up playing first, so I never got to enjoy the terrible localization and all of these wonderful glitches that you keep telling me about. I will say that I was a weird stickler about the original because the War of the Lions, annoyingly just squished all the graphics, instead of having like an elegant solution, so everything looked a little off. And added load time for all the spells.

Yeah, yeah, I think now that's gone in whatever the newest version of that is in like the Vita. Like, what is it out for now? Android. Android, yeah, I think that's that there's like a PSP fix where, I don't know, it was a PSP problem, but I was like, I'll go back to the original because the translation is going to be bad, but I'll be able to understand it. I couldn't. And I was like, how did I ever stomach this? But then I think the remake goes in the opposite direction where it's like, I can't understand this either. Like, it's an extreme. And it's like, I'm very, I have master's of green literature. I know what it's like to want to show off, but I feel like. That's, that's understandable. But I feel like there should have been. like, there's a nice medium like Dragon Quest, I think, is a nice meeting between flowery and, you know, just vulgar, vulgarity. The good balance is, um, is Alexander O. Smith, who unfortunately did not work on War of the Lions, but they, they designed, you know, they wrote it in his style or in an imitation of his style, and it just wasn't the same. Like, he's got a great sense, a great year for what is, you know, both kind of authentic, but also, uh, digestible by moderate. audiences, but also good at conveying information, but also good at giving personality.

It's a rare, rare balance. I still feel like in both versions the story is lost on me because of there's the artifice of, or like the barrier of bad translation than the barrier of, you know, different localization of like a two baroque localization, I guess I would call it. I followed the story really well in War of the Lines. Like everything that didn't make sense in the original version of the game, I was like, oh, That's what's happening. Oh, this is what the factions are.

Oh, this is what their motivations are. I was okay. Like, I didn't have trouble with the localization, but I do wish they had dialed it down a little bit. Like the original one, yeah, I gave you things like ice brace instead of ice breath because they didn't know how to read the kanji or whatever. But it also gave you blame yourself or God, which I just love that. It's not it's not blame yourself. It's tough. Don't blame me.

Blame yourself or God. Yeah. It's doubled into something very, I don't know. Profound. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's a few. Oh, ice bracelet, not even ice breath. Brace.

Yeah, there's a few lines that are... You spoony bard level iconic? Yeah, like, iconic in a kind of weird way. Like, I can't believe they wrote this, but okay, sure, why not? Yeah, but, but okay, so localization quibbles aside. The story is very, very complex, and we can talk about that later, but I still want to talk about some of the gameplay mechanics because there's so much going on here. The job system is phenomenal.

Before we continue, I found it interesting that apparently Sakaguchi was the one who originally envisioned having a Final Fantasy Tactics in the early 90s around that time. And he even had a five or six page design document. And then when he brought in Matsuno, Matsuno and Ito just went, eh, and then proceeded to essentially do Final Fantasy Tactics Oger. I've always wondered what Sakaguchi's version of Final Fantasy Tactics might have looked like. I don't know. I feel like it probably wouldn't have been as good.

Oh, I have no idea. I don't know that that necessarily... But he liked tactics games, so it would have been different for sure. I'm happy with the game that came out. I wish they would create another game very much in this mold, not just like Tactics Advance or A2,

but really kind of, you know, just embrace the very hardcore, you know, like, high baroque fantasy style that tactics does. People refer to it as, you know, being like Game of Thrones or a Song of Ice and Fire. The thing is, this game was actually

in Japan, it predates the publication of a Game of Thrones by a year. Like that showed up in 1998, the book did. Everybody always uses a Game of Thrones when a Game of Thrones itself was basically War of the Roses, right? I mean, this game is, the story is inspired

by War of the Roses. The War of the Roses, not the movie War of the Rose. Oh, that's sorry. I mean, it would be kind of fun to play. I think it's funny that that... It would be kind of fun to play, you know, an RPG based on the movie, War of the Roses. I've done this myself, by the way, like talking about Witcher 3 and everything, being like using Game of Thrones as a baseline, but Game of Thrones itself was based on that kind of stuff.

Yeah, I mean, this is obviously the Game of Thrones of Dark Souls, so what do you want to do? I don't know what just happened, but I don't like it. But, yeah, so the thing, though, is that there's a very clear line between FF3 to FF5 to tactics ogre to Final Fantasy Tactics in terms of the job system, which is, I think, the fundamental core of the tactics game and probably the greatest innovation that this game brings to game. So what you're saying is this should have been the odd game instead of Final Fantasy 7. kind of yeah that's like when you look at it in hindsight

this definitely feels like this is the way the pattern would go you're going Shall we talk a little bit about the Johnson? Sure. We're cutting ahead in the notes, but that's fine. That's fine.

We can jump around. What are you doing? Didn't you? I love this kid. It's like my favorite game. Yeah, there's 20 different core classes in the base game. And I like the way that they're divided up here because in Final Fantasy 5 they're divided up according to the crystals that you acquire. So you get batches of jobs all the same time.

Here you start out with, what, two jobs, and you have to unlock everything else by skill progression, which is really, really clever. It's another part of that feedback loop where you're like, oh, I got to do just one more because if I fight one more battle, I unlock the ninja, it's going to be so good. So, effectively, you start with two choices. You've got the squire and you've got the chemist. And the squire is basically the baseline fighter type for physical damage. Like physical classes, yeah. And the chemist is a baseline for magical and spiritual classes. Right? And so your first party, you've got a handful of the two. The chemists can throw potions. The Squire can throw rocks.

But from there, you get to level five on either of these classes. And the first thing that happens is Squire will break into Archer and Knight and Chemist will break into White Mage and Black Mage. And then as you progress, each subsequent tier of classes requires you to have some combination of levels of previous classes in order to unlock. So while the first few levels are pretty straightforward, it gets to being really interesting, like when you're trying to unlock the samurai, and you need to have, like, knight at this level, an archer at that level, and then you need to have, like, white mage at this level or something to that. It encourages you to diversify and to explore different skill sets. It also kind of demands having access to a wiki, because unless you have a lot of time on your hand to experiment, like sheatham. I mean, I'm sure that you probably sat around just leveling up characters, seeing what all of the different classes came in. out and trying different combinations, that kind of thing. I recall the remake telling you what it requires, like, when you're going through

like a little ring of people. I want to say that, you know, when you're close to getting a new unlock, that you get like that character darkened out, don't you? No? No, it doesn't show you what the next level tier is until you unlock it. So if you stumble into it randomly and then you highlight in the wheel of, like, classes, which one it is, it'll say, oh, this requires blah, blah, and blah to get. Which I thought was super, it's both obtuse and cool.

in that 90s kind of like, you know, magic the gathering, open a pack and don't know which one's a rare way. Yeah, you figured it out. Now you have the formula. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's like the magic spells in Castlevania Symphony in the Night. Like, you can access Alicard's spells from the very beginning of the game. But if you don't know the button inputs for them, then how would you ever find them?

But once you do stumble across them, then it gives you an explanation of like, here's how to do it again. In the meantime, I was such a pleb because I was just like, which classes are good? Which ones are strong? What are the strong combinations? I mean, you want mediator and calculator and mime. You want calculator, but no spells. Calculator with no spells. Like, yeah, turn your knight into a calculator.

Oh, God. But the class-based system in this game was like, it was like a drug to me. Because I would just sit there and play this and be like, oh, my God, I love the monks so much. Oh, no, I need to get geomatser. Oh, my God. Look at this guy with the guns and the summons. And every class had so many amazing things. Like, each class had skills associated with it.

Those skills got up to, like, rank 8 or 9 or something. And you could master a class, move on to the next one. And if you took a male – and the thing is this game also had gender determination. I don't know what the word I'm looking for. Where women had stronger – Yeah, dimorphism. Like, women had stronger kind of spiritual and magic kind of stats. Men had the stronger physical stats.

Like in real life. But if you took a man and mastered all the way up the – healers, the spellcaster tree, you could unlock a barred. And if you took a woman and unlocked all the way up the top of the physical tree, you could get Dancer, which are the two kind of max classes of the game. And they were able to do things like just area effect, like

mass, crazy town stuff. With Nibas. I think because of this game and five, I just love anything with this kind of class system in it. And it's a shame they've mostly gotten rid of this idea outside of 14, where 14 has a version of this, where it is much like, you know, you unlock these two classes to get this one.

But, yeah, I feel like... The last single-player game to really have it was, what, 10-2? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, the orbs. Yeah, so one thing that I think, you know, really, really makes the job system so valuable here is the way you just have kind of, like, built-in, totally customizable multi-classing. Like, whichever job your character currently inhabits or currently is specializing in, your

your character can use all the skills you've unlocked for that job. But at the same time, you can also equip other skills, kind of taken from Final Fantasy 5, but taken up to the next level. You have battle skills, and, you know, you can stick white magic on a night, or you could stick black magic on a night, or you could stick calculator skills on a night. You could basically just take, you know, mix and match any way you want. It doesn't always make sense to do it because, you know, different classes have different stat specializations, but you can do that.

Then you have movement ability, and this is something that wouldn't make sense in a classic Final Fantasy game because your characters are standing in a line and just taking turns wailing on each other. But because positioning and movement factors in here, you have the ability to customize, to give a character a movement ability that you've unlocked from another class. And that can be anything from gaining the ability to jump extra height or even just ignoring height altogether or, you know, the ultimate kind of skill is teleporting around the stage. And there are limitations to that, like the further you teleport, the higher your percentage chance of failing.

But still, like being able to just teleport anywhere gives you, like you can create a ninja who can warp behind a character and stab them to death with two swords. It's great. Then you have the support abilities, which allow for more subtle abilities. Like, you can arm a mage with swords or guns or, you know, boost experience game. Again, like the, you know, once you graduate out of Squire, no one except Ramza ever wants to be a squire. Like, there's no value to it. But if you take that Squire's, you know, gain JP up or gain experience or whatever. Move XP up, yeah.

Yeah, like they have some really great reaction skills or support skills. sorry, that can really speed your way through leveling up and gaining job points. And then there's reaction abilities. So you can choose how to counter enemy attacks. Do you block? Do you parry? Do you counter? Do you reverse and like take no damage while inflicting that amount of damage on the enemy?

Do you take damage and like, what's that? Auto potion? Yeah, auto potion. Or do you take damage and gain experience for it? Like you can, you get to choose how you want to build. your characters. You can build all your characters the same way or you can have all of them built in different ways and give

each one special perks, different perks. There's so much freedom and customization to this game. It really, like, I've never played this game through several times and it's never the same. And it's not quite like Final Fantasy 7 with the material system where your character were effectively

interchangeable except for their limit breaks. In this, the class of stats changed based on what the classes were. So if you were a knight, and you did have magic skills, your, your mag skill as a knight is going to be inherently lower, so your spells are going to do less damage? So you want to think about, do you really want that support skill? Or do you want to have, like, your secondary thing be monk so that you can do more unhanded damage or whatever. But, oh, God, just having that kind of tabla rasa

in front of you of being able to make your entire party, whatever you want, very Baldur's gate, like, almost. And it just, it felt really, really cool. Like, your party was never the same as your palace party, like, taking on the challenges was always different because your friend would be like, well, my mage monk went over here and did this thing. I'm like, but what about my bargeo-mantor? What am I going to do? And some classes were definitely stronger than others, but pretty much everything was viable, right?

More or less. More or less. I mean, maybe you don't want Ramsa to be an Oracle. Oracle got a lot better in War of the Lions. Yeah, that's true. when it was, what the heck they call them, a yin-yang priest or something in the original? I should look it up. But, yeah, it's just, and this is, I think, one of the few final fantasy games were actually doing things like poisoning people had effect.

Right. Well, it's because, you know, because you're not just standing in a line, trading blows against enemies that have, like, high hit point values but low damage values, you know, there's a certain balancing that standard RPGs have. Like in this, each battle, okay, so in a standard RPG, basically, like, each individual battle doesn't count for much because you're, like, in battle after battle after battle. But in this, each battle stands alone and therefore the stakes are higher. So they can afford to, you know, raise the risk so enemies can hit you and, you know, one or two hit kill you if you don't build yourself outright. So, yeah, that becomes like a huge factor. And so, again, yeah, like you said, poison and stats, you know, like slow is just the worst thing to get affected with because, you know, suddenly the enemies are acting three times for every turn you take. Yeah, it was, it's an Oracle in the original game, but Yin Yang magic was his stat power.

Right, okay. Which is super just like, we don't want to say Taoism, really, really badly. I was going to say you mentioned that the material to the material system where the skills go to the materia, and it's just about plugging things in. It's very much about what the individual character earns, which really can, you know, bite you in the ass if you let a character die because you have, what is it, three turns to bring a fallen character back to life with a resurrection magic or Phoenix Down or something. And if you don't do that, that character is permanently lost and they turn into a crystal. And anyone on the battlefield can pick up that crystal, including the enemies. The enemies can pick up like this character you've painted.

mistakenly taken through all the skill of branches and maxed out and like, oh my God, it's a godlike character. But whoops, you get up against the chokobo battle and, oh, no, they fall in and you can't get them up in time.

Or worse, you had fast on them. You know, quick. What is it? What's the spell? Haste, yes. You have haste on them, so their turns go faster. So you have to, you know,

you have like have as much time to resurrect them. And if you, if you don't, they turn into a crystal. they're dead forever, and whoever picks up their crystal either gets some extra, you know, some hit points healed, or you can take one of their skills. And that's cool when you kill a unique enemy and you can, can you take unique skills from enemies? I don't think you can't actually.

You can't take unique skills. However, some enemies are higher level and have skills that you might not have access to yet that you can get. But along those lines, I've definitely tactically killed some of my own. units to be able to absorb their skills to level up my other guys. Wow. Remind me not to work in your army. Heartless.

Holy cow. Look, man, they serve me in death just as well as they serve me in life. I guess. Yikes. If my character ever died, I just immediately, I would either resurrect them or I would quit and reload because I'm not going to let them actually die and then get turned into a crystal and then taken by an interview ever. The only time I would let them like actually crystallize is if I was so close to beating

this battle and this battle was just like a real. pain and I didn't want to have to fight that battle again. Yes, I lost my whole party on Riavone's castle, but Ramosa was still alive and won. And I don't want to do that whole grind again. Goodbye level 70 ninja. Okay, maybe not that. Yeah. Goodbye calculator with every magic spell.

The thing I was thinking of was that in War Alliance, the Oracle was called a mystic. That's the word I was looking for. Okay. The job system is phenomenal. Before we end, I just want to talk about one of the greatest things, the calculator. which is one of the max level magic using characters. And the first time you get it, you look at the powers list and you're like, these are weird things.

It's like number or level or like height. And you're like, what does five height mean? What is this even telling you about? And then you get it. You level up, you use them. And you're like, wait, this guy doesn't have any abilities. There's nothing going on. Because the trick with this calculator is that each power they gain is a formula.

It's like level five or like level and then five means that you target all creatures on the battlefield that have a level that is in multiple of five. Yeah. It's taking some of the blue magic from Final Fantasy five like level five death and saying roll your own buddies. And then any spell from any spell casting class you've learned so far can be used with this formula to sit and like affect everybody on stage. So you could do things like mass resurrect. Like one of my favorite things to do is when you're on a board with. a whole ton of undead units and then you sit there and your guys have been getting beat on and it's like, okay, well, I'm going to cure four or like Phoenix, you know, raised

from the dead, like raised dead basically, cast mass raised dead on everything on the table because it's like, you know, height one, we're all on a flat stage, all of them die, all your guys come back to life. Well, maybe, but you're not taking into account brave and faith. You're not taking into account brave and faith. Many times the undead have very low faith. is a whole can of worms that can make the games. Oh, and your birthday

for the... Yeah, that's it. Yeah, the Zodiac compatibility, yeah. But the brave and faith thing is especially faith. Because you would think, like, a mage would have high magic power and high magic defense. But no, the more powerful a character's

faith is, the more powerful their magic attack and, you know, their active magic is, but also the more damage they take from enemy magic. I love that. But you know, it's counterintuitive. You're like, why can my wizard who specializes in magic not be more resistant to magic than my knight? But on the other hand, it means that when you cast healing magic on a character who has high faith,

then they really benefit from it and a character who has low faith, like a monk, is going to get very little of a benefit. So it becomes, there's just so many little factors that you wouldn't think, like, oh, I don't need to master this. I don't need to really understand this. But you get into certain battle situations and you're like, oh, yeah, Yes, this suddenly matters a whole lot. I'll just end with this one little bit. I was in a battle with my army against a bunch of monks on that one hill. I cast level five death.

All of them survived. All of us died. And that's what I learned my lesson with level five in calculators. We're going to be able to be. We're going to be. We're going to be able to be. We're going to be. We're going to be able to be.

Something we haven't really talked about this episode is the story. We've mentioned War of the Roses. We haven't really talked about the characters either. We've mentioned Ramsa. But more so than many Final Fantasy games, I think understanding the characters and the story is pretty germane to the discussion at hand because this does have such a complex story

and it's, yeah, like, it's really hard to understand in the original PlayStation translation because it was localized by, I think, a few different people. Localized by Gablefish. I think it was after this game that somebody at Square of America said we have to have a localization department. There has to be resources in a database and things like that. There was no formal process at this point.

I think this was when Richard Honeywood was like, it's time to do some stuff. Let's make things coherent. Final Fantasy 7 and tactics the same year. And both of them are like, ooh, boy. Well, I think part of that is because it was both games were published by Sony. And I don't think Sony had... Was electronic arts?

No, the Square EA came later. Okay. Any of the games that had like the white package with kind of like the vignetted style those were all Sony

so Saga Frontier Bushido Blade Ironhander I want to say it was like Brave Fencer that had the first Yeah I think that was Square EA And Final Fantasy 8

and yeah like Square EA really changed how I think the relationship worked with Square and localization but I mean Square'd been doing good localizations in the 16 bit era I really think it was

you know something about the relationship with Sony that whatever happened, it wasn't good. And this was not a game to have, you know, to saddle with a poor localization because it is so complex. And even the tutorials, like there's an extensive tutorial system. There's an extensive like journaling system that explains the plot. None of it makes sense.

It's all like you kind of get the shape of things, but it's very, very, it's very difficult to follow. And I will say that the War of the Lions, for all of its localization quirks, is much more coherent and much easier to follow. And, you know, you have a story here where you have warring factions. There's like three layers to the story. There's, there's Romsa's story, which is actually, actually there's four layers. So you've got Romsa's story as he travels through the game, Romsibwev. And...

Beowulf. How did you ever pronounce that? Because I could never figure out. I thought it was Beowulf. Like, Beowulf. No, Beowulf is a character in the game. Oh, oh. How do he spells last name?

B-E-O-U-L-V-E. I just said it was Bayowulf. I believe it's Bwelv, but... Buel. No one's ever said it out loud. Yeah. It's the first time. definitively.

I think it is said in some of the cutscenes of War of the Lions. Anyway, it doesn't matter. The important thing is that you have his story, and his story is actually being told the framing device is that a scholar, many years later, has, like, basically uncovered the truth of the War of the Lions. Daravan. And, yes. No, not Daravan. It's A.J. Durai. Right.

And the reason he's interested in clearing the air about this story is because his ancestor, Azalazam, Dari, or maybe it's reversed. Maybe it's Azalazam who's telling the story and A.J. Durai. No, I think A.J. J. J.I. is the one who's telling the story. But his ancestor, Azlizam, was kind of indicted for heresy for, you know, presenting the story. And Ramoso was also condemned as a heretic and so forth. And now that he's discovered that the true, the dry papers, he wants to basically clear his ancestors' name. So the entire story takes place as like a, you know, something being relayed by an academic years down the road in the future. And at some point you do encounter Azlizam.

He is a character who battles in a couple of fights with you, right? He isn't either the astrologer or whatever? Right. right. He's got the big one. He's got like a crazy galaxy battle. He's basically got like Sephiroth's, you know, his meteor skill, but written into the context of a turn-based battle. So that's your intersection, basically, with the larger framing device. As you meet and battle with in one fight, I think, the character whose descendant wants to clear the air. As a history fan, I always found this aspect of the story most interesting, because

Because, I mean, obviously in history, you hear one narrative, people become heroes, other people become forgotten. And that's the main general thrust of Final Fantasy Tactics is the character Delita is a hero of history. It's one of the great kings, usher did a great golden age. It's like, oh, well, here's the actual history. What is truth? Yes, exactly. Yeah, so you have, you know, Derai's story. You have Ram's journey through this story.

He's the central character. you have his work, you know, getting through the War of the Lions, which is a massive, you know, multi-kingdom battle that, you know, by the end of the game is enormous in scope and goes on for years and, you know, follows on from many years before that of unrest and strife and discord. And then finally, you have the whole Zodiac brave story where there's like these mystical stones that are tied to the church. and they're one of the powers behind the thrones in the War of the Lions, and their Christ figure, St. Ajora, is actually a horrible demon who wants to take over the world. And so, you know, that's where you get the Final Fantasy stuff. Like, Tactics Ogre didn't have anything along those lines. That is very much like the zodiac crystals, the 12 stones, that is Final Fantasy right there. And that's kind of what brings it all back.

And I know some people get frustrated that basically chapter four of the game, by the time you get to that point, the whole like War of the Lions sort of recedes and you really get into the battle against the church and dealing with the demons. And, you know, the gloves kind of come off. You meet a couple of the zodiac demons throughout the game. Like the first encounter you have is with, I think they initially localized his name as Kappa. Heclane, but it's kuchelaine, chukulane. Ku Kuklein. Yeah, Kukuklein, the impure. And he's like this kind of like bipedal job of the hut.

And he has this face on his stomach that he can like open up and spew poison at everyone. It's really gross and weird. And then, you know, you see weird stuff happening with the zodiac stones a few times. And then finally you have the climactic encounter at the end of chapter three where you have to fight Uigriff. One of the knights of, is he one of the northern. the northern star knights or whatever, the Hokotan. Yeah. I think so.

Why graph is a, yeah, he's one of the Hokkaton nights. Okay. Yeah, they localized that from Japanese in the War of the Lions, so you actually know what it means. But, yeah, he's one of the knights, and he has fallen in league with the Zodiac Braves. So you fight him one-on-one, which is very difficult. And then once you actually whittle him down,

he transforms into a Zodiac monster, and your whole party has to fight him, and he also summons like these gargoyles who can one-hit most of your team. It's great. I've noticed that maybe this is a literary trope, I don't know, but in a bunch of the RPGs of that era, including Tactics Ogre, it starts out with two protagonists

who begin as friends but are separated by circumstances and war and everything, and they are used to illustrate the conflicting ideologies at work It's happening in Tactics Oger. It happened in Sweekin in two. And it's happening here with Delita and Ramsa because Ramsa becomes, you know, a mercenary. Basically, they have very different outlooks on how things are going and Delita is much more of a means justify the ends type guy. And Ramsa is much more of a, no, I'm going to stick to my personal, like, beliefs.

And I don't know, I think you can draw some parallels to what's happening now. I think there are plenty of people who would say the end. justify the means. You're like, what are you talking about, man? Well, yeah, actually, the interesting thing is that even though Ramza is the more principled one, he's the one who becomes a mercenary. Like, when you get into chapter two, after the big climactic horrible things that happen and you think Delita is dead, his friend Delita, along with Delita's sister, Ramza basically, like, his squadron or whatever sort of falls apart and he joins a mercenary squad with that horrible Black Knight Gafgarian who is basically

a miserable wretched person and has no ethics and morals whatsoever. Whereas Delita, who is very much, ends justify the means, decides that the, you know, the means he wants or the, yes, the means he wants to explore are joining the church's brigade of holy knights, right? And so he does end up kidnapping the Princess Ovelia, which is how the game opens. So, yes, it's a, the framing device is like you're looking back into history, and then the game opens with another framing device where you have Delita and his squadron abduct the Princess Ovelia. And then the first chapter is actually a flashback leading up to that point. It's great. It's very complicated.

Yes. It's like berserk. Anybody? Nobody? I haven't read that one. Okay. But I hear there's a true love story at the same. center of it. Anyway, yeah, so there's a lot happening. And in the end, Delita, so Delita is

kind of Ramza's adopted brother. Ramza is a part of a noble family. His father was a knight in one of the kingdoms. I can't even remember which one. And his brothers are all like high ranking members of the military. And Ramza is kind of like the disappointing son. I think he's like their half brother. He had a different mother. And his truce is. like full-blood sister, full-blood sibling is his sister, Alma, who joins the church and becomes a priestess. And then Delita is, you know, low-born. You can tell because he has dark hair instead of blonde. And his sister, he and his sister are close.

They're like siblings to Ramza and Alma. And basically what happens throughout the first chapter is you see that the nobles kind of suck. They're all jerks. They, you know, have no problem abusing and misuse. using the lowerborn people. And that culminates in the horrible, slimy little rat known as Alga Stadolphus, who... You see, look at that. You mention his name, and people are just like...

It's like a Donald Trump reaction. He's like the second worst villain, I think, or like just second biggest asshole in, like, PlayStation era gaming next to the villain of Sucadent. Right, Luga Bright, yep. Yeah, he's just a horrible, you know, he sees the lower classes as beneath him. And anyone who doesn't, you know, subscribe to his personal philosophy is also beneath him. I mean, he is basically a Nazi, pretty much. We have a character like that in Tactics Cogor as well.

Correct me if I'm wrong. And I think that if you go down one of the past, you have to have him as an ally. And he gets very annoying, very fast. Yeah. That's another Mazzano trope. I guess. Well, Algus is, it's very satisfying because later you do get to kill him. Oh.

Actually, I think you fight his revenant late in the game, don't you? Yeah, he turns to a vampire by Elmdor. Yeah. So eventually you do get to kill him, but not before he causes the death of Delita's sister, Teta. And seemingly, Delita dies in an explosion, and that's the end of the first chapter. And then from there. Such an emotional scene. too.

It sucks. No. And then, oh. Yeah, it really sucks. And then from that point, Roms and Delita's paths diverge. And Delita eventually becomes king by marrying Ovelia,

the princess he kidnaps at the beginning of the game. Also, just a word, it was Oran Dura. A.J. was Arzlazal. Okay. Arazolam. Yeah. AJ. Okay.

Yeah. Oron Dera is the guy who joins you and has a crazy galaxy powers. Got it, got it. I knew it was one of the Dari kids. Yeah, Godfitz on a Cid. Oh, okay. There you go. Yes, and this game has a Cid who is, unlike in many other Final Fantasy games, a total badass. He's entirely too powerful.

Okay, so there's unique classes in the game. Like, some of the characters have a unique class, and his is basically like Holy Knight. Yeah, like, there's a few different Holy Knights, and some of them have, you know, holy swords and things like that. But his is just like all-inclusive. So there's a handful of characters. There's like Agrius, one of the heroes you get very early on. She's got the Holy Knight skill set with things like Stasis sword and thunder and whatnot. There's Gavgarion, the mercenary boss that lead to you.

And he's got abilities that are. Is there basically like the evil version of Agrius? And his attacks do things like drain your MP or drain your HP and, you know, refill his. And then there's Media Duel who's got the ability to break your armor with her sword attacks. Orlando or TG.Cid has all of them and then some. And he's also very powerful. And he becomes like one of the strongest swords in the game and he's just obscenely good. I mean, it's almost in the, like when you're playing five-fancy tactics, it's almost kind of like when you get him, you just make an oath not to play him because that just takes the fun out of the game.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of really fun characters who it's easy to. kind of overlooked because of, you know, you've got your core team that you've been developing the whole time. And then you get characters like I think Agrius is awesome. I love I love... Mustadio. Well, see, I was going to say, you know, I love how powerful TG Sit is, but

I feel like characters like Mustadio tend to get overlooked. And it's really a shame because you can do cool stuff with Mustadio because he's one of the few characters who naturally equips a gun. And so he has like all these break skills. Oh, yeah, I love breaking things with the gun. It's so great. You're not really inflicting a lot

damage with Mastadio, but what you are doing is debilitating enemies. You're annoying them. Yeah, you're like slowing them down or breaking, like being able to break someone's armor from halfway across the battlefield is so good. It's so great. Mustie's power set is like, oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. I remember getting a gun character and being like, why does this feel so weak? Because you just assume, oh, they got guns.

I'm going to be able to really, really mess them up. But I forgot this is Final Fantasy Tactics where guns kind of suck. or Final Fantasy Guns suck, period. Unless you're squal, Leonhardt. Though interestingly. In which case your gun has a sword on it and it's cool again. And then Final Fantasy 12 had Baltier as a guest character.

Baltier is also in War of the Lions. And he can, that's what I meant, she was in War of the Lions. And he completely overshadowed it was Mustadio. Yeah, he's Mostadio Plus and I love him. But Mustadio's abilities are things like shoot your kneecap so that they can't move. Shoot your arms so that they can't use abilities. It's incredibly powerful. But he is so outclassed so quickly.

Yeah, but you just have to know how to use these characters. And then we mentioned the Hell and Heaven Night, Rafa and Malik, the siblings, who are extremely underpowered in the PlayStation game because their skills are random. And you get like, their skills like fire off like two or three times and probably won't hit a character like their target. But in the remake, they tend to fire off like eight times. And sometimes you'll get like, you'll get a stick like two or three or maybe even four times. It definitely feels like it was weighted towards hitting the, like, to give you more chance of hitting the people on the squares. Like, their abilities would target five squares in a cross.

And it felt like in the PSV or the PSP version, it would actually hit the units and not the empty squares. You would still get whiffs, but not nearly as many as you did on the PlayStation. Yeah, and there's a lot of specialized characters, too. Like Worker 8, the Golem, is really interesting because he has a status called Innocent, which gives him zero faith. So magic does not work on him, which is good when you're up against enemy mages, but bad when you're like, oh, worker eight's going to die and I need to, you know, heal him. Oh, well, I can't. It's like, do any of my guys have item equipped that I can go and throw a potion on him? I hope maybe.

No. But only chemists can throw potions, otherwise you have to go stand next to him. Run next to him and be like porous portions. I think like the monk's chakra can also ignore faith. Yeah, a monk's chakra just heals whoever's next to him, a little bit of MP and a little bit of HP. and one of my favorite abilities in the entire game. It's great. Yeah, and then you can get the dragon.

Right. You can also... Reese, who starts out as a dragon and then... Becomes a lady. Yeah, becomes a lady, and I feel like it's a downgrade. No offense to women. I just, like, at some point, you have a dragon in your party, and that's really awesome. And then later, it's just like, well, here's another human character.

You can also get Boko. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can recruit, like... Monsters. A ton of things. You can recruit monsters. You can retook. Retute, recruit, you can recruit enemy, you know, mobs.

Yeah. Not like named characters, but mobs, yeah. You can, you know, like use the mediator to say, hey, come on over. We talked about Cloud and Ayrth and Balthier and Boko. This game is full of references. Also, Luso, yeah. There's also in the pub quests where you send people out, like all the places they go are references that were all lost of us until it was translated. it better until we got those games.

Like, oh, they just went to Mount Golg, but someone mistranslated it, and it doesn't come through. They went to Mount Glug, another bar. This is getting a little bit back to the job system, but this game is so built around the idea of, well, you know, you can just build a character that's going to go and one shot everybody. I think you can just take Romsa, give them the best sword in the game, or one of the best swords, and have them slash twice and basically kill everything.

but there are a lot of rabbit holes to go down with this particular game where if you really want to just start getting really inventive, there's a lot of latitude to do so. I think that's why people like Final Fantasy tactics so much. It's that, man, you can just spend forever just messing around with all the different systems at play, or you can just completely ignore them. It doesn't matter.

One of my favorite things about the game in terms of the job system is that Romsa's default class is insanely powerful, but you don't realize it at first because he's a squire. So you're like, oh, well, he's a squire. I don't want to do that. But he gains a new special power with each chapter. Like, you know, by the time he has the assless chaps uniform, he has, like, he has some really, some, I can't remember exactly what his powers are. But they're, like, really, really versatile and powerful.

Well, he gets yell, which lets him buff up people's, like, brave and attack powers. Yeah, my, my, he gets Ultima. He gets, well, he doesn't get Ultima by default, but he can learn it if he, if he go into the dark dungeon or the deep dungeon. Um, but yeah, like, the strategy you got for a second. Yeah, my, the last time I played this, my strategy for beating Uigriff was to, uh, give Ramsa auto potion and yell. So I just had him like running back and forth, taking hits, using auto potion and screaming at himself until he was so powerful. He like was moving four times for everyone that Uigriff had and punching him in the face really hard. Exactly.

That, that, that, you're taking me back here. I mean, you're taking me way back. So, Romsesteads is yell gives him a plus one to speed, which in a game where weapon speed and character speed matters is incredibly powerful. You know, that's not to distract too much, sorry. We'll get back to what you're saying in a second. But something we didn't talk about is, you know, the really unique thing about Final Fantasy Tactics combat system, you know, most strategy games are, you know, sides take turns. But they really tried to integrate the active time battle system into a chess board style. tactical RPG.

So each character has their own speed stat, and that determines how frequently they get to move. And so everyone has a third, you know, they have health, magic points, and then they have CT charge time. And you know, with every action that's taken, charge time for

every character changes, but depending on their speed, their charge time rises more quickly. And when someone gets 100, you know, charge time, then they get to move. And so yeah, giving your character is like speedboot, they get to move much more frequently and it really, it turns speed into an important factor in the combat system in a way that it's not in a more traditional strategy RPG. And it's also not hidden.

So you can go in there and let's say you're fighting a character and you want to, because with a magic user, for instance, if you want to cast fire on a creature, you want to check, okay, is that guy going to move before the spell it goes off? Because you can either target the panel they're standing on or the unit itself, which is one of the great innovations of this. game. Because that way, if that character is surrounded by other units that you want to blow up, but his turn is coming before your spell goes off, okay, well, I'm going to hit the panel so that I can make sure to hit those other three guys. Or you could pick a different spell that's got a slightly faster or slower speed to move you up and down the initiative grid so that you can launch off.

And I was like, this is the greatest visualization of second edition deed I've ever seen in my life. Oh, my God. Yeah, and you can also use that against enemies. Like if an enemy targets you with a magic spell and you get to move before. that, you can go stand next to the guy who's casting the magic on you, and, oh, they just screw themselves over by casting magic on you that then hits them, too. Yes.

And just by virtue of the way that the game is set up, if you mess up, you will feel the consequences much more quickly than you might in, say, a game where you just have more traditional player phases. No, it's interesting. I like the good facts that you can mess around with speed to the point where effectively the enemies never even get a turn. and you can just completely steamroll them. It's pretty great.

And, of course, I love when you have haste cast on a character, and they just start moving really fast, like, e-e-e-e-e. Like, they're actually... Their little animations are running in place. And the haste and slow animations are, like, the clock going... And it's like, oh, that's how it cool. That's a very good impersonation of that charge spell. I love that.

I hate the slow sound because it's always affecting you. Yeah, right? Yeah. But yeah, the other power is scream that he gets, which is on Braves, his speed, his speed, is physical and his magic attack, which is in like act four just like, okay, I'm going to just destroy you. And one of the things that is a subtle but valuable element to tweaking, like to buffing characters in combat is that some of the stat changes you inflict in battle sometimes stick around after. Like if you boost someone's brave pretty high, they may get like a permanent like plus three buff to their brave. And Brave, you know, is kind of the counterpart of faith.

Faith affects how much magic affects them. Brave is more like how often they use counter skills and how likely they are to hit and so forth, which, you know, again, like based on your position relative to the enemy that you're attacking, if you're attacking from the side or behind, your percentage goes up, you know, and then having high brave makes it even higher. And it makes it more likely for you to effectively land like an armor break skill or something along those lines.

So, you know, using those temporary buff stats, you might not think, well, what good is this going to do me in this battle? But you keep doing that and it adds up over time. One of the secret things, or not secret, but one of my favorite little subtle things about this brave and faith system is the fact that if you ramp somebody's faith all the way to 100, like on an enemy, then they will basically just, you know, become enlightened and decide they don't want to fight anymore and you lose use of them. And they leave your party or they leave the battle. Yeah, they're like, I found God, so I'm going to go join the monastery now. And if you, like, ramp their brave too high, they're just like, you know, I'm above this. I don't need to fight for you. Drop their brave all the way down to nothing.

They become chickens on the field. That's right. And then drop their faith all the way down. And I think they're either just too scared to fight or something like that. But it's just like, that's such a great way to stop people from just min-maxing, like, all the way up and down. And it's, like, adorable. Yeah, the number of systems that play are pretty ridiculous. And we've barely even touched on the zodiac system.

Oh, yeah. We didn't even know about the zodiac system really to begin with. And I was like, oh, okay, so healing isn't very effective because of the birthday is interesting. And it's really complicated. It's like 13 zodiac symbols of play and there's a square and a triangle grid and how they affect each other. And it's like, okay, that's just one system too far. Yeah, I mean, at a certain point, it's like, a guy's settle down, okay? I know that you just keep piling them in. But like your modifier is getting a little much.

here. Well, I think the idea is just to have so many factors and variables in combat that, you know, it makes it less predictable. So you can't just go in and easily steamroll. I mean, you can. You certainly can steamroll things in this game. But this is like a little bit of an impediment that keeps you from, you know, like if the combat system were too simple, there weren't enough factors, it would, I think, really diminish the sort of playability of the game because, you know, a lot of the enemies you face are randomized. So you don't know, like certain enemies, you know, key characters have like a set birthday. So if you're concerned about Weigriff, then you choose a birthday for Ramza that is, you know, not compatible with Weigriffs. So he doesn't do as much damage to you. And that once a end of grind up and the random schmucks that they show up in combat alongside them, I think tend to be, you know, just kind of procedurally generated. So you don't know exactly what they're going to be. And it keeps things, you know, it mixes things up. Well, once again, we're getting into the wiki rule, though,

because nobody, like, is thinking when they first start Final Fantasy Tech. I better, I better properly set Ramza's birthday or else I'm going to be totally screwed. I'll be honest. This is, like, the one game I play where my favorite thing to do is being in the menus and in the leads. This is, like, the most, if I use the old school in 1950s MIT terminology of the top of the table for the model train. In MIT, there was a tech model train club where they had the people who were like, let's look at the top of the table and make the models and make the trains and make the things, everything pretty.

And then there were the people who were like, let's look at the bottom of the table where all the switches are in the electronics and do all the tinkering. And that kind of divide between I'm looking at the flavor versus I'm looking at the systems. FF tactics is like the hardcore systems game. And this is, I'm not a systems guy necessarily, but this is the game where I want to be like just in the guts, tinkering and linking things and making this whole just. like incredible, like, deep kind of link of setups so that my units are just optimized to go out and wreck face. And it's just so fulfilling and so just satisfying to sit there and watch your guy who's just

been like this weird. I mean, you see the pictures on Twitter of people who are like, yeah, I've got my cowboy hat and my samurai gear on because I've been maxing and they look really ridiculous. In this game, you're sitting there like, I don't know what even. happens when you've got a guy who's like a ninja assassin who is focused on bribing people and talking to their pets. And you're like, I don't

what? Okay, why are you talking to my pets? But it works and I win and that's what matters. I think it's telling that we were talking about story and then we just went right back to talking about all the different crazy combinations because this game has a good story and I think it has

a lot of very memorable elements to its story. But when people think of Final Fantasy tactics. They think about everything that you were just described. Yeah, they're like, I'm going to max out Agrius by giving her a purse instead of a sword, because that's what knights should wield. But we didn't mention so far anything about the music of the game.

I know I've been meaning to mention that, and then other things keep coming up. There's so much to talk about, but I do want to mention so it is Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masahiro Oata, and they both do, they're both bass escape now as their company, but I feel like, so he was composing music for a decade before this,

but I feel like this is the game where you figured out his what would become its like signature sound and you would hear that reverb on it a ton of reverb but it's like very rich and smooth

and you would hear it in like games like Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy 12 but also in things like Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter Opuna

has an amazing soundtrack that nobody knows about it does not deserve it does not deserve that soundtrack the game is like C minus and like Valkyria Chronicles

like they all have that same soundscape you even get some of that in Gradius even though it's like techno, you're still like in Radiant Silver Gun. You have that, that, you have that, you have that Sakimoto sound even though it's like, here's electronic, you know, EDM in space, but also, you know, you get the like the orchestral chamber music with reverb over top of that.

And apparently he's also composing for Unsung Story. Oh, good. I'm very excited. Late 2019, everybody. So a Parrish story is that early on when I was just a fan of Parrish, and I used to He used to talk about the soundtrack of Final Fantasy Tactics all the time and, like, how great some of the songs and stuff were. And I'm, like, a hardcore tactics fan boy, and I'd be like, I don't remember that track. And you know what happened?

It's because when you're playing the game, the way I do, where, like, the story is maybe 2% of the game that I'm actually playing, and the other 98 is just grinding back and forth on the various levels. I've heard the battle songs of, like, Swigi Woods and Mandalay Plains or whatever 12 billion times. The one track that Jeremy is talking about that was like, oh, my God, this is an amazing. song, maybe in like one story level that I played once it's part of like a side quest on top of that. Right. Yeah. And it was like 700 hours ago I might have done that and I don't have any recollection of it

because all I can hear is the I know which track you're talking about. Was Sakamoto, so two things. He kind of defined the sound of Evalese which was a very kind of, I want to say epic, very full maybe John Williams kind of

sound. And it wasn't as distinctive. It was very good. You could tell that it's his particular style, but I think he was immediately compared to Uwimatsu because he was the first composer to really take over fully from Uwimatsu. And so it sparked some debates because Ui Matsu obviously had his own very distinctive style that everybody, you hear it and you immediately like, oh yeah, it's Ui Matsu. But, I mean, Sakimoto was really good for the most part. and Evil East definitely has its own flavor to it. When you hear that soundtrack going, you think this is a rich, deep, interesting setting that I want to kind of dive into. But at the same time, the music, despite being fairly bombastic, also kind of is in the background.

So. So there's a whole lot of letters from listeners on this episode. Way too many for us to tackle. So we'll have to do that in a separate mailbag episode. But did you guys have any final thoughts on Final Fantasy Tactics? Any Final Fantasy Tactics thoughts? Let me focus it a little bit. What would you like to see in a true sequel to Final Fantasy Tactics that Square will never create?

I want it to exist because, I mean, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance obviously came out after a tactic. and then we got A2. But we haven't had a whole heck of a lot else beyond it. I mean, we've had Front Mission, but I mean, so many of the tactics games are much more in the lines of Fire Emblem, I want to say, where you are recruiting characters and they're much more set

and less customizable than Final Fantasy Tactics. And that's definitely a particular approach. But I... Or like Descaya style games. Yeah. So I like this style, and I wish that there were more like it from, you know, a major developer like Squarionix. There have been a few along the, you know, through the years, like Hoshigami, and I guess you could consider Rondo of swords along these lines, but none of them have whatever special sauce it is that makes Final Fantasy Tactics so good.

And Tactics Advance, I like Tactics Advance a lot, but it's a very, very different thing from the original tactics. I know tactics a lot, but it's not, it's not tactics. Yeah, it's not a game that I can really commit myself to. I really tried. I gave it an earnest go a few years back. It's probably been like seven or eight years at this point. But, you know, when I would take the train to work, I would, for like a month, I would, you know, just play tactics advance. And I probably got like 40 or 50 hours into it. And I just kind of lost interest. It just, I don't know, it didn't connect with me in any way. I wouldn't mind a War of the Lions HD that kind of took the Let Us Cling Together approach, adding some interesting new mechanics to let you play around with the story a little more, letting you mess around with the classes and then putting on Nintendo Switch. Yeah, I totally agree. That would be an awesome idea.

And if you haven't played that game, let us cling together. Definitely played. It feels like a spiritual sequel to this. And if you miss all the evilly stuff and you want to see it in another series, Final Fantasy 14 has a lot of it. like there's a ray designed by Mazzano and 12. But, I mean, 14 is like a new game, and then they're still updating it. So there's a lot of the classes in there.

It has the same kind of localization, but like toned down a lot, so it's like intelligible. And I feel like that is like the last remaining remnant of this kind of job system. The last remnant is a different game. No, no, no. Oh, yeah, that's a great game, by the way. We didn't even talk about how. Saga. We didn't even talk about what a great setting, Evolese is.

I love it. The original Final Fantasy. Tactics didn't have all of the different, you know, races in it that would eventually appear in advance in Final Fantasy 12. Tactics is set in, like, the decline of Evil-Ease, where if you, each battlefield has flavor text. If you just, like, press the select button when you're in a battle, you can read about it. And it talks about how, like, this is where Mughals used to live. And so all these races, like, once upon a time did exist, but, you know, the golden age of Final Fantasy 12 is long past. And so now it's just down to horrible little human factions fighting with each other.

So they've lost the technology of 12. Like they lost the airships and everything. Yeah, like the final battle takes place in something called the airship graveyard, which is like a repository of ancient technology that no longer works. So there's a real kind of gunslinger vibe, like Stephen King's Dark Tower. Or Nausica. Yeah, exactly. The after the end where everybody's forgotten all of the technology. I like that a lot, actually.

That's great. This is my favorite game of all time. And I know I say that a lot. But, like, if you ask me ever, it's like... I thought Swicken 2 was. You would think Sikid and M. But if you compare the amount of time I've put into any game... So Sivor Sv or Sweekit into Final Fantasy Tactics?

Depending on the day you ask me. Yes. But the thing is, the Final Fantasy Tactics is the game that, for me, encompasses how to take RPGs and like Eastern RPG sensibility and Western RPG battle systems and tactics and fuse them together into a way that is... CRPG kind of stuff.

Yeah, it's not only just like easy for people to get into, but if you're a high-level player still continues to provide depth to you. So if I wanted to have a true sequel to this, I almost wouldn't want a Square Enix or somebody to like do that. I would want to see like, I don't know, Bethesda or like a Western company

take this or like Black Isle. in the old days, take this kind of game and give me this rich, robust tactic system. And the story is, I mean, a lot of people are like, oh, you know, the story doesn't matter. I'm just looking for the board. But the story is what keeps you kind of hooked in because without the story, it's just like, okay, well, it's a board and I'm going to attack some chokobos and stuff. That's interesting unto itself, but it's not nearly as compelling as, like, your Ramza, you're trying to, you know, figure out what's going on with the church, what happened to your best friend? And how do you stop these people? Like, your brothers are trying to kill you.

Like, what is going on? And just this world is rich, robust. It's got flavor. It's got, even in the terrible localization, like, all the pub rumors and stuff just gives you so much to, like, sink into. As a guy who loves world building, this is one of the greatest world building exercises in gaming. And just every stage is so uniquely built, so tailored, so perfectly kind of designed to give you a different. challenge, like the waterfall stage versus the desert stage versus like, you know,

when you're on the swamps and each thing takes double movement to go anywhere and you're taking damage every step. This is, like, this is to me the perfect game. This is, if I was going to take one game with me to a desert island forever, this is the game I would take. This is everything, like, even

today, like in preparation for this, I fired up tactics again on my Vita and I was like, holy crap, I never need to play another game again. This is still just as perfect as it was the first day I play. I love that we're going to rescue you from a desert island in five years, and you still won't have beaten the game. Oh, yeah. Why would I want it to end?

Why would I want Final Fantasy tactics to end? You can load an old save. You have to beat Deep Dungeon first. Yes. Do Deep Dungeon? If you get your guys, you give them catch, and then there's ninjas who will throw, like, defenders and save the queens at you. And then you can have a stack of infinite defenders and save the queens. You can use old dupe tricks to get just more.

And then now all you've got are dual-wielding defenders and throwing them. I do like the insight. like talking about how it visualizes Dungeons and Dragons so well. And talking about how it really is a great middle ground between kind of classical Japanese sensibilities and old school CRPGs, right? I mean, obviously, Dragon Quest got it started as, you know, wizardry and Ultima and then spun off into kind of its own thing. But Final Fantasy Tactics brings it back, right? And it makes for a really great contrast to Final Fantasy 7, which obviously came out the same year, not just in terms of the incredibly dense systems versus a much more generalized Final Fantasy 7.

But Final Fantasy 7 is kind of very weird fantasy, psychological drama, ecological stuff, versus the real politic of Final Fantasy tactics, how grim it could be and the fact that, you know, one of the original storytellers got burned as a heretic. And, like, you know that Romsa survives. You see him in that final scene, but what happened to him? Is that him? Or is it just like a vision? Is it a ghost?

But it doesn't tell you, and that's great. But you can kind of assume that maybe, I don't know. I mean, does Delita kill Ovelli at the end? Or does he just wound her? What happens there? Yeah, it's a, there's a lot going on. It's a strikingly mature example of storytelling, I think, in RPGs, especially for that time. Yeah, this definitely feels.

much, like, a lot of people like, oh, that game is so mature and deep. No, this game actually is mature and deep. So, finally, to wrap, what I would like to see is for this team to get back together and make another game like this, but to set it somewhere else in the Ivalese timeline, either during like... The vagrant story time. Well, either during 12's golden era of Ivelace where you get all the mystical races like Banga and Biera and stuff and really do it like original Final Fantasy Tactics style

instead of advanced style, where it's kind of like a more whimsical, lighthearted feel. And the weird judges. Or else, yeah, go all the way forward in the future to vagrant story where it's like, you know, like a postmodern evil ease, where none of the magic exists and everyone thinks magic is a rumor, a myth. Like, that could be really interesting, too. We never did get a vagrant story, too. What did Ashley Riot do after the rude inverse was permanently fused to his body? Maybe he goes off to become like a villain or something and you have to beat him, I don't know. I just, I want more of this.

Vagrant Story 2, but it's actually Final Fantasy Tactics. Oh, my God. Final Fantasy Tactics 2, Colan, Vagrant Story 2. Oh, my God. No, Final Fantasy Tactics V2. Oh, there you go. Okay. Don't even joke, man.

Boy, I just came up with my dream game. I didn't even if I didn't even get to tell you about the deep dungeons of the light up the stage. where you're going. Well, when we eventually do our Evil East podcast, we can totally do that. I love this game. Actually, Kat, we did that five years ago. I love this game. Too late.

Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm not familiar with all the entirety of the Retronauts canon because it's been around for so long. We should do a Retronaut on Retronaut. Anyway, we're going to let this episode become part of the backlog now. It's time for us to wrap up and call it a night. So, with that in mind, why don't we all go through the backlog to the backlog?

the routine. First of all, I'm Jeremy Parrish and continue to be heavily involved in Retronauts, which you can find at Retronauts.com, at Libson, and on iTunes and many other podcatchers. There might even be Retronauts on, like, Spotify and stuff by now. I don't know. That'd be pretty wacky. But of course, Retronauts is crowdfunded, Patreon-supported. Go to patreon.com slash Retronauts. And we're not just asking you for your money. We're giving in return. We give you each episode a week in advance and a higher bit rate than you can get on iTunes and with no advertisements. So that's pretty cool and I think it is worth your time and your while. So please consider going to patreon.com slash retronots and we thank you for your time.

Bob, what about you? I have a lot of plugs. My life is crowdfunded, Jeremy. I do the Patreon Talking Simpsons, which includes a lot of podcasts, including our chronological exploration of the Simpsons Talking Simpsons, which Cat and Shevham have been on. Jeremy has not been on the show. I don't know why, but Jeremy has been on. Which episode? Talking Simpsons. I have not been on that much about Simpsons.

I don't really know that much about Simpsons. I didn't think so, but I'll forgive you. You've got on a cartoon, though. The G.I.J.O. episode was excellent. Jeremy has been on what a cartoon, our weekly exploration of a different cartoon from a different series. Those are both free wherever you find podcasts. But our Patreon is patreon.com.

So, Talking Simpsons. There's a lot of fun bonus things there. Dozens and dozens of bonus podcasts, exclusive to series. Right now we're recording and releasing Talking of the Hill, our first season exploration of the King of the Hill series. Lots of fun, lots of fun stuff happening on the Patreon. Check it out. And I'm, of course, Bob Servo on Twitter.

Check me out there. I'm the underscore Catbot on Twitter. I'm the editor-in-chief of U.S. Gamer for all of your news, reviews, features, et cetera, retro needs. As you go check us out and follow us on all the social medias. I'm also the host of Axe of Blood God, which is our RPG podcast. by the time this episode comes out our top 25 RPG countdown will have finished Final Fantasy Tactics is not on it actually sorry it's Tactics Oger but I think Final Fantasy Tactics is an amazing game

and it was a very hard decision to decide which one to be on there and by the way we have a newsletter for Acts of the Blood God so if you enjoy the podcast you should sign up for that because every Wednesday Nadi and I put out all of the RPG news straight to your inbox along with a nice little op-ed that in which we kind of Talk about the world of RPGs, either current events, or we delve a little bit into an interesting kind of mechanics. Maybe you'll see something about Final Fantasy Tactics. And Shevim, I should get you on the show sometime because you have a lot of interesting things to say about RPGs.

I'm Shivan Putt. You can find me on Twitter at Electrotal, E-L-E-K-T-R-O-T-A-L. And I also host my own podcast because that seems to be the thing to do around here. But my podcast is about Magic the Gathering, the Commander format. and it's called Commanderin, and you can find it wherever podcasts are sold. I like that. It's not just a Magic the Gathering podcast. It's a Magic the Gathering podcast for a very specific format. Yeah, but it's also the second most popular in the world of that specific format.

Congrats. Yeah, we have a very large and dedicated fan base, and it's really great. We do a lot of interviews and stuff with community members and with the people who make the game. And I just like talking about magic when I'm not talking about Final Fantasy Tactics. Okay, and that is it. That's all. We're done talking about Final Fantasy tactics. Shivam, your assignment is to go beat the game. The rest of you, go play the game because it's so good. I'm going to go play the game. You're going to be able to be.