Honestly, the closest thing I've hears to a game being quoted is memetic popularity of Undertale's version of Megalovania. Which is not quite the same.
It might be a regional thing; the example that instantly comes to mind for "memetic popularity" is Dragon Quest.
Which is so memetically popular everyone knows any story about "hero vs demon lord", especially in a faux-medieval Europe setting, is inspired by Dragon Quest. Even specifics about Dragon Quest, like the hero being sent on their epic quest by the king, armed with nothing but a pittance of money and one (1) cypress stick, gets referenced everywhere. For quotable lines, there's the "monster wants to join your party", the "I'm a friendly slime", and the endgame "Demon Lord tempts the hero by promising half the world".
However, this does run into the issue where it's difficult to say which of the Dragon Quest games are representative. We can't really point to, say, Dragon Quest III specifically and say "this is where it all comes from", without considering other games. So I would say it's less of a Godfather or Star Wars situation, and more like James Bond: the overall franchise is very culturally relevant, but the individual entries might not seem particularly impressive.
And Dragon Quest games have strictly kept themselves to a certain formula, deliberately so. They're all nostalgia entries, playing it very safe in both presentation and story, unlike Final Fantasy re-inventing itself with every new game. So there are no meaningful lengthy essays analyzing Dragon Quest itself, as opposed to the many essays about Dragon Quest's influence on culture. It's like essays about Tetris the game, compared to essays about the Tetris effect on cognition.
It might be a regional thing; the example that instantly comes to mind for "memetic popularity" is Dragon Quest.
Which is so memetically popular everyone knows any story about "hero vs demon lord", especially in a faux-medieval Europe setting, is inspired by Dragon Quest. Even specifics about Dragon Quest, like the hero being sent on their epic quest by the king, armed with nothing but a pittance of money and one (1) cypress stick, gets referenced everywhere. For quotable lines, there's the "monster wants to join your party", the "I'm a friendly slime", and the endgame "Demon Lord tempts the hero by promising half the world".
However, this does run into the issue where it's difficult to say which of the Dragon Quest games are representative. We can't really point to, say, Dragon Quest III specifically and say "this is where it all comes from", without considering other games. So I would say it's less of a Godfather or Star Wars situation, and more like James Bond: the overall franchise is very culturally relevant, but the individual entries might not seem particularly impressive.
And Dragon Quest games have strictly kept themselves to a certain formula, deliberately so. They're all nostalgia entries, playing it very safe in both presentation and story, unlike Final Fantasy re-inventing itself with every new game. So there are no meaningful lengthy essays analyzing Dragon Quest itself, as opposed to the many essays about Dragon Quest's influence on culture. It's like essays about Tetris the game, compared to essays about the Tetris effect on cognition.
Dragon quest Series is more comparable to the whole genre of organised crime movies, than necessarily any singular movie like Godfather. Which is why I bring up Megalovania: Undertale is very kuch closer to a singular movie in comparascent, and literally the Pope heard Megalovania, so, like... It definitely has some cultural impact.
On the topic of games as art, and related to FF8 and the other final fantasy games, I think there is a bit of misunderstanding of how going to the medium of interactivity games possess changes how stories need to be told.
Let's look at some examples where FF8 does well that is fresh in my mind: The order of events in the Ultimecia fight. Going from against her, to against Griever, to her junctioned with Griever is an impactful bit of storytelling because it mirrors the gameplay.
Gameplay is an aspect to the art of video games, and I'd argue that it can extend the old saying "show don't tell". That works in a medium where the goal is to inform the reader/watcher with what is presented to them, but at face value it runs into an issue with games: That you can control where and importantly how you look.
Games need to play towards their stories too. If there is a clear disconnect between how things go in gameplay and how they go in the story, then it is a noticeable impact on how the player interprets the story. Adel isn't just said to be absorbing Rinoa, but she also is not just shown to be doing so. Rinoa is mechanically drained by Adel during the boss fight, and that explains what is happening better than even the physical appearance of Rinoa half submerged.
But there is also the downside too. The Lunar Cry is halfway working, Eshtar is under attack and mechanically changed, but the other half where you can just fly off and go do other stuff messes with the story. It is an interactivity impact that you don't really have a direct equivalent to for a film or book. They do a wonderful job of "showing" the Lunar Cry in the cutscene, but a terrible one of making it play out.
However, that sort of thing is in a way just an extension of "show don't tell" in a new medium. This is why games can run into trouble if they stick with just what makes film or books work out as great stories, because the part people interact with needs to match too, or it gives a new kind of disconnect that is sort of like if a film has a set that is just a bit too bare. Possessing only the details that a book would have time to give, without all of the other small features that a visual medium needs to add to express the same idea.
On the topic of games as art, and related to FF8 and the other final fantasy games, I think there is a bit of misunderstanding of how going to the medium of interactivity games possess changes how stories need to be told.
Let's look at some examples where FF8 does well that is fresh in my mind: The order of events in the Ultimecia fight. Going from against her, to against Griever, to her junctioned with Griever is an impactful bit of storytelling because it mirrors the gameplay.
Gameplay is an aspect to the art of video games, and I'd argue that it can extend the old saying "show don't tell". That works in a medium where the goal is to inform the reader/watcher with what is presented to them, but at face value it runs into an issue with games: That you can control where and importantly how you look.
Games need to play towards their stories too. If there is a clear disconnect between how things go in gameplay and how they go in the story, then it is a noticeable impact on how the player interprets the story. Adel isn't just said to be absorbing Rinoa, but she also is not just shown to be doing so. Rinoa is mechanically drained by Adel during the boss fight, and that explains what is happening better than even the physical appearance of Rinoa half submerged.
But there is also the downside too. The Lunar Cry is halfway working, Eshtar is under attack and mechanically changed, but the other half where you can just fly off and go do other stuff messes with the story. It is an interactivity impact that you don't really have a direct equivalent to for a film or book. They do a wonderful job of "showing" the Lunar Cry in the cutscene, but a terrible one of making it play out.
However, that sort of thing is in a way just an extension of "show don't tell" in a new medium. This is why games can run into trouble if they stick with just what makes film or books work out as great stories, because the part people interact with needs to match too, or it gives a new kind of disconnect that is sort of like if a film has a set that is just a bit too bare. Possessing only the details that a book would have time to give, without all of the other small features that a visual medium needs to add to express the same idea.
Its part of a gameplay story tension as players infamously hate point of no returns. Even in strategy games which often have a linear structure there a tension between players who want to be able to grind, and those who want a linear tight experience. Difficulty one way of integrating gameplay and story but there's also a tension between casual and gamers on the subject, casual may be less found of the idea of a unit appearing the map and suddenly changing enemy hit and avoid rates by 30% because genius tactician(this is real btw the game in question is deranged). Just look at the reception of soulsbornes games even if summons is a defacto easy mode.
However, that sort of thing is in a way just an extension of "show don't tell" in a new medium. This is why games can run into trouble if they stick with just what makes film or books work out as great stories, because the part people interact with needs to match too, or it gives a new kind of disconnect that is sort of like if a film has a set that is just a bit too bare. Possessing only the details that a book would have time to give, without all of the other small features that a visual medium needs to add to express the same idea.
Its part of a gameplay story tension as players infamously hate point of no returns. Even in strategy games which often have a linear structure there a tension between players who want to be able to grind, and those who want a linear tight experience. Difficulty one way of integrating gameplay and but there's also a tension between casual and gamers on the subject, casual may be less found of the idea of a unit appearing the map an suddenly changing enemy hit and avoid rates by 30% because genius tactician.
Well, I did point out earlier how that could possibly be moved to help integrate it better (move the city point of no return to before you go to space, and the spaceship only locations point of no return to the ability to visit overworld after Time Compression).
Although I do understand the overall issue is tricky to fix.
I think the main problem there is that it is kind of just a description of where it goes wrong, and doesn't really capture the true nature of the issue fully.
... but I also have been blanking on where I've seen it discussed before, and I appreciate the reminder.
Well, I did point out earlier how that could possibly be moved to help integrate it better (move the city point of no return to before you go to space, and the spaceship only locations point of no return to the ability to visit overworld after Time Compression).
Although I do understand the overall issue is tricky to fix.
I think the main problem there is that it is kind of just a description of where it goes wrong, and doesn't really capture the true nature of the issue fully.
... but I also have been blanking on where I've seen it discussed before, and I appreciate the reminder.
Do you want to create a more immersive experience by logically gating off events and locations in the world, sometimes permanently, while committing extra resources to try and avoid accidentally softlocking the player? Or do you want to hedge your bets on only the most completionist / neurotic players deciding to put the apocalypse on hold to go fishing? Think carefully, because either way someone on twitter will loudly call you a hack idiot and a bad gamedev.
From a purely game design standpoint, I can accept very late-to-non existent points of no return. The reason why it feels kind of galling in FF8 to me at least, is that there's so much time and effort showing this big apocalypse that somehow ends up having less mechanical effect on the world-state than the optional card minigame or silly UFO sidequest.
Admittedly, it doesn't really help that FFVIII waits to finally give you the Airship until immediately after the supposedly big world effecting event of the Lunar Cry... and then still has the actual Point of No Return be like 10 minutes later anyways with the Lunatic Pandora. Maybe they should have pulled a FFIII or something and just had two different airships, an earlier one that accesses most of the world (bar Esthar for magical plot technology reasons, super duper barrier is a thing already idk), then the Ragnarok for post-Lunar Cry with big worldstate changes happening.
Of course, with the current plot that also runs into the issue of the point of no return being set when you have one party member completely removed in Rinoa. Really, I think it's just another part of the problem that is "Final Fantasy VIII's plot super-accelerates in Disk 3 and 4".
Maybe they should have pulled a FFIII or something and just had two different airships, an earlier one that accesses most of the world (bar Esthar for magical plot technology reasons, super duper barrier is a thing already idk), then the Ragnarok for post-Lunar Cry with big worldstate changes happening.
Fair, the Garden does kinda cover that niche - I mostly just meant something a bit better than "discount combo of the FFIV hovercraft and a boat" that hopefully moves faster than the average snail, and doesn't get blocked off by an ocean-spanning bridge from Fisherman's Horizon. You know, something so mid-late game sidequesting doesn't take ten minutes just to get from place to place.
But there is also the downside too. The Lunar Cry is halfway working, Eshtar is under attack and mechanically changed, but the other half where you can just fly off and go do other stuff messes with the story. It is an interactivity impact that you don't really have a direct equivalent to for a film or book.
I can't help but think of it like a spy movie where an audience member decides that now would be a really good time to explore the story of the guy who was jogging in the park for some reason.
Do you want to create a more immersive experience by logically gating off events and locations in the world, sometimes permanently, while committing extra resources to try and avoid accidentally softlocking the player? Or do you want to hedge your bets on only the most completionist / neurotic players deciding to put the apocalypse on hold to go fishing? Think carefully, because either way someone on twitter will loudly call you a hack idiot and a bad gamedev.
From a purely game design standpoint, I can accept very late-to-non existent points of no return. The reason why it feels kind of galling in FF8 to me at least, is that there's so much time and effort showing this big apocalypse that somehow ends up having less mechanical effect on the world-state than the optional card minigame or silly UFO sidequest.
Remembers Tales of abyss deranged conga line of missable sidequests.
I think a big thing is also making sure the rules for points of no return are consistent and transparent, but also most games don't benefit much from them mechanically.
People generally accept the story game segregation because there's little benefit usually to holding to integration and missing content feels bad.
Dragon quest Series is more comparable to the whole genre of organised crime movies, than necessarily any singular movie like Godfather. Which is why I bring up Megalovania: Undertale is very kuch closer to a singular movie in comparascent, and literally the Pope heard Megalovania, so, like... It definitely has some cultural impact.
Personally I would say the one game which has as much cultural recognition as a big-name single movie would be Final Fantasy VII. As is famously memed, the Italian Senate knows about Tifa.
I do think a lot of the continued cultural relevance of FFVII comes from the sheer number of spinoffs and media keeping it in the public consciousness, like Star Wars. However, I'm also not sure if FFVII really works as art, in terms of deliberate artistry as opposed to "deadline is approaching, close enough". Maybe rather than The Godfather, it could be more like Casablanca?
But there is also the downside too. The Lunar Cry is halfway working, Eshtar is under attack and mechanically changed, but the other half where you can just fly off and go do other stuff messes with the story. It is an interactivity impact that you don't really have a direct equivalent to for a film or book. They do a wonderful job of "showing" the Lunar Cry in the cutscene, but a terrible one of making it play out.
One of the recurring awkward aspects of FFXIV which illustrate the MMORPG-ness is how the player, as soon as they regain control and regardless of whatever is currently happening on-screen, can go off and do other stuff like fishing for rare catches or gamble in the Gold Saucer. This includes cases like being captured by hostile forces (probably the first blatant instance that happens), and there is a convenient "escape route" just large enough for one person, but the player character is warned to "come back by the time the guards check" (ie when the player is ready for the next instanced battle). Or the player character is literally facing down a boss in their arena, ready to fight, but can also just turn around and exit the arena to go play Triple Triad.
This sort of thing is blamed on MMORPG-ness, but I think it also applies to the other single-player games as well: players in general don't just dislike Points Of No Return, they also dislike being restricted, especially if there are no signposts or warnings about being restricted. The story might require the characters to go through an emergency situation where their freedom is limited, but the player still has to play through it, and every playthrough may be different.
More recent games have tried to add warnings for the player, whether diegetic "make sure you've done all you can, because we don't know what's going to happen, hint hint", or non-diegetic "several cutscenes will play in sequence". But as you said, there is no real equivalent for more passive media like films or books, with warnings of "if you continue past this chapter, there is NO GOING BACK".
I'm working my way through Tales Of Vesperia, and "deranged conga line of missables" applies there too. So I get the feeling it's just a Tales thing in general.
It's especially annoying because a lot of the missables can get locked out based on events that do not have any direct relation to those missables. It's just a bit of code going "okay, the player reached this plot flag, time to alter the world state". We've seen stuff like that with the Timber Maniacs collection altering Laguna scenes for no apparent reason.
Personally I would say the one game which has as much cultural recognition as a big-name single movie would be Final Fantasy VII. As is famously memed, the Italian Senate knows about Tifa.
I do think a lot of the continued cultural relevance of FFVII comes from the sheer number of spinoffs and media keeping it in the public consciousness, like Star Wars. However, I'm also not sure if FFVII really works as art, in terms of deliberate artistry as opposed to "deadline is approaching, close enough". Maybe rather than The Godfather, it could be more like Casablanca?
One of the recurring awkward aspects of FFXIV which illustrate the MMORPG-ness is how the player, as soon as they regain control and regardless of whatever is currently happening on-screen, can go off and do other stuff like fishing for rare catches or gamble in the Gold Saucer. This includes cases like being captured by hostile forces (probably the first blatant instance that happens), and there is a convenient "escape route" just large enough for one person, but the player character is warned to "come back by the time the guards check" (ie when the player is ready for the next instanced battle). Or the player character is literally facing down a boss in their arena, ready to fight, but can also just turn around and exit the arena to go play Triple Triad.
This sort of thing is blamed on MMORPG-ness, but I think it also applies to the other single-player games as well: players in general don't just dislike Points Of No Return, they also dislike being restricted, especially if there are no signposts or warnings about being restricted. The story might require the characters to go through an emergency situation where their freedom is limited, but the player still has to play through it, and every playthrough may be different.
More recent games have tried to add warnings for the player, whether diegetic "make sure you've done all you can, because we don't know what's going to happen, hint hint", or non-diegetic "several cutscenes will play in sequence". But as you said, there is no real equivalent for more passive media like films or books, with warnings of "if you continue past this chapter, there is NO GOING BACK".
I'm working my way through Tales Of Vesperia, and "deranged conga line of missables" applies there too. So I get the feeling it's just a Tales thing in general.
It's especially annoying because a lot of the missables can get locked out based on events that do not have any direct relation to those missables. It's just a bit of code going "okay, the player reached this plot flag, time to alter the world state". We've seen stuff like that with the Timber Maniacs collection altering Laguna scenes for no apparent reason.
Look tales of the abyss sidequesting is deranged even by Tales standards.
Very little art actually achieves that classic status and many works that evoke that classic style nonetheless hold very little difference in quality to the genre fiction that such classic's supposedly surpass(cough Emmy bait). Classic works are also usually immortalized as much by their own merits as by the academics touting its merits, perceived cultural significance also plays a role(sometimes outside of the works actual quality). They are also usually not recognized as such within the writers own lifetime(yes Miura died before the work was completed but people where saying it before that). Works like Berserk or lotr are significant for achieving this status so soon in light of this, but also likely owes to fitting into acceptable artistic molds(Miura by his iconic art and Tolkien by being a respected linguistic professor and having academic tier medieval style prose).
As to final fantasy 7 itself it somewhat occupies its status by being well rounded while pushing the envelope in some areas, I'm not a huge ff fan but it seems to occupy the same place as ocarina of time does being well rounded entries, though this is perhaps too unfair to ff7 as I feel like ocarina of time is vastly overrated and was surpassed by entries who did parts of it better. The darling of 3d zelda has in recent years been occupied by Majora a game who which very much deserves its reputation imo as its just achieves higher highs then Ocarina even if its less a everyone game.
Speaking of everyone games there's often a tension between cult classics and wider appeal works with advocates of both trying to put the other down. And while we often make the case that cult classics are obviously better(I just touted Majora's horn lol) we often neglect to mention how the authority of the significance of those type of works are often championed by a small cadre of often white men(in the west as vague a term as that can be) who use their authority to ascribe significance to a work(which may at times in fact be made to appeal to their sensibility cough Emmy bait).
All which is to say what makes something classic is more arbitrary then we'd like to admit.
All of this is to say, we should be looking at Grand Theft Auto V and interrogate its artistic message, its aesthetics, its production, its marketing, with as much, indeed with more intensity and social interest as we do The Godfather or (perhaps more directly analogous) Avatar 2: The Way of Water.
Well, apparently it doesn't care about trains very much: View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LNr8QCAzmM
...No, I'm not very much in GTA's target market.
I think the most involved I've ever been with it was reading a narrative LP of San Andreas years ago.
Actually, though, while I'm linking game-related videos involving Hyce, here's one showing a fairly different game, in case anyone here's interested: View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaM_nio62aw
There's also even getting to that point. 2001 is image in sound; it could be off a DVD, a fully digital file over the Internet, a VHS tape, literal film... many mediums, many potential display devices, all giving pretty much the same experience and with at least some that are pretty durable. As this thread shows, though, getting FFVII running can be a challenge in itself, and maybe it turns out that, right at the end of the game, the particular version being used has a... different version of an iconic piece of music. This thread also shows that the challenge isn't insurmountable... but someone has to have reason to put in the effort to surmount it, further raising the barrier to entry.
(Personally, for instance, I started playing the Fallout series... some time after 2010. Still started with Fallout (1), though -- specifically, a DOS version with IIRC limited sound, because I was on a Mac and could run that in DOSBox. For Fallout 2 I started figuring out Wine, and used Wine for New Vegas too (Oh, and incidentally, another potential barrier to entry? Bugs and glitches; I was motivated enough to keep going, saving frequently, anyway, and/or find fixes, but compare to just pressing Play on a movie and not having to worry the DVD will eject itself three quarters of the time a character goes through a particular door on screen.). But Fallout 3? Failed to get it working in Wine, failed to get it working in a Windows virtual machine, eventually just gave up. Now from basically everything I've heard, I'm not missing much; New Vegas appears to be much more to my liking. It's still a very famous and influential game, though, in a series I've had some fairly significant interactions with, and that I tried to play, and... nope. No direct experience of that work of art for you, Reese.)
And it's likely unsolvable - with the caveat that it seems like, increasingly, streamers are becoming a means for people who won't or can't play certain video games to experience them vicariously
but also likely owes to fitting into acceptable artistic molds(Miura by his iconic art and Tolkien by being a respected linguistic professor and having academic tier medieval style prose).
While I can't completely concur with the "Ultimecia was supposed to be a potential Future Rinoa" theory on account of not having played myself, the argument makes sense from the data given, and it makes me think of all the ways stories evolve during their production that create entirely new points of drama or themes, or alternatively, create problems as the visible stitching of the changes are visible (see: FFXIV and the 2.55 Banquet's resolution in Heavensward).
Thanks for your playthrough, Omi. This is the first FF you've played that I did not previously play myself. Your views on VII actually prompted me to revisit my own souring of that game and decide to reconsider, and your VIII playthrough has been equally interesting.
I'm thinking of doing something unique for the next, though. Due to reasons I'm sure were entirely unrelated to recent releases, there was a brief sale from Square and Steam this past summer when FFIX was on sale for a small price, and I grabbed it. It's a port of the Android port, apparrently. I'm only a bit of the way into it and I may just wait until you start it to play along as you do, and experience the story that way.
Knock yourself out, but do be aware that it may still end up in me reading it and still deciding I value the original experience of the game as released over an objectively more enjoyable gameplay experience and going with the unmodded game anyway.
That's absolutely fair. I'll try to make my case for why the changes in the experience are merely limited to removed frustration and thus not that necessary to discussing the game, but I perfectly understand wanting to go with the version more people know intimately.
So, to make this fair, I'll try to list all of the advantages of using the LFT mod first, and then I'll list the negatives, such as they are, in the hope that'll provide a fair argument. Each point I'll make will have a non-spoiler version, and then a longer, spoiler analysis if I feel it's necessary for veteran FFT players to weigh in appropriately.
1) Less Grinding
As I mentioned before, one of the best aspects of LFT is reducing grinding. That's not just a convenient thing for the purpose of not having the annoyance of it - the need to grind severely disrupt the game's pacing several time, especially at the very beginning of the game.
To quantify exactly how much grinding is reduced, I'll use a comparison.
The one thing that defines RPG as their own genre and different from non-RPG games, like Action-Adventure and Platformers, are abilities that the character can learn and use. Every Final Fantasy had abilities to learn, with various different cost, from FFII where it takes a number of actions to learn them, to FFIV where they are gained through level up, which means a number of XP are required to gain them, to most other Final Fantasy where they require a certain number of AP to be learned and are carried by different constructs, and even mixes like the original FF and FFVI where both leveling up and something else, either AP or money in the case of the first Final Fantasy, to be learned.
Grinding for abilities is the thing that Final Fantasy Tactics is obnoxious about, and where LFT does the most work. If we were to assume that Tactics worked like FFVII and required AP to teach abilities, then the amount of AP required for an average character (not all character have the same requirements, but this is an average reference point) to learn all of their abilities in the base game would be around 96'830; War of the Lion would demand an even higher amount, let's say 113'740 AP. By contrast, that same character would only need an amount around 74'650 AP to learn all of their abilities in the LFT mod.
Final Fantasy Tactics also has the option to let characters accrue the required resource faster, but to do it, they need to sacrifice combat effectiveness; on the other hand, LFT made this option automatically active, and without sacrificing combat effectiveness at all. Naturally, these two factors compound on each other, making it vastly less annoying to train up a character and, more importantly, helping the pace by greatly reducing the need to grind whenever the game provides a difficulty spike.
In addition to that, just like FFVII had Materia that granted greater effects upon having collected a certain amount of AP, or FFVIII has some GF with abilities that are only unlocked after learning another ability, FFT too has gated abilities that aren't immediately available, and the LFT mod once again works to make the grind required to obtain them smaller - which is a separate thing from the resource collection I mentioned above, even if related.
As a result of these three factors compounding on each other, grinding is practically never necessary in LFT unless one is trying to obtain end-game abilities early, which does a lot to both improve the pacing and make the game more fun and less repetitive. It's the mod's primary feature, and while people mentioned the mod is old at this point, I've never really found any other FFT mod which has this as its primary focus and accomplishes it equally well.
So here we go with some hard numbers. As most people likely know, when I referred to the option of sacrificing combat effectiveness to hasten the grinding process, I was talking of the "gained Jp up" ability, which is a blight on FFT.
The ability is practically mandatory to make any progress in gaining abilities for the first two and a half, maybe three chapters (our of four that the game has), to the point that tons of guides to the game basically demand that the players use it, and since you always basically set it when starting the game and never remove it, that means that every unit will be operating without a support ability for three-fourths of the game. That reduces variety, handicaps units, limit tactical options, makes a ton of abilities pointless to learn, and is all in the service of reducing the pain of grinding from unbearable to merely painful.
LFT removes the ability from those that can be learned, and gives it to every unit as an automatic innate; that alone is the best decision the mod makes, and I believe a number of other mods borrowed it - it's a great combination of both reducing the tedium of grinding and opening up a lot of options to the player in how to customize their units, which is where the fun of playing FFT comes from.
Then there is the last point I made, which was about class accessibility. The most poignant example here is the Mime; it's a gimmicky class that, in base FFT, is unlocked too late to truly be useful, with ridiculous requirement (specifically, it requires to have Mastered the starting classes of Squire and Chemist, and Job lv. 4 in Lancer, Geomancer, Mediator and Summoner, all of which are classes pretty deep on both sides of the Job tree). In LFT, the requirements are reduced to Job lv. 4 in Squire and Chemist, and Mustadio starts with it already learned, so that players can know how to obtain it. Mime is a fun class to experiment with in Chapter 2, but it loses potency in the lategame, so changing the prerequisites to unlock it gives it a chance to shine if the player is so inclined, while still making it not an immediate unlock, since most people won't naturally push both Squire and Chemist so high on the same character (one, yes, but rarely both).
The same sort of thought has been put in changing the accessibility of other classes, with most of them having had their prerequisites lowered; this helps give the players more variety and options from early on, which makes experimenting with party composition a more involved process from the beginning.
However, the thing that matters most for reducing grinding is, of course, the great reduction in JP cost for most abilities, which result in an overall reduction of the total JP needed to master all of the jobs. I already provided the numbers for the total JP of a generic unit in the different versions above, but of course, that data isn't conclusive; most units will NOT master the full job tree, so the total isn't really an accurate reflection of the reduction in required grinding.
More importantly, the LFT mod didn't simply reduce the cost of all abilities; instead, the changes in costs were made with a focus on game balance, and a number of abilities have been re-assigned to other classes when necessary to keep things fairer. This all means that just saying "the JP required to Master this particular class have been reduced by 35% in the LFT mod" doesn't really explain why I really like the way the changes in ability costs were changed and why they're so effective at reducing tedium.
Therefore, I shall illustrate with some examples, which should help clarify the changes made, and why I think they're good.
In vanilla FFT, Mastering the Chemist Job requires 5140 JP; the LFT version can be Mastered with just 3190 JP, but while that seems like it could just be achieved by reducing each ability's JP cost by the same amount, that's not what happened. In fact, some abilities (Potion, X-Potion, Move-Find Item, and obviously Equip Change) retain the exact same cost, while a couple even had their cost raised substantially (Phoenix Down went from 90 to 250, and Auto-Potion went from 400 to 1000).
In both cases, it's easy to see why. Potion costing 30 JP to learn means that it'll take two or three actions to gain it at the beginning of the game (level 1 or 2), and that's almost guaranteed to happen, since a level 2 character will have around 50 HP and delivering around 20 HP of damage per hit - meaning a character will need around three attacks to kill an enemy. It's a basic ability, and the chemist doesn't work well without it, so it costs little. Meanwhile, X-Potion costs 300, making it quite the opportunity cosy to get at the beginning of the game, but once you're much further into the game and have already progressed chemist a bit, which is the point where the X-Potion's healing power starts to be required, it's about as easy to gain as Potion was.
Meanwhile, Auto-Potion is a very powerful ability at the beginning of the game - when enemies have 60 HP and you hit for 20 damage, having your attack trigger an auto-heal for 30 HP is a slog to get through, making the player too strong once they have it, while leaving them unable to learn any of the actual Chemist abilities as they save to get Auto-Potion immediately. Making it the most costly ability in the job turn it into a late game option, where it is still very strong, but it requires some setup and a lot of money (for buying X-Potions) to bring out its maximum power; without that it's just a good ability, but not necessarily better than the other late-game abilities. Similarly, raising Phoenix Down's cost to 250 JP makes revival harder to get, which makes low-level fights more tense and encourages players to use the less costly revival abilities of the Priest. Phoenix Down remains stronger due to being instantaneous, so giving it an higher cost makes sense to give other support classes a chance to compete with the Chemist, which would otherwise dominate the extremely important "resurrection" niche.
And the rest of the abilities had their price slashed, and in some cases by a lot: the basic healing items all were lowered from sometime exorbitant prices, as the lower of them started from twice the JP cost of the Potion, which is usually a better use of a Chemist's turn than most of the rest. In detail, the reductions went like this: Eye Drop 70 > 10, Antidote 80 > 20, Echo Grass 120 > 30, Maiden Kiss 200 > 40, Soft 250 > 50, Holy Water 400 > 60, Remedy 700 > 200. Notably, this brings all of these abilities under the cost of Phoenix Down, and in fact, a player could unlock the full set of status cures - except for Remedy - plus Potion for less than the cost of Phoenix Down; this matches the fact that Phoenix Down is the best ability in the set, and also means that a low-level Chemist can still have a lot of uses as a status remover and healer while they wait for Phoenix Down.
The reduction in the cost of Remedy is enormous, but that's matched by the fact that the previous cost of Remedy was the same as the cost of Shiva + Ramuh + Haste; not only is Remedy NOT as valuable as those three abilities together, but of the abilities that remove multiple status effects, it is the least powerful in the game (in LFT - Heal is weaker in Vanilla), in that it catches the smaller number of afflictions, missing dangerous ones like Don't Move, Don't Act, Slow and Zombie. It's still competitive in a general sense due to its long range and, of course, being part of the Item command, which is often the preferred support option due to Phoenix Down, but not with the vanilla cost; by bringing its cost down and in line with the new costs of the other multipurpose status-removal abilities (Heal 150, Esuna 280 > 200, Stigma Magic 200 > 150), the player has a genuine choice to make, whereas before Remedy would be an ability most people would never even bother to learn unless they had nothing else left on their Chemists.
So, we can see that need to grind is removed from multiple angles - making weak abilities easy to get so the units have options in combat right away, while pricing other abilities with their power in mind so as to make them easy to gain in the late-game but hard to get in the early game, and keeping in mind the costs of abilities of comparable value to give the player genuine choices. This is the mindset that the LFT mod brings to all of their changes in JP costs.
To make another example, the vanilla Lancer has multiple Jump Height and Jump Length abilities; however, most of these are redundant, because the higher number abilities will always allow the player to use the effects of lower level ones - so, a Jump Vertical 4 will let a Lance jump to height 4, but also to heights 3, 2 and 1, making the abilities providing those jump heights superfluous. So, most of the Lancer's abilities were traps and most player would just keep their lancer without any ability to Jump until they had collected the 1800 (!) JP needed to learn Jump Vertical 8 and Jump Horizontal 8.
LFT changes this by slashing away most of the abilities, instead giving the players only three options: a low cost one of the minimal Jump possible in Vanilla (Jump Vertical 2 JP 100 > 50, and Jump Horizontal 2 JP 150 > 100), a singular mid-cost option (Jump Vertical 4 JP 300 > 150, and Jump Horizontal 4 JP 450 > 300), and then the old maximum option (Jump Vertical 8 JP 900 > 450, and Jump Horizontal 8 JP 900). This makes things much clearer for the player, who can immediately have their Jump active at the minimum value, and then can chose if they want to save for the maximum power, or are content using the mid-power version that they can acquire much sooner and leave the maximum power version for much later into the game. The reduction in JP doesn't just reduce the need for the player to grind the abilities out, it streamlines the decision-making process and removes a trap that newcomers could easily fall into.
That fact that every class in the game has been revisited with this kind of approach is why I really like LFT, and why I say that it truly does a great job of reducing grinding - because it's not just reducing the JP costs, it actually put thought into how to make the "buying ability" part of the gameplay more interesting and less boring for the players.
2) Quality of Life improvements
This take the form of a couple of minor changes that, put together, bring the game much more into line with modern sensibilities.
Perhaps the most important is that the LFT adds to the mod a way to avoid non-mandatory encounters at the player's will; they can still be had, but the player would need to willingly have them. This is more in line with modern games like FFVII Rebirth or the remake of Dragon Quest VIII, although, as we saw with FFVIII "Enc-None", the concept is not that new. Still, the original FFT doesn't have any such feature, so the LFT mod has a clear leg up on this front. Notable is that, despite being more recent than the LFT mod, the War of the Lion version of the game does not have this feature, so that it is impossible to avoid non-mandatory encounters in that version.
Then there are item drops. In the original Final Fantasy Tactics, obtaining certain drops from enemies is a convoluted process, both because of complexities in how certain abilities that influence the process work, and because some of the drops are unique items that cannot otherwise be obtained, and have a very low drop chance. The LFT mod simply made the abilities involved much easier to use, and removed all of the less useful drops from the process while making the unique ones mandatory, so that farming for said items is a lot less time consuming.
A number of things, such as status effects, didn't work properly in the original game; also, some game-destroying glitches were present. Most of these things are ones that War of the Lion also fixed, so they're not worth lingering on much, other than to note that the LFT mod does took care to make those minor fixes as well, so playing it won't lose that benefit.
Of course, some people might say that the original having those glitches was part of its charm and that not using them is "not being true to the original FFT experience". I will say to that, the LFT mod left in exactly one glitch that the War of the Lion removed, because it was just a faster way to do something that could also be achieved in a more convoluted way by a sufficiently determined player, so it was decided they might as well allow players to have fun with it, but removed all the rest because they didn't make the game more fun, they actually disrupted the experience, and in my opinion, that was the right call.
So, to clarify, how this works is that random battles aren't a thing in the game anymore.
When you move through dots on the map, you'll only trigger a battle on a green dot if you stops there; if you're moving between two blue dots, let's say Dorter and Eagros, then passing over Mandalia Plains will never trigger a random fight. However, if you move straight to the green dot of Mandalia Plains, then you will always trigger a fight upon stopping there. This gives players absolute control over what they fight, while also allowing for challenge runs such as "only fight plot battles and no randoms", which would require a lot of savestate abuse to do before. It's really hard to overstate how much frustration is saved by this.
Additionally, in chapter 4, green dots will also indicate from which direction one needs to approach them to trigger the rare battles. For those that don't know, each random encounter map in FFT has a rare encounter that can only be triggered when entering the map from a certain direction; the most famous of these is the 16 Monks fight at Grog Hills, but there's one per map, and most of them are quite challenging. By indicating which direction these encounters can be triggered from, the game helps players who aren't ready to, say, face 16 lv 99 Ninja in Argway Woods throwing ultimate weapons at your head to avoid it, while also making it easier for those who are looking for the challenge to seek them out.
As for the items, what I'm referring to here is poaching. Poaching is a genuine hassle in vanilla FFT, with enemies having rare items that you need but are hard to obtain, the need to have Secret Hunt active on a character to even have the shop that sells the poaches visible in the right towns, and the fact that, since you usually need to bred the monster yourself to be able to poach what you want, a lot of extra efforts goes into hunting down certain items.
What LFT does is give the Thief class Poach as an innate ability; they can still learn it so you can give it to other classes, but if you're running a Thief, you get it for free, which opens up more options by leaving that ability slot free. Also, the poach shop is always active, and very often, you can just happen to have a Thief in your team for your own reasons when stumbling upon monsters, and poach them at no cost to you. Then, the more important change is that now all enemies only give a single item, so you never have to worry about poaching an item and getting the item you don't want; that also means you don't need to breed for a monster except in the most rare cases, just to find a map where the enemy appear normally, and kill it - a much more straightforward process.
Overall, both of these are changes that makes playing the game a whole lot less annoying, while not really affecting the experience that much - a player new to the game who didn't know what FFT poaching was like would likely not even realize that anything had been changes, given how much more intuitive the process is when handled in this manner.
3) Game balance
This is probably the largest reaching change, and the one that is less faithful to the spirit of the original game; however, it both makes the game better and allows the best aspects of FFT's own mechanics to shine brighter and to shine longer. When I make the arguments against, the extent of these changes will feature, but before I do that, I want to emphasize that, not only does every mod other than minor ones like the "dialogue replacement" one does this in some form or other, LFT has the least amount of changes in this field that I've seen. In general, reading on the forum where the mod was developed, the developers' goal was to stay as true to the original game as feasible while improving the balance, and I think the minor changes in how the game plays out resulting from the balance-oriented modifications are perfectly acceptable.
To summarize the thrust of these changes, a large number of characters and/or abilities available at the beginning of the game, depending on how one wants to look at it, are subpar and often actually detrimental to use. This is one of the things that causes the need to grind at the very beginning of the game, because only a very limited number of options available to the player are worthwhile, which results in a very samey play experience. The LFT mod remedied this, mostly by improving abilities, making them more accessible, and giving certain characters necessary tools to fill niches they were clearly supposed to fill in the original designers' intention, but didn't due to bad choices.
In addition, upon reaching late game, certain ability as so powerful, easy to use and convenient that not using them is the same as a self-imposed challenge, which once again make the game more samey by reducing the available option, as well as, in this case, making a focus on different abilities in the preceding game a waste of time. The LFT mod corrects for this by somewhat nerfing those abilities, although not to the point of removing them from the game (with one, sadly very iconic, exception), instead merely finding aspects of them that can be limited, while at the same time applying slight boost, diversification and addition to other abilities so that they can compete with the no-longer-overpowering old abilities.
The end result is that a much larger amount of strategical and tactical freedom exists in the game, and in the case of this particular thread, instead of readers who already know the game's best combo chomping at the bit for them to be discovered while warning against bad choices, they get to be surprised by what happens, while @Omicron would get to enjoy a much larger latitude in what to face the various challenge offered by the game with.
So, the most obvious example here is the Archer class.
The Archer class, as anybody who has experience with FFT knows, is completely unusable in Vanilla; their "Charge" ability locks onto panels of the map rather than enemy units, meaning that if the target moves before the ability triggers, they miss, having wasted the Archer's turn. The Archers, as befitting their class, are easily taken out by melee classes; in theory, they are glass cannons who strike with increased power from afar, but in practice they are sitting ducks unable to hit anything unless they use the base attack, which is too weak to be effective since the bows have lower attack power and use a weaker attack formula (Speed + Physical Power /2 multiplied by Attack, instead of a sword's Power x Attack), things that the Charge ability should compensate for but, due to being useless, doesn't.
Therefore, LFT changes the Archer, and it does so dramatically. First of all, it greatly speeds up the Charge abilities: the lowest power ability in the set, Charge +1 (which would have allowed the Archer to change the value of Physical Power in its damage formula to Physical Power +1, with matching changes if the weapon used isn't a Bow) is removed entirely, and the new lower power ability, Charge +2, has its CT count reduced from 5 Clockticks to 1 Clockticks.
Clockticks is an internal mechanic of the game, referring to the number of Ticks of the game's internal Clock that will pass before an action takes place. Normally, a player has a speed value (let's say 6, which is the speed value most units have at the start of the game), and each clock tick the value is added; the character act once that result reaches 100, at which point the value is reduced to zero (actually, if a unit reached, say, 102, it will start from 2 - so every single point of speed matters) and the process repeats. So, a speed 6 unit will take 17 clockticks between turns (or 16, every three turns, due to the accruing extra 2 of the 6 x 17 = 102 equation).
Of course, if two units both have 6 Speed, then they will act on the same clocktick (in an order determined at the start of battle); that's what makes landing a Charge ability tricky. There are ways to manipulate a unit's CT, the most used of which being the "wait" option, where an unit will not move and, as a result, start from 20 rather than 0; in our case of two units with speed 6, that means that the unit which didn't move will be able to act after 14 Clocktics, (or 13, with some stored speed), so three-four clockticks before the enemy. Meaning that the Vanilla charge +2 would, in this case, still miss, since it takes 5 CT to resolve - but the renewed Charge +2, taking only 1 CT, will hit - almost always, in fact, since units have different speeds and it's easy to check how much a unit has left before reaching 100.
Charge +2 is not the only one that has been changed, of course - all of the Charge abilities have, with the most powerful ability in the set, Charge +20, which previously had a CT count of +35 (meaning the attacking unit would need to have the enemy completely immobile for two turns and also skip one of their own when their speed was 6 at the start of the game - let alone being usable in the late game with speeds of 11 or 12), being lowered to a (still incredibly hard to hit!) CT of just +15 (which was the previous CT count of Charge +7, which in LFT has a CT of 6, basically a hair slower of the vanilla Charge +2, and which is therefore an ability that can only land some time and requires careful planning to use). As mentioned, a CT of 16 would allow a speed 6 unit to just barely land the ability before its next turn is up if the enemy was at 0 and also had Speed 6 - this is an ability that is still hard to land even at the beginning of the game when everybody is very slow. But, it can be used - it is now a challenging but high-reward ability. This change makes the Charge skillset something that any physical class can find use for; it adds an extra option for the players to use, and makes enemies who sport it dangerous threats instead of easily ignored opponents.
However, even this isn't really enough, since waiting would make the archer a sitting duck, and archers only have average mobility (3 squares of movement, same as most mages, while most melee classes have 4 squares of movement) and are fragile. So, the LFT mod took an ability that was otherwise completely ignored by players in the base game, and moved it to the Archer class: Ignore Height.
This ability allows players to ignore Jump limits, being able to jump up as high as possible - in vanilla FFT, it is a 700 JP ability of the Lancer class, which is unlocked after the Time Mage and Thief are already available (and thus have already started to accrue JP), which both offers superior abilities in the form of Move +2 and Teleport (the latter is in the top two best movement abilities in the game) for less JP (600 Teleport and 520 Move +2); furthermore, the immediately available Move +1 (in vanilla, this is a Squire ability costing 200 JP) is more useful for the Lancer, who uses Spears which have one extra panel of reach, and likely already learned, so a FFT vanilla Lancer will focus on first mastering its Jump skillset (which takes a minimum of 1800 JP) and unlocking the 560 JP reaction ability Dragon Spirit, which is among the best, so that, by the time a player can focus on Ignore Height, they'll likely have access to either Move +3 (1000 JP on the bard class, the other member of the top two best movement abilities) or Fly (1200 JP on the Dancer, same thing as Ignore Height but also ignore traps and obstacles).
By giving the Archer Ignore Height at a reduced cost of 300 JP, the ability is much more useful, and competitive with the other abilities immediately available (especially as Move +1 has been moved from Square to Knight and raised to 400 JP, Move +2 on the Thief has been raised to 900 JP, and Teleport on the Time Mage has been raised to 1200 JP), and allows for a lot more freedom of movement on many maps. However, the mod didn't stop there, and instead made the ability Innate on the Archer; this mean that the Archer can use the ability without need to equip it, so that it can be combined with other options, and that the ability is immediately available from the moment the class is unlocked.
As a result of this, the Archer is now capable of climbing to a high perch and sniping enemy from afar, exactly as the class is iconically supposed to do, and it also fixes the two big problems, as the Archer can now "wait" without moving, manipulating the CT to land its Charge attacks much more easily, and needing to be taken down with either ranged attacks, magic, or another unit that has equipped Ignore Height - so that, by making it available early and with a lower JP cost, it's more likely for the computer to have units with it, and also the players can have a counter ready, in the process making the ability more useful than it was in the original game.
So, this is a demonstration of how far reaching the balance changes can get in LFT - the most useless class in the game suddenly has a niche, and one that is fitting to it (the sniper), a number of combat classes have a new option that they can use (the Charge skillset, which offers extra power at the cost of not taking a more versatile ability and needing to watch the enemy's CT counts), and the tactical options are greatly expanded by the ability of units to move in ways that they would not have been able to before (incidentally, having Ignore Height as an innate ability allows players to set Move-Find Item on their Archers and use those to reach treasures that were otherwise next-to-impossible to obtain in vanilla FFT - this is a quality of life improvement alongside being a balance change).
The Archer isn't the only class to face this sort of makeover; the Knight was given innate Defense and Magic Defense up, which makes it the most resilient class in the game and immediately gives it a niche (the tank) which it sorely needed in vanilla; now, when unlocking the more powerful Samurai, Ninja and Lancer classes, the Knight has still a use case instead of becoming useless - and those classes all also were tweaked so that they each offer a different approach to the "melee powerhouse" archetype that doesn't overlap with the Knight.
Similarly, the Oracle was given innate Move MP-up, so that it never runs out of MP, and had the Weapon Guard ability moved to its list of support option, as well as having the "parry" value of Staves increased to 35% to go along with Weapon Guard; this makes the Oracle the "melee mage", with higher weapon damage, a form of defense and a great staying power, so that it now has something to recommend it against the sheer power of the Wizard, the many support option of the Priest, and the shenanigans of the Time Mage. It opens up options.
Of course, I mentioned that, in addition to buffing weaker classes like Archer, Knight and Oracle (and Squire, and Lancer, and Samurai, etc), a few abilities were nerfed, in a way, to allow more of the late-game options to shine. I already mentioned that Teleport had its JP cost doubled; this was one of the two attacks to the famigerate Teleport Draw Out Wizard build, which was generally one of the only two builds used in the late game - where the Wizard would use Teleport to pop between enemies, then use Draw Out with the far more powerful magic power of the Wizard rather than the much lower magic power of the Samurai, immediately wiping out enemies while not hurting allies due to the Draw Out "intelligent targeting".
Increasing the JP cost of Teleport so that now it is (appropriately) the most costly movement ability in the game doesn't really remove the option of using this build; it just pushes it to much later in the game, so that it comes online after other, less devastating options have had their time to shine. Furthermore, the game removed the "intelligent targeting" from Draw Out, so that now the abilities will hit allies and enemies alike; this makes positioning more important for the abilities, and helps the Summoner by leaving that niche to just it, something the class needs to stand out. However, the build can still be used, it just require far more careful positioning - the mod. didn't remove the option from the game, it just changed it from "no risk - all reward" to "powerful, but not overwhelming".
Additionally, the game changed the magical power modifier of some classes (Wizard 150 > 140, Geomancer 105 > 120, Samurai 90 > 112, Squire 80 > 110, Archer 80 > 100), although not all (Time Mage 130 = 130, Summoner 125 = 125, Oracle 120 = 120, Priest 110 = 110); the Wizard is still the strongest, but not by quite as much, and many more other classes, most notably the Samurai, can now compete - so, the build is less powerful than in vanilla, but more classes can use it, which combines to offer the player more variety and freedom of experimentation.
Generic units aren't the only ones to benefit from these balance changes - unique units have been modified with this same mindset as well. For example, Mustadio is now the fastest unit in the game, very often finding himself 1 point of speed above other characters when leveled in his own class. It's a small change, but it makes him more unique and gives him a use in the late game, where the auto-haste effects really magnify speed differences.
Similarly, it's a common refrain that, in vanilla FFT, Orlandu completely overshadows Meliadoul, being obtained earlier but having all of her abilities plus the much more useful sets of Agrias' abilities (and Gafgarion's, too) with much better stats and several battles of headstart into building an additional skillset. LFT fixes this by removing the "Destroy" abilities from Orlandu's skillset (where they went unused anyway), and then adding Zaalbag's "Ruin" abilities to Meliadoul's skillset; this gives her something useful to do when she can't break enemy equipment, and also makes her a better version of a Knight from a skillset standpoint, since she now has both equipment-destroying and stat-reducing abilities like Knights do, but hers strike at range.
Building on this, the mod also gives her the same innate defenses as generic Knights have, and lets the playable version of the character use the same stats as her boss version; these are still inferior to Orlandu for the most part, but the one key exception is HP, which is much higher. As a result, Meliadoul suddenly becomes a suped-up Knight, a very strong defensive unit; this gives her a unique niche against Orlandu's focus on offence. What's more, while Orlandu joins with his own class Mastered, Meliadoul joins with Dancer unlocked; this means she has immediate access to all of the classes on the physical side of the job tree (Dancer in LFT is unlocked by having Geomancer and Lancer at Job lv 3, lower than the base game Geomancer and Lancer at Job lv 4), so it's much easier to build her up however the player wishes to.
I'll talk of the downsides of this later, but in general, I think all of these changes are for the good, make the game much more fun, and in no way detract from the FFT experience; they change it, sure, but the change is only in the freedom of the players, in giving them the ability to choose how to face the game's challenge instead of being mandated to use only those abilities and characters that are overpowered and ignore the rest.
I cannot see this as anything but a positive, and I think it would make for a much more interesting Let's Play if Omicron was trying out new party configurations whenever a battle gave him some trouble, instead of either overpowering them with the only good options or having to stop and grind to gain the abilities that enables those good options. That's why I'm suggesting this for the LP, it'll be more interesting for us to read as well as being more fun for Omicron to play through. It's a win-win situation in my book.
So, that's it for the positives, in my view: massively reduced grinding, some serious quality of life improvement, and most importantly, a re-balanced gameplay that is extremely faithful to the original and retain a lot of the previous fun while also adding a whole lot of enjoyment and new options to it.
As for the negatives, they can be summed up in two points.
1) Gameplay breadth.
As I just mentioned above, the most powerful abilities were nerfed; naturally, that's removing something veteran FFT players would miss, in the forms of ways the game can be broken on your knee harder than FFVIII ever does. Some people who are angry at FFVIII for having that kind of brokenness to it will defend keeping this brokeness in FFT as a good thing (I'm not talking about people in this thread, to clarify, it's just something I've seen happen in other, less civil online discourse), but personally I feel like removing that kind of "press X to win" options is for the good. Still, I can see people pointing to this as a negative, in that @Omicron won't be able to experience the absurdity.
More relevant are the changes in how certain characters and/or abilities function, however; while most individual changes are small, a few are notable, and most importantly, them all put together opens a vast array of tactical complexity and options that can, depending on ability selection, cause battles to play very differently from the base FFT experience. Note, if one were to make certain choices, those being the ones that were overpowered/mandatory in the original game, it will play almost exactly the same (the diversification in samey abilities still changes things a bit, but it's minimal), but other choice will completely change things, to the point that the same battle against the same opponents in the same location could be an entirely different experience from what people are used to.
Again, to me this is to the good - it adds variety and replayability to the game, a ton of it in fact - but, in the context of "playing the game the way it came out", yeah, the fact that @Omicron might be able to vary their choices so that a FFT veteran is caught by surprise by the way a battle plays out might count as a negative, I suppose.
I should also note, for the record, that War of the Lion is worse on this front - while it doesn't make the balance changes, with all their positives, it does adds a lot of extra options that are, for the most part, wildly out of whack with the rest of the game, thus introducing all the negatives of the changes in gameplay from the original without any of the positives. Just in case more persuasion was need to not go down the WotL path.
So, I guess it's time to talk about the Calculator, and then explain how the balance modification overall change the way the game is played.
The calculator is the worst class in Final Fantasy Tactics, hands down. It has the worst speed modifier: 50, when most other classes have 100, the fastest classes can go up to 120, and the only class under that, the Summoner, has 90, and is generally considered quite slow and ponderous. Speed is the best stat in the game, with even one point mattering a lot (speed 9 takes 12 CT to go from 0 to 100, while speed 10 only takes 10 CT; double that with Haste, and the 10 speed character will be taking 6 turns for each five of the enemy, meaning acting twice quite regularly), so having half the speed of the other classes kills a unit utility enormously.
Furthermore, while none of its other stats are quite as bad, they are not good; despite being a mage class, unlocked by reaching Job lv. 4 in Wizard and Priest as well as Job lv. 3 in Time Mage and Oracle, it has a magical modifier of 70, lower than non-magical classes like the Archer, Knight and Monk (all of which have 80 in the vanilla game), let alone an actual caster class (those are all above 110). And, least you think that we're looking at some sort of punch magician here, its Physical Modifier is 50, same as all of the other mages and leagues below something like the Lancer (120 in vanilla, 140 in LFT). There's no saving the Calculator on the stat front.
Of course, the badness of the Calculator is deceptive, in that, it's even worse than it appears from just the numbers. See, units gain JP and XP each time they take actions (not unlike FFII), and being so slow that it only takes one turn for each two-to-three turns of every other unit on the map, the Calculator will unavoidably gain less JP than any other character, so it'll take longer to learn its abilities and the player will need to spend more time in the worst class on the Job tree to achieve it, and also gain less XP, thus leveling slowly, thus taking longer to gain in speed, thus becoming even slower compared to the other characters. Actually trying to master the Calculator's set of abilities is the epitome of FFT grinding problem.
How this is usually handled is by using the Proposition system, which allows characters to gain JP without fighting, a workaround clearly intended to be used with the Calculator specifically, as it's the only way one can gain all of the Calculator's abilities without pulling their hair out.
So, does the Calculator has any saving grace? As it happens, it does, in the form of its skillset: Math Skill. This is an ability clearly inspired by the LV 5 Death Blue Magic spell we saw in previous Final Fantasy, only this one actually does it better, in a very intuitive manner - I honestly thought for a long time that the other games in the series had been inspired by it, since it's such a natural fit.
The skill set lets the user choose a parameter, obviously including level, but also elevation, XP total, and CT total, as well as a divisor between 3, 4, 5 and a Prime Number, and then hits every target on the map that matches the chosen parameter with a spell chosen from those the Calculator learned on the Wizard, Priest, Oracle and Time Mage abilities lists (the four classes necessaries to unlock the Calculator). Due to picking from four different magic lists (instead of the max of two a normal caster is limited to), striking across the entire map regardless of distance, allowing the player to select or exclude targets pretty much at will, consuming no MP, and having no charge time, Math Skill is easily the most powerful skillset in the game - held back from absolute game dominance only by being attached to the worst class in the game. In theory, giving the Calculator a use case.
In practice, like with Draw Out, what players actually do is to move this skillset to the Wizard, so that now the benefit of Math Skill can be fueled by the highest magical modifier in the game instead of the Calculator underpowered one, and come out twice as fast due to not being saddled with the game's lowest speed; creating the other build (aside from Draw Out Teleport Wizard) which is the obnoxiously, overwhelmingly powerful choice for late-game FFT: Math Skill Wizard.
In fact, this is so strong a setup that it's become one of the most iconic things about FFT. CT 4 Holy will hit every single target on the map most of the time, is obnoxiously strong when it combines the third most powerful spell in the game with the highest magical power multiplier and then, taking advantage of it being the only one of the three strongest spells to have an elemental affinity, powers it up further with a item boosting Holy Damage, and alongside with equipping every party member with an item that let them turn Holy Damage into healing (conveniently, those two come into the same item), it lets the player kill every enemy on the map while fully healing every ally all at the same time. Death can be used to the same effect - ward all your characters against it, and watch every enemy on the map keel down with a single attack. It's brutal.
And, obviously, completely disruptive to game balance; no physical class can hope to compete with a mage using Math Skill, and in vanilla FFT, the Wizard's advantage in magical power multiplier is so high that no magical class can compete with it either.
Now, most mod creators know that Math Skill is absurd, and that the Calculator class itself, separated from Math Skill, is completely useless, so they just remove the class and skillset from the game and use the slot to include something else. It's the easy solution to the problem of Math Skill and the Calculator - just don't have them.
However, LFT finds a different solution, keeping both in the game, and instead strives to balance them. The way it does this is by sharply limiting the spells that can be accessed with Math Skill; no longer can it calculate near every spell in the other lists, instead being mostly limited to buff and lesser status effects (the ones that don't win the battle instantly), plus the most basic of offensive spell at their lowest level. This still leaves the skillset enormous versatility, but it is no longer overpowering; casting lv 5 Fire across the map is obviously useful, and you can even set up your characters to absorb Fire so that it also heals, but not even a Wizard will be able to make the base Fire into a OHKO, and now that Wizard has a reason to use their own skillset to cast Fire 3 or Fire 4 (or Flare, or Death) when they need more serious damage.
Of course, this change meant that Holy and Death had to be removed from the Math Skill options - there's simply no way the skillset could have retained parity with the other magical abilities if it retained those two options. So, in the name of game balance, the most iconic ability was removed from FFT. I understand why people might say that doing something like this makes LFT as a mod unsuited for the let's play thread; however, I think that getting hung-up on it is loosing sight of the forest for the three. Math Skill is better without those abilities because, without them, it becomes an option a player can choose or not, instead of being mandatory. I think the tradeoff is worth it.
Anyway, continuing the discussion, the LFT mod isn't content with simply nerfing Math Skill so that it's no longer a giant dominating the rest of the game; it also wants the Calculator to have a use on its own, to be a worthwhile unit a player could select for their own reasons, rather than just for the skillset. And so, they decided to make it quirky.
First, borrowing the idea from the Archer, they gave the Calculator an innate movement ability, in the form of Teleport 2; this is a more advanced version of Teleport that cannot fail - whereas the normal Teleport can sometimes fail if you move too far from your starting point, Teleport 2 doesn't, giving the units with it free rein of the entire map. In vanilla FFT, this is an ability only some villains have, but here, LFT gives it to the Calculator as an innate; it cannot be learned, so the only way for the player to access this powerful movement option is to use the Calculator class.
Then, in addition to it, they gave the Calculator another innate ability: No Charge. This is an ability that basically removes the CT from all the spells in the game, making them go immediately instead of having to wait turns (which potentially allows targets to escape the spell's area of effect). This is based on affinity to Math Skill, which is instantaneous, and immediately make the Calculator useful: it remains as slow as in vanilla, but now, when its turn comes up, it can strike immediately, making up somewhat for the long wait time. The ability is also added to the ability that a Calculator can learn, although at 9999 JP, with the slowness of gaining JP on the calculator class, it's really the sort of thing that would only see use against the post-game secret superbosses that LFT added.
So, by combining a depowered Math Skill with a unique movement mode that lets them reach everywhere on the map (something encouraged by the Move-Find Item treasures having been made better throughout the entire game, with some exceptionally good one on the hardest maps like Riovanes Rooftops) and the ability to strike immediately, it at severely compromised power, the Calculator ends up having its own niche - it is still better to move Math Skill to a different mage than the Calculator, but it's not overly better, just a bit, and if you need a lot of mobility or some slow ability to hit faster then usual, then it becomes a class with uses. Once again, adding variety to the game and options to the player.
Having said that, in addition to how the nerf to Math Skill offered a reason to talk about the removal of iconic things, the Calculator also offers a reason to talk about the downsides of these balance change. While I love the modified calculator, there's no denying that adding a teleporting instant-acting unit to the game completely changes the sort of tactics that can be employed in a fight, and when you start to combine units that have been modified - using a Calculator for its teleporting ability, a Bard for their blood-sucking Harp now having been given enormous attack, an Archer to harass enemies from the rooftop while a Knight tanks things from the middle as it takes twice the amount of punishment other units could - the game can play completely differently from what a FFT veteran would expect, often to the point that it's hard to believe one is playing the same game.
Even items play into this; as all of the items have been streamlined and redistributed, Chapter 1 now makes the Magic Ring and Power Wrist available immediately (stripped of their status protection, only granting +1 MA and +1 PA respectively) at reasonable prices, with the Small Mantle and Spike Shoes (now upgraded to +2 Jump) made available later in Chapter 1 - which offers a lot of extra possibilities for accessorizing builds, but also opens up the game to different builds that never would have happened in vanilla; an evasion tank Thief showing up in Chapter 1 would really change how a battle plays out, same as a magically oriented Squire, due to the combination of higher MA and a option for a +1 at a time where the mage's advantage on that front is small.
Or, for a late-game example, the "Always Regen" effect of the Chaos Blade has been removed from it and added to the Defender, which can now be easily poached; combined with the Knight's halving of all the damage it receives, the addition of automatic self-healing to a weapon that grants 60% miss chance with Weapon Guard active makes for a very hard to kill unit, and if one such enemy were to show up it would immediately force the player to change their normal priorities in a way vanilla FFT never asks of the player.
So, yes, when all the balance changes are put together and allowed to compound on each other, the game could easily end up as being nearly unrecognizable in play... because a number of classes, items, abilities and strategies that weren't viable in vanilla suddenly are. It's not the same experience as original FFT, that's undeniable, and if we're watching this let's play to get the original experience, it'd be fair to say that using the LFT mod would detract from that original experience.
If, however, what we're following the let's play for is to see what interesting ideas Omicron can come up with and what sort of interesting new approaches to the game he can take, then I would say that LFT is the way to go, because it offers so many more of them. Plus, it's twice as fun as FFT, which, considering how much fun FFT is by itself, really should be enough recommendation on its own.
2) Optional content
FFT, like every Final Fantasy since FFIII, had optional sidequests; I hope this doesn't count as a spoiler, and apologize if it does. What LFT does, mostly as a threat to veteran players who would want to use the greater breadth of gameplay available against something challenging, especially when the rest of the game mostly focuses on balancing things for an average player, is turn all of these sidequests into endgame content. There's really no other way to put it - the challenge of the sidequests, all of them, is upped to the point they compare to the game's final boss, and completing even one of them at the moment they become available would easily allow the player to steamroll the rest of the game.
While most of the sidequests don't add anything to the plot, and so modifying them in this manner does little to change the game, there is at least one that adds a tiny bit of extra lore, thus being very tangentially connected to the plot, in the vaguest of sense; nothing that happens in the sidequests actually affects the plot game, it mostly acts as extra context. Losing that is a bit of a shame, I'll admit that readily, and if I was pointing to the most valid reason not to play LFT and instead go with the vanilla FFT, just like @Flare did, this is what I'd point to.
That said, I still consider this to be a minor thing; it's very easy to miss these side missions if one isn't pointed directly to them, and simply playing the game plot in its entirety without worrying about them is a perfectly legitimate way to go through FFT - and if one does that, than this one downside to the LFT mod doesn't really matter at all.
So, I mentioned before that the mod modified the rare battles on each map, making all of them more unique and more challenging. In a couple of cases, this extended to battles featuring unique enemies and rare items, hard enough to be considered the equivalent of secret superbosses. This is a lesser manifestation of the same issue that I thought worth mentioning.
More importantly, however, are the other sidequests, which for those that don't know, are actually a single long sidequests of battles that have to be fought in a specific sequence, with the first becoming available halfway through chapter 4 of the game, and more of them becoming available as the plot progresses until all are open once the game can tackle the final gauntlet of fights that lead to the final boss.
The fights all include unique units with unique powers, rare equipment, high levels, potent skillsets, and a general very high level of challenge overall. The Nelveska fight, in particular, is deadly, with enemies that practically skirt the line of breaking the role with their presence; this is especially annoying as the two pieces of unique equipment that can only be recovered from this fight in the canon version (and, due to the obtuse way FFT handle treasure, could be completely missed by the player) have actually turned in two of the best items in the game as well as homages to the best items of their category in FFIII and FFVI (the Blood Lance and the Paladin Shield) and made impossible to miss... only that surviving the fight to get them is now much, much harder, pretty much comparable to a superboss and probably the hardest in the game, although there are other contenders.
Finally, the Deep Dungeon is a special spot on the map with ten different fight locations, each one containing four fights; all of the fights in the place have been replaced with harder ones comparable to the rare fights, and one fight on each location is pretty much a superboss fight - except for the last location (the bottom of the Deep Dungeon), where all five of the available fight are that level of challenge.
Overall, a new player who doesn't know FFT ins and out to the smallest detail would probably be obliterated by many of these fights, and this makes them pretty much off-limit to a let's play like this one. This has the effect of removing a lot of side content from the game, and making it impossible to collect the few bits of extra lore that these fights guard.
Technically, it is possible for a novice to make it to the bottom of the Deep Dungeon by resetting whenever a hard fight comes up and then managing to find a strategy that defeats Elidibus and provides the Serpentarius Stone, and I quite like a lot of the modified Deep Dungeon fights, enough that I would keep them. The rare battles on the green dots don't really matter, but losing the whole Beowulf sideplot that yields the Aquarius and Cancer stones, as well as being unable to collect Cloud's cameo appearance, is a bit of a disappointment.
If I was any good at programming, I'd like to make a version of the mod that keeps the rest of the LFT changes but remove those to the sidequests, but I'm not, so I just have to accept that the sidequests being made pretty much inaccessible is the big price to pay for an otherwise excellent remaster-style mod.
So, that's it for me making my case for why using the LFT mod won't really disrupt the experience of playing FFT, only make it more interesting and less frustrating; hopefully it'll change some minds, and if not, I'm more than open to know why! Although, given the subject matter, anything more details than "I agree" or "I disagree" will likely need to be expounded upon under spoilers.
Tactics has a lot of jank that mods fix ,it feels against the spirit of things to try an change it like that. Its part of why tactics has so many mods. Tho the jank is less apparent if you don't grind, tbh but that causes its own problems arguably.
The jank and the grind in FFT cause, and compound on, each other. They're indeed a very integral, very frustrating part of the experience.
However, unlike FFVIII where exploring how bizzare the mechanics are is a core part of the game, most people agree that the mechanics in FFT are great... just, you know, once you get through the jank and grind first. Those aren't a part of the game that is discussed when talking about Tactics as a game, they're an obstacle people need to overcome before they get to experience the "true" Final Fantasy Tactics.
So, if they're going to be downplayed and ignored when judging the game's quality anyway, why bother to play through them, when you can just remove them and simply appreciate/enjoy the game in full? It seems unnecessary to me.
As a result of these three factors compounding on each other, grinding is practically never necessary in LFT unless one is trying to obtain end-game abilities early, which does a lot to both improve the pacing and make the game more fun and less repetitive. It's the mod's primary feature, and while people mentioned the mod is old at this point, I've never really found any other FFT mod which has this as its primary focus and accomplishes it equally well.
Grinding is practically never necessary in FFT WotL either (Source: I just did it). 100 battles, including MSQ, sidequests, and random encounters, and you're set, without Gained JP Up or Stone Throwing contests (technically I used JPUP and only played 65-ish battles, but 100 without JPUP would have made things easier lvl-wise.). That's enough to have complete builds without enough to go "I have every expensive skill from every class on every character and just W+M1 to victory like a TF2 Pyro main", which is indeed tedious and repetitive and not fun.
The problem is all the guides (and many players) insist on being prepared for the mid-game by like the third fight, which imo ruins the game entirely. They bore themselves through excessive grinding and then get rid of the difficulty and make the rest of the game also boring.
"Minor changes" proceeds to talk about how they reworked every job.
This is just short of a total conversion mod. No obviously I can't recommend playing this as someone's first time through the game, especially when the entire point is to experience the game as it was and not how a bunch of modders thought it should be.
As an aside, it's rather dishonest to repeat yourself like this. You just reworded the last topic, kept the positive tone, then stuck it in the negative category to pad it out. Otherwise yeah the same as above, because it's the exact same point and you're just repeating yourself.
Yes the side content is important wtf. Imagine talking about any of the previous FFs Omni has played and went "Yeah you should instead played those games with a mod where every single side quest is hidden behind a copy of FFVII Emerald Weapon."
Especially when Elidibus is like, a quarter of the reason I want Omni to play this game in the first place [\SPOILER]
After FF8 I am personally ready for significantly less FF side content but I would be interested in your opinion on what distinguishes FFT side content from FF8 side content.
It's a positive for me, but it's a negative for you and others. That was my point.
And I would not say that every character was completely reworked; the abilities are mostly the same, only some characters have greater access to them, or they're available earlier, or have been moved around. Compared to mods that actually change the game completely like 1.3, the changes aren't that large, they're just using what was already there in FFT in a more creative manner. Next to nothing new has been added, very few things have been removed.
But I did say for people to provide their opinions, and it's clear that your opinion is a no. That's fine! I've made my argument in as much detail as I could, and if it doesn't persuade people, then it doesn't.
...That's twice the normal amount of fights the game has; that's plenty of grinding. When I say LFT removed it, I mean that you can go through the whole game without having a single random encounter, and always have some ability at hand, and never feel like you need to level somebody up to win a fight. Being able to surpass the first Dorter fight, or the Golgoland fight, or the Wiegraf fight at Riovanes, with just the abilities you have on hand, without need to spend random battles unlocking things.
...That's twice the normal amount of fights the game has; that's plenty of grinding. When I say LFT removed it, I mean that you can go through the whole game without having a single random encounter, and always have some ability at hand, and never feel like you need to level somebody up to win a fight. Being able to surpass the first Dorter fight, or the Golgoland fight, or the Wiegraf fight at Riovanes, with just the abilities you have on hand, without need to spend random battles unlocking things.
I've done Dorter without having fought any random battles, and Golgoland was after about 3 or so random battles. I sought out exactly zero random battles, while using a team of only generics. Hell, I broke double-digit random encounters only while going from Goug back to Riovanes after picking up a new gun. And those random battles were not very long. Yes if I didn't use Gained JP Up I'd have to fight more battles, otoh if I used Agrias or played base FFT I'd need less. 100 battles, when there's 55-ish mandatory battles, 8 or 9 in the deep dungeon, and another half-dozen or so sidequest battles, is about 30 random battles, which you'll probably do while poaching or doing errands. Each of which end up being maybe 5 minutes long. 2 1/2 hours grinding without using any of the tools provided to make the game easier in the grindiest version of the game is not a lot. Use any actual named character and you need significantly less grinding. Use Gain JP UP and you need significantly less grinding. Use the characters you trained from Chapter 1 instead of ditching them for Lavian and Alicia (...I like them ok?) and you'd need less grinding.
That's fair. I don't think we should continue a mostly spoiler discussion in the main thread, but I can see where you're coming from. I think we just have different tolerances and opinions; that's perfectly understandable. Thanks for engaging with what I posted!
