look into playing Final Fantasy Tactics - not sure what the remake situation is on that front -
Oh, this is a thing I was looking forward to speaking about. Potential spoilers here, I tried to keep things as generic as possible to preserve the "blind playthough" aspect of this thread as much as possible, but it's impossible to discuss this without explaining a few things about the gameplay, so this is my warning if you'd rather not be spoiled on the general overview of how the mechanics of the game work.
First of all, as above said, there is only one remake/rerelease for FFT, and that's the War of the Lion version for the PSP. People above might be saying that the new translation is better than the old, but having gone through each one, that's not true - they're both very bad. It's just a different kind of bad; the original has a lot of translation mistakes and ridiculous, silly lines, but the new one has a "ye olde english" tone that is obtuse and overly complicated. They also put different emphasis on different sections of the story, with the original having a translation that gets better as you go forward, while the War of the Lion one gets more and more difficult to decipher near the end. Due to this, characters who appear more predominantly in the earlier or latter portions of the game end up having
different characterizations in the two versions, due to the deeply changed dialogue they sport. Also, for whatever reason, the two versions have slightly different names; some of the changes are improvements but others aren't, and of course, the Aerith/Aeris debate is nothing new in the FF community. Overall, it's a matter of taste; I generally load the original translation because it's sillier and funnier, but the new one can be worth going through if archaic English is more your style, or you feel like the game is better with a darker tone.
Having said all of that, I think the translation is the very least of the things that needs discussing here. Final Fantasy Tactics is, as indicated in the name, a tactical RPG, meaning its fights happen in an isometric grid by moving one party member at a time like a chess match; due to this, the gameplay is actually the most important aspect of it by a much large margin than any other Final Fantasy. That's because there's next to no exploration and NPC interaction in the game, with the only locations the player can move to being either battlefields or shops; the (extremely) limited NPC interaction is basically limited to "check the tavern for rumors" when you're in a shop location, and the exploration is limited to a few unlockable secret maps that can be found by looking for rumors in the right places. Outside of that, combat is really all there is to the game.
And, within that framework, the gameplay of the battles is a blast...
once it gets going. That, though, takes a while.
Trying not to spoil too much, characters in the game have multiple classes to learn abilities from, which can then be combined in a mix-and-match style that lets you build the team you want. It's a very freeing playstyle that allows for endless experimentation, giving a game that, ultimately, is just a string of less than 50 fixed fights (give or take a few bonus ones) an incredible level of replayability.
However, the thing is, it takes
a while for the game to get going. In both versions (more so in the original) the tutorial is absolutely useless and endlessly confusing, and since the game is basically just fight after fight, you're thrown into the thick of it with no idea what you should be doing. Without somebody to tell you "this is how the game works", it can take a while to learn how to play. A lot of people, especially ones with no experience in tactics RPG, bounce off of FFT due to that initial difficulty in learning how to play and never make it past the intro fight.
But even once you get past that problem, the real fun of the game doesn't really come in until you actually have enough characters with enough classes unlocked and abilities learned to start the mix-and-matching process; this can well take a dozen of battles in the original, although you can grind to make it less of a pain - assuming you are quick to understand the way in which grinding works in FFT, which isn't intuitive at all. In fact, this is so common that most veteran players will say "the game starts at Dorter", which is the fifth fight in the game and, notably, the second fight to take place after the first grind spot is opened to you, with the previous fight also opening a second grind spot. There are abilities in the game meant to make the grinding more effective, but since the progression curve is so slow, most people will keep those abilities on for the entire game, effectively reducing the ability to mix-and-match things in order to have usable abilities, and to make matter worse, most of the early classes are so bad, there's not much fun to be had with those, so the fun of the game is delayed until the player can unlock the classes with the fun abilities.
And what the War of the Lions did was make all of these problems, the barriers that stands in the way of letting players enjoy what's so great about FFT, that much worse. Abilities cost more to learn and classes are more difficult to unlock, including those who already had ridiculous requirements, while nothing has been made to improve the least effective early game classes, meaning the players have to grind longer to get to the point where it's actually fun to play the game, and keep their grinding up throughout much of the game. That's why I'd never ever recommend that anybody plays the War of the Lions version. It's like actively making one of the most fun games ever worse for yourself.
Which is where I bring up something that will surely be controversial. FFT has one of the most active modding communities around, with a lot of work and creativity going into the game. There's all sort of mods available, like masochistic difficulty increase mods, ones that completely change the plots, and even mods that replaces all the classes and abilities with completely original stuff. However, there are also a couple of mods that provide "quality of life" improvements to the original game (most of the modding is about the PSX version, not the War of the Lions version), with my favorite among those being LFT (Laggy Fantasy Tactics, which unlike the War of the Lion version, actually has less lag than the original; the lag in the War of the Lion version was the most complained about problem that one had). I think LFT is the more "spiritually close" option to what the pixelated remaster you're going with has available, in that it absolutely remove any need for grinding - once I got it, I never again played FFT without, and also I never once bothered to waste any time grinding until I was training for the secret bosses, since just normal play would see me gain a couple of new abilities every fight. What's more, the game also rebalanced all the classes and made them all much more easy to access, so that the early classes can still be useful for late-game combinations and that every single class has something going for it, greatly expanding the potential for mix-and-matching stuff, essentially making the game more fun by increasing the amount of combinations available, which is what FFT is all about.
And, for fans of the new translation, LFT has two versions, one for each translation, so you can pick the one you like best; they're still both mods for the original PSX variant, one also changes all of the dialogue in addition to re-balancing everything.
Of course, I don't know if using mods is something you'd feel is acceptable for a first time play; I can imagine people saying "well, they didn't really play through FFT if they used a modded version", and of course there's always people who say "you can't really appreciate a mod if you didn't play the vanilla version first", but my personal take is that there's never a good reason to play a lesser version of a game if you have a best one easily available. And, as I said, I enjoy LFT as a mod so much I'll never again play any other version of FFT, so that's my recommendation.
As an aside that doesn't really matter, War of the Lion has extra content in the form of a few bonus maps and items, one extra class that takes even more grinding to unlock than anything else in the game (and isn't that saying something), and messes with the story by replacing in a few cutscenes with CG videos that are actually inferior to the original game's scenes in terms of fitting with the game's style and what information they provide. The only thing I would keep from that is the bonus map, because it expands on the backstory of one party member, but that's not enough to make me decide to drop the version of the game that's actually more fun to play for it; I'd much rather wait for somebody to adapt that backwards as a mod for the PSX version, if that was possible, than subject myself to the endless grinding of War of the Lion again. But that's just my preference.
TL, DR version to avoid spoilers about the game's mechanics:
If I was making a suggestion on which version of the game to go with, I would say get the LFT mod for the PSX version, and go with that. Having said that, if you'd only play the official version, then I would suggest going with the original over War of the Lion. And, regardless of which version you play (that is, even if you were to go with LFT), find somebody you trust who has played the game before, and have them explain to you how to play; that'll spare you two hours of pain trying to figure it out on your own. Unless you would enjoy that, I suppose.
...I really had a lot to say about this, didn't I? And yet, despite the fact I generally prefer tactics RPG and how fun I think FFT is (when properly modded), it's neither my favorite in the series, nor the one I think is the objectively best entry in the Final Fantasy franchise (those two aren't the same to me, as it happens). Not sure what to think about that. Also, I hope this was helpful in some fashion!
