- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I do hope @Adloquium is alright, they haven't been on in a while.
(I mean it's not like analyzing the JP script for our entertainment is their job or anything but I do miss their breakdowns)
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy IX]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
(I mean it's not like analyzing the JP script for our entertainment is their job or anything but I do miss their breakdowns)
So unconsciousness, confusion, pain, and then more unconsciousness. Though I'm sure he has very strong opinions on what floors in Ivalice are the most comfortable to bleed out on.
I can't decide if Construct 8 or post-game Alma with Ultima is the funniest option for Louise.
For 'funny' I'd actually think it better to go with Reis since she's ~technically~ everything she was asking for, for interesting plot and character stuff maybe Alma during those thirty seconds where she was possessed instead.
Final Fantasy Tactics: Final Thoughts
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Final Fantasy Tactics, Final Thoughts
Final Fantasy Tactics is not a mainline entry in the Final Fantasy series. Yet it is now obvious to me that no Let's Play of the series could have been complete without it. It is a truly important piece of Final Fantasy history, as well as a tremendous game in its own right. It's also just fascinating to study.
Final Fantasy Tactics succeeds in part because of all the ways in which it deviates from the established FF formula; at the same time, the flaws it does possess are just as inevitably linked to these differences.
So let's talk about it.
On Narrative
Final Fantasy Tactics is a different beast from the others. It's been compared to Game of Thrones; I would say that more than this it has some of the sensibilities of a HBO historical prestige drama, Rome mush as Game of Thrones. It's a story that's grounded in a sense of reality, of both the macro- and the micro-scale interacting with another; it's a story that cares about the clash of armies, the hunger of peasants, the unpaid wages of soldiers, but it's also still ultimately a story about ambitious individuals vying for power against one another in a deadly dance. It's a story of corrupt nobles, scheming advisors, fanatical clergymen, cynical conspirators, and the few who hold true to bravery and honor. But it's also, unavoidably, a story about the great threat of an otherworldly evil, demons without redeeming qualities or psychological depth who seek to drown the kingdom in blood and fire and who manipulate the events of the war… But without ever overtaking them.
I've seen it said that when Hashmal says Ultima has not had enough blood to awaken, he's saying that the whole of the War of the Lions was orchestrated as a summoning ritual. I don't think that's true, because we're never given evidence that the Lucavi were in a position to cause the war. They merely took advantage of it. The war happened for the reason all human wars happen - ambition, succession crises, competing claims to power.
Final Fantasy Tactics is the first game to manage to harmoniously wed the two halves of social commentary and inhuman evil, and it succeeds for a simple reason:
The inhuman evil is the natural endpoint of the human evil.
The Lucavi are a metaphor. They've always been. Why does Lucavi possession work in the specific way it does, where the host starts out as still themselves, merely suddenly imbued with greater power and knowledge, only for them to progressively lose their human attachments, connections, emotions - even their grief and anger and hatred, until it's all subsumed into the demon and they no longer even identify themselves by their human name?
Because that's what war and the lust for power do to all of us.
Ramza fights two duels in the course of this story: Against Gaffgarion and against Wiegraf. In the first one, he fights against a man who once held a position of both leader and mentor over Ramza, and who in multiple interactions shows that he holds some fondness for his younger mercenary, however short was their time together. Gaffgarion continues to plead to Ramza that his brother is sure to forgive him if he lays down his sword after said brother has told Gaffgarion he had his approval to kill Ramza if he continued to be an obstacle. I don't think that was a lie; I think Gaff was willing to bend the truth a little hoping to sort it out later if it might mean not having to kill Ramza. Yet at the end of the day, when push comes to shove and he has to make a choice, Gaffgarion decides this affection will not stop him from doing his job and killing the boy, without particular remorse or hesitation.
In the latter duel, Ramza fought against a man who had once held great ideals of equality and justice marred by a thirst for blood for blood's own sake, a struggle he never managed to reconcile; a man who swore an oath of vengeance against him for the death of his sister, and who, bleeding out on the pavement of Orbonne, made a pact with an otherworldly power for the strength to see that vow through. And when the time of their final battle came… None of that mattered anymore. The dream of a better world, his oath to Milleuda, it was all dust in the wind. He drew his sword against Ramza out of the fading embers of a dying fire, a lingering sense of obligation that no longer bore any true emotional weight.
These two men are no different. Gaffgarion and Wiegraf both sold their souls. One of them did it figuratively, when he decided that lofty ideals of knighthood and honor, a sense of justice, or his personal fondness for a young mercenary he'd taken under his wing mattered not one whit weighed against the coin in his purse. The other did it literally, by reaching out to a greater power on the cusp of death. But they were both hollowed out all the same.
The fall of House Beoulve is civil war in a microcosm. It turns brother against brother, it reveals where our lines are drawn in the end, it unearths ancient wrongs, secret crimes and long-held grudges, it drives each of us to crime we would have once thought unthinkable. When Dycedarg bargains with the Capricorn Stone, he is already far gone. He has already killed his own father, sold out his half-brother, and turned his blade against his trueborn brother. All the stone does is give him the power to stand again and reveal the depths of the truth to Zalbaag before slaying him. And Zalbaag, the Knight Devout, Lord Commander of the Northern Sky, this pinnacle of knighthood - though in the end he did open his eyes to his brother's crimes and found the moral resolve to call him out, though he's found a core of conviction and principle… He'll never wash his hands clean of Tietra's blood.
He doesn't even realize they were stained to begin with.
This is, I think, why the ending - not the Delita epilogue, but the fight in the Airship Graveyard - struggles to land. We don't know how Folmarv-Hashmal's current state represents a supernatural exaggeration of a human fall, because we never knew Folmarv to begin with. Ultima presents the suggestion of themes surrounding false prophets, ancient crimes buried and forgotten coming back to the fore, and how the bloodshed of war nurses great evils, but it never coheres into a real idea. It is, at the end of the day, just a cool monster who says a couple of lines about "more power" and "I recognize you…" then dies. Hashmal does at least present the suggestion of loyalty, of love - that he did it all for someone, more than just the sheer love of carnage; but this too is underwritten, and that contributes to leaving the final, ambiguous fate of all our heroes unsatisfying.
It's okay if everyone died in a doomed, but heroic last stand against the return of an evil god. It's okay if their deaths were worthy. But they can't be without an antagonist strong enough, and rooted enough in the themes of the narrative, to make this sacrifice meaningful. And at the end of the day, Ultima doesn't have the juice to purchase our heroes' sacrifice, and so the game tries to land an awkward middle ground in which we see Ramza and Alma survive and leave Ivalice behind for a better life away from war and bloodshed while keeping it ambiguous whether anyone else survived and that doesn't really land.
In part because it just ends up emphasizing one of the greatest flaws of Tactics hopelessly intertwined with some of its greatest asset.
On Characters, and Emotion
Final Fantasy Tactics is home to some truly stellar character work. Foremost of it all is Delita Heiral's game-spanning arc: At the end of it all, even the player doesn't truly know the truth of Delita's heart, and in a way that is good, because no one has ever known it. Perhaps not even himself. This is his tragic flaw: Delita is so good a schemer, so skilled at presenting whichever face the situation required and finding the right words to get his ways, that anyone close to him can't help but realize it and wonder if he was ever true to them.
That's why everyone who gets close enough to see this must be pushed away or excised from his life. And that's why the one person he doesn't remove from his life, the one person he allows to stay close enough to watch him seamlessly move between his various personas and use and discard others as pieces on a board, is the one to plant a knife in his chest.
In the end Delita's cleverness buys him all the power and glory in the world and the love of the people and the adoration of historian, and it leaves him utterly alone, forever. It is excellent writing.
There are others, less front-and-center but still excellent characters arcs in the game, of course; Wiegraf's moral degeneration I'd likely rank second to Delita. It shares with it a mastery of anticlimax; both arcs end not in a big, dramatic confrontation with a character's sin; one ends in a messy and bloody struggle with a knife in which barely any words are exchanged, and only the aftermath is left to contemplate; the other ends in a shadow of the man that was Wiegraf, every cause he once upheld both righteous and vengeful forgotten. The progressive uncovering of Dycedarg's depravity forcing Zalbaag to confront his own failures and where he draws the line - also tremendous. Tactics is good at character writing. There's absolutely no doubt about this.
There's one thing in common to these characters I cited above, though:
They're all antagonists.
What are our protagonists? Well…
Ramza is fine. He's okay. His main character traits are that he's righteous and has a strong sense of justice, that he feels guilt over failing to save Tietra, and that he wants to save his sister. That's pretty much all there is to him. 80% of his dialogue in the last act of the game is variations on "Where is Alma" and "Alma, I'm coming." He has the flickers of a compelling personality early on in Act 2, when he's clearly struggling to pull himself out of the torpor of the last year in which he dissociated and killed a bunch of people and now has to realize that his past is catching up to him and there are innocents in need of saving and it turns out he can't turn his face away like Gaffgarion asks him to, and then he just spends the rest of the game just having a basic sense of ethics and experiencing no conflict. That doesn't mean he's necessarily boring - there's stuff I enjoy about Ramza: His moments of cleverness, his increasing frustration and fatigue with his enemies, the implication that he's traumatized enough by getting jumped several times in Chapter 2 that he never goes anywhere without five heavily armed maniacs lurking within earshot ready to pounce the second someone pulls shenanigans. But he's so, so far from Squall, or Cloud, or even Terra or Celes.
But hey. Ramza is our main character, and main characters in JRPGs being blandos isn't unheard of. What about the rest of the cast?
Well, it's great! Here, let's grab just one example: Agrias.
Agrias is a great foil to Ramza because she has the same basic instincts as him but she's an ass about it. Agrias is honorable, loyal, and devout. She has taken no side in the war as such, yet she is willing to go to the ends of the earth for the princess she's sworn to protect, even when all the expectations of duty start falling apart and the royal family start turning on one another over competing claims to the throne, because this princess is her princess. But she's also impulsive, prickly, and abrasive. More than that, she's proud - but proud in that particular way that is extremely sensitive to insults and condescension and willing to draw steel to settle it. And the thing is, there's a very clear gender angle to it - she is this proud and this defensive because she is frequently the target of sexist comments or expectations that strongly suggest that, even though Ivalice allows women to serve in the military and reach positions of great honor, it still labors under the shadow of centuries of patriarchal culture and social conditioning. Being willing to defend her honor with violence (the way a knight should) rather than adopting a serene and above-the-insult attitude codes Agrias as kind of a hardass, the way many women who "can't take a joke" in a sexist environment are treated as "bitchy," and just like these women, she's actually completely right to react this way. Agrias's attitude tells us a lot not just about herself, but about Ivalice as a society.
Her first loyalty is to Ovelia, and she joins Ramza in hopes of saving her. And then the paths of her desire and necessity diverge - Ovelia is unreachable at the heart of one of the Duke's domains, while there is a present threat to all of Ivalice that must be uncovered and fought. How does Agrias reconcile these two facts? How does she make the decision to let Ovelia be and pursue the Lucavi threat?
In the War of the Lions, the answer to that question is left until the very last minute of the game, moments before the point of no return. In the PSX original, there is no answer. Agrias's conflict is not even not resolved; it is simply not featured. There is no conflict, because Agrias ceases to exist entirely the moment she joins the party. In WotL she receives two (two!) scenes to slightly explore her character, one good, the other barely viable enough to justify its own existence. How does a knight of the Lionsguard resolve her conflicting loyalties to the royal family? How does a she react to the truth of the Lucavi? She doesn't. There is no Agrias past that point.
This is well-trod ground for this thread by this point, but this post just wouldn't be complete without me revisiting it and laying out all that we have in Agrias at the start of the game, and how it just vanishes into the aether past one specific milestone (her joining up).
There are 17 unique recruitable characters in Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions. All of them cease to exist within the narrative once they are recruited. This is the core failure that holds back the game from perfection.
It's not just a failure of basic writing, though. It's a disservice to these characters, sure, but there's more to it than that. It's a failure of Final Fantasy writing specifically, and that's what makes it… Interesting? Because that's the other side of the coin of "this game is really good at telling a kind of story no other FF game has told before", which is that it's bad at the things mainline games are good at.
Namely, it lacks a party. It lacks the feeling of watching a bunch of weirdos slowly grow to know each other and bond with one another. It lacks the depth and focus to really dig into the psychological frailties and trauma of a character who is more than they let on on the surface. It lacks… friendship. And because it lacks friendship, it lacks emotional peaks and valleys. The story of Tactics is grand, sweeping, operatic; it has shakespearian tragedy, yes. But it lacks a Shakespearian hero (or rather, that hero is Delita; but it's Ramza whom we follow and are asked to empathize with), and the result is… How to put it?
Final Fantasy Tactics could never make me cry.
This is obviously kind of a quippy comment. "Cryability" is not the standard of a good story. But though Tactics takes us through tragedy after tragedy, slowly mulching through 90% of its cast as the game advances, and though it keeps throwing emotional uppercuts at Ramza, there is never a scene where he is broken down and brought to his lowest point in the way Squall, Cloud, Terra, Celes, even Cecil were. And because there isn't, there's never anyone to hold his hand and guide him back to the surface. Obviously not every Final Fantasy game needs to follow the same arc, with the same beats and the same highs and lows. But Tactics just lacks that sense of digging into the psychological meat of a character's issues and flaws with your bare fingers to dig up their core and ask what makes them them, and what's a layer of emotional sediment that makes them someone else. Whether that character is Ramza, or Agrias, or Mustadio, or even Rapha or Meliadoul - all their complications are left unexplored and unaddressed.
I said early on in this playthrough that "Who can you trust?" was the core question at the heart of Tactics. And it never truly stops being so… The problem is that the answer it settles on is "Those guys over there, who will never have a spoken line again. You can trust those guys. They're your buddies, we swear. Oh, and Orran too I guess." Every other game in the series (at least since IV) manages, more or less successfully if often awkwardly, to get you to a point where you can say: Even at my lowest point, there'll be these guys by my side.
Every game except Tactics.
And that just doesn't work.
On Gameplay
Final Fantasy Tactics is the most fun I've had playing a Final Fantasy game.
There's no "since [number]." That's it, that's the whole sentence. It's the best one.
When I started playing Tactics, I thought to myself that the maps were too small, and the unit count too low. That's because I misunderstood the meaning of the word "tactics." I was expecting a slow, plodding gameplay, in which many turns were spent setting up proper positioning and conditions, approaching under cover, wearing away at enemies with high miss chances, and covering ground towards objectives.
That's not Tactics. Tactics, despite its turn-by-turn gameplay, is a brutal, fast-paced, intense battle game, in which fights are over in a handful of rounds and every decision matters. Units often die in two hits at the start of the game, one hit by the end; Assassin-type units can reshape the entire battlefield on Turn 1 before the enemy has even gotten to act, or overexpose themselves and die before they got to do anything. Defender-type units can grant themselves extremely high chances to negate attacks making them futile to take on head-on, which can be completely obviated for a one-hit kill by using back attacks or 100% accuracy moves. Support units are a force multiplicator that can't win battles on their own but which are completely indispensable to ensuring consistency in victory rather than rushing to DPS and rolling the dice every time. But the game is so deep that your best support unit can in fact also be your best assassin unit, as we saw with Gillian, the White Mage with Holy!
Tactics battles are not castle sieges. They're SWAT raids. Early advantage or disadvantage quickly snowballs into an overwhelming victory or defeat, or else everything devolves into a bloody slaughter on both sides that ends with you racing against the death clock to secure the objective win. Permadeath is, on the whole, a bad mechanic the game should have avoided; but the emergent gameplay that arises from having one unit down, no viable raise, and needing to win in three turns before their counter ticks down and it's game over is some of the most tense and satisfying gameplay in Tactics.
The Job system has been refined since V and this is something approaching its apex form. The sheer versatility enabled by the long ability lists and the Command / Command / Reaction / Support / Movement ability spread is unmatched in any other game. V needed the Freelancer because of its fairly restrictive ability slots making it hard to truly customize a character within a specific job, but it led to the homogenous endgame blobs. V does not have this issue. By the endgame, each of my six main units (Ramza, Agrias, Mustadio, Hadrian, Gillian, and Hester, with one being left out in any given fight) had a completely different build and largely different battle roles. Some absolutely dominated the early and mid-game, while others came into their own late in the game, but none of them were ever obsolete or useless.
The player-side of the gameplay is so good, it's enough to overlook its chief weakness, which is that so much diversity comes at the cost of enemy diversity. Due to sprite count restrictions, the game cannot handle very complex or varied enemy set-ups, and often defaults to very similar basic formation - two Knights, two Archers, two Mages, and variations thereof. The Knight, especially, is omnipresent among enemy squads while being a fairly boring unit except when it ruins your unique equipment and you have to reload the game. By the end of the game, you've seen enough Divine Knights that they're no longer particularly fearsome or dangerous, which contributes to the feeling of hunting down and finishing off the last few stragglers of the enemy faction, rather than going up against terrifying combat monsters. Endgame Tactics is just not very difficult, and features unexciting enemies… Which is something it largely gets away with because of how satisfying it is to see the builds you've been constructing over the past 40 hours fully come online and click and destroy your opposition. You have earned this.
Like, I've said it a few times, but it bears repeating: By the end of the game, my party was ten levels lower than their opposition, and still tore them to shreds, because of how important ability combos and equipment choices are.
I have grown so attached to these nameless generic units that I am seriously considering commissioning artwork of the full party (but I definitely can't afford it (Agrias would be a vampire in it though (it'd probably ship Mustadio and Gillian))), which is paradoxical considering everything I said about the issues with the game's character writing, but this paradox is inherent to the Tactics experience.
Is the gameplay perfect? No. Some of the classes are just not good enough or interesting enough, like Archer, or even Knight. But the thing is, if you look at the game from the perspective of first time player, these classes are entirely good enough, because their purpose is to be training wheels. Squire, Chemist, Knight, Archer; all these classes initiate you into the basic mechanics of the game without overwhelming you with early gameplay complexity. Sure, it'd be better if they were all also long-term viable in their own right at the same time, and mods have been amply discussed that change them to be that; but from my perspective as an entirely new player I was glad complexity only steadily came in over time.
Other issues are more problematic. The fact that the game is fairly fast-paced and intense makes it hard to justify using abilities which could be battle-enders if they land but have a high chance of failure, like a 60% Disable chance, when a missed turn can be so damaging. The fact that all the endgame equipment is in a bonus dungeon and requires you to engage with the Treasure Hunter mechanic, which is terrible, is incredibly annoying and, as you can see, I didn't even bother engaging with it. The Zodiac system needs to not exist.
These blemishes are not enough to drag down the gameplay's overall quality. Tactics is just fun.
And coming off VIII, that is the single most important thing I could ask for, and why I'm so glad I took a break from the main entries to play it.
On Presentation
Final Fantasy Tactics is a glimpse into another world, a path not taken - what might have happened, perhaps, if the Final Fantasy series had committed to sprite-based design as it moved to the PSX.
When I say this people tell me "and Chrono Trigger is another example" but, like, guys. No. I'm not saying Chrono Trigger isn't a masterpiece and a beautiful game, but there is a change in hardware that is fundamental and completely changes the aesthetic of the game. Because what Tactics does is set sprite-based characters in a 3D environment. This allows it to do tricks that were beyond the capabilities of the SNES, like having multiple camera angles that the player can control, or which the game itself can take control of for cinematic purposes, allowing it to use deliberate staging and blocking. The paradox of Tactics's visual design is that by using the more 'primitive' technology of sprites, it gives the player more camera control than the ultramodern 3D rendering of VII and VIII. This camera customization is possible in part because of the complexity of the sprites, with characters broken down into multiple limbs, an incredible wealth of custom poses and animation, creating character work far more alive than any previous game.
Interestingly this means that the backgrounds of the game look a lot uglier than the backgrounds of VII, because these backgrounds aren't lavish pre-renders designed for a single camera angle but crude, blocky maps that need to be twisted every which way mid-battle. But it works for the game's aesthetic! If you do pay close attention, it creates this very strange, almost surreal look to many of Tactics's maps, especially the urban ones, where instead of having clearly demarcated "streets" and "houses," you have these strange chunks of architecture that seem to merge in and out of one another, these ideas of a castle, of a church. The verticality in these terrains is frankly kind of incredible, with each individual map designed as a little scenario unto itself before the units are even introduced, with various paths upwards and downwards for units of various mobility ratings and abilities… Again; I started out thinking the maps were too small, and I eventually realized that no, they're each beautifully crafted for their specific size requirements.
The CGI cutscenes added by War of the Lions are… Hm.
I can't say they're universally a bad addition. In particular, I think the opening and ending cutscene are better in the cell-shaded WotL style. There are a couple that are more powerful, more beautiful than their sprite work version - I'm thinking of Delita and Ramza at the Mandalia Plane… And at the Church in Zeltennia? Except the Church scene is more complicated than that because it changes the setting of that encounter, and in changing the setting, it changes the meaning of their interaction. In a vacuum, I like the WotL scene better; in the context of the story, I don't know. A lot of other times, though, the CGI scenes are inferior to a sprite-based, in-engine cutscene, despite some decent voice acting and some beautiful environments, because, well, the 3D models are hideous due to their unseemly proportions and the camera work is desperate to hide this fact, leading to godawful blocking because the game is actively trying to keep the characters off-camera.
And that's just bad filmmaking.
As for the music…
…
Yeah, I'm sorry, I retain no memory of the music. By my last play session I found the intro music grating, I have heard the World Map theme so much I ended up putting it on mute by the endgame. The battle themes were mostly fine! Some of the cutscenes had some really good orchestral cutscenes! I couldn't tell you which ones, though. Sorry. I'm as bad with music as I ever was and this game has not given me a Force Your Way to stick in my mind. I apologize to those for whom this is heresy.
…
But there is one other aspect of presentation that I want to talk about, and I believe this is the first time I have ever touched upon this aspect in this category:
The prose.
Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions is incredibly beautifully written. We started this series with solid modern localizations of older scripts, and they had some cool lines, but ultimately their script rarely drew attention to itself. Then we had two straight games of barely hanging together scripts, though VIII had the merit of, like, mostly not being Literally Incorrect?
But god it's so nice to listen to the music of words for once. Yes, the WotL script is at times overwrought, sometimes too full of itself. But it earns forgiveness for those foibles, because for the most part, it's just pleasant to read.
Ramza: "I had lived my life the only way that I had known. But when the pillars of that life came crashing down, I did not stand and watch them fall. I turned, and walked away."
Ramza: "House Beoulve is no more. But what does it matter? We are the sum of our deeds, not our names."
Delita: "Forgive me. 'Tis your birth and faith that wrong you, not I."
Delita: "All of them swept up in a mighty current, a current they cannot see or feel... I simply swim against it. Nothing more."
Delita: "I will burn down this kingdom, and from its ashes build for you a new one - a kingdom worthy of you."
Ovelia: "My entire life has been spent behind sacred walls. The only sky I've known, hemmed in by slate and stone. Did you know, before I was sent to Orbonne, I was in another monastery? When I heard I was to be the adopted daughter of the late king, and after - ever in a monastery. It's not been such a bad life, I suppose. Only...Only, knowing that men die, for no more reason than that I am the princess - it's almost more than I can bear."
Wiegraf: "What troubled sleep have you known, to speak of my dreams? No matter how sweet, a dream left unrealized must fade into day. Only with power can dreams be made real! I see the truth of it now. What good, dreams, without that power? You think me a thrall? So be it! Your envenomed words succour me, for when at last you yield - as you must - their poison will consume you!"
It's good words.
Perhaps where this change elevates the material the most in the decision to make the Lucavi universally speak in (pseudo) iambic pentameter. I didn't check every bit of dialogue to make sure it always kept the meter, but even if there's sleight of hand, the vibe is there. It creates this unity among the Lucavi, where they all share a particular kind of antiquated, highly formal speech, which differentiates them from their human forms and sets them apart as older, ancient, perhaps more sophisticated beings. These demons claim to be gods, and they at least have the patter right; even when they speak of death and horror and mock mortals and promise death, they do so with the lofty airs of creatures wrought of a history book, an old play, a book of fables. Though in truth their motives are petty and base, they at least can put up the appearance of grandeur, of divinity. This is a considerable improvement from my look at the PSX script which seems to have them all talk like cackling cartoon villains, and not the cool kind either, the one-episode ones with a nasally laugh who get punted at the twenty minute mark with a lesson about friendship and never appear again.
This isn't to make a universal statement about the quality of the WotL script as pertains to things like the characterization of the cast, or specific plot events or implications of themes. This is perhaps more arguable (and people have argued it; we have a pretty comprehensive breakdown of @Egleris's particular read on the PSX script's differences which I find quite interesting and am glad was posted even if I don't necessarily agree with it), but strictly in terms of the beauty of the language, I am glad I had the WotL script. This final review would be much less kind to the game if I hadn't, purely because I would have enjoyed my time with it much less.
In Conclusion
Final Fantasy Tactics is not a perfect game. No game is. But it gets closer than many, and it could have gotten even closer without some flaws holding it back.
But it's still really, really fucking good.
It's no wonder that it gave several later FF devs brainworms so severe they would hatch in some major aspects of the award-winning MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV. Its particular storytelling sensibilities are unique in the Final Fantasy field, being, in effect, the recruiting of a guest writer from a different series to bring his own particular approach to game design and storytelling to a spinoff from the story, and like often, this produces a total banger.
It's been a fantastic experience that did not overstay its welcome, and I could absolutely see myself, later down the line, replaying the game with one of the various gameplay overhaul mods that people like to mention, in search of a more elaborate and veteran-friendly experience, with a challenging endgame and rebalanced classes and the like. I could replay it without one of these mods, just because it's that fun baseline and there are multiple classes I haven't used at all, like the Bard or the Mime, and I barely tapped the Summoner's potential, and so on! The last game for which I said this - the last game which I thought "wow, that might actually be fun to replay later!" was V, fully three games ago. God. Those were the days. And even so V's endgame was like eating an entire wheel of cheese in one sitting and I'm not eager for it.
Wait, fuck - I meant to have a section On Worldbuilding here where I'd talk about the world design of Ivalice and how it gels together but I'm running out of time, god, what was there? The way the game's handling of female characters, both actual characters and generic units, suggests a world that is just past a particular inflection point where women's place in society considerably expanded to the point of occupying a significant part of the military, yet society as a whole remains heavily patriarchal (all the major nobles and church officials are men) in a way that suggests lingering tensions that the game unfortunately left unexplored but which could be ripe for a deeper social commentary? Oh, oh! The way that magic is basically divided between 'miracles' that are poorly understood related to the auracite and the Lucavi, and magick which is a formalized science (really more of an engineering discipline) that is taught in military schools and deployed on the battlefield without fanfare or awe but as part of combined tactics units where mages act as portable artillery, medics, support units, which culminate in the ultimate magical job being Arithmetician, a unit that has literally solved magic through the power of advanced mathematics? Final Fantasy Tactics foreshadows Tactical Breach Wizards decades ahead of time! Or, or, but there's not enough time, not enough space.
I'm going to miss Tactics and its Job system as we move back into the main series, but I am satisfied by this détour, and I'm hopeful IX will be great in its own right and in its own way.
This was a great experience, and I'm glad you were there with me for it.
And we got done in time for the holidays, even!
Thank you for reading.
WAIT FUCK I FORGOT TO TALK ABOUT WHETHER RAMZA SHOULD HAVE STAYED A SQUIRE OR BECOME A DARK KNIGHT-
Final Fantasy Tactics is not a mainline entry in the Final Fantasy series. Yet it is now obvious to me that no Let's Play of the series could have been complete without it. It is a truly important piece of Final Fantasy history, as well as a tremendous game in its own right. It's also just fascinating to study.
Final Fantasy Tactics succeeds in part because of all the ways in which it deviates from the established FF formula; at the same time, the flaws it does possess are just as inevitably linked to these differences.
So let's talk about it.
On Narrative
Final Fantasy Tactics is a different beast from the others. It's been compared to Game of Thrones; I would say that more than this it has some of the sensibilities of a HBO historical prestige drama, Rome mush as Game of Thrones. It's a story that's grounded in a sense of reality, of both the macro- and the micro-scale interacting with another; it's a story that cares about the clash of armies, the hunger of peasants, the unpaid wages of soldiers, but it's also still ultimately a story about ambitious individuals vying for power against one another in a deadly dance. It's a story of corrupt nobles, scheming advisors, fanatical clergymen, cynical conspirators, and the few who hold true to bravery and honor. But it's also, unavoidably, a story about the great threat of an otherworldly evil, demons without redeeming qualities or psychological depth who seek to drown the kingdom in blood and fire and who manipulate the events of the war… But without ever overtaking them.
I've seen it said that when Hashmal says Ultima has not had enough blood to awaken, he's saying that the whole of the War of the Lions was orchestrated as a summoning ritual. I don't think that's true, because we're never given evidence that the Lucavi were in a position to cause the war. They merely took advantage of it. The war happened for the reason all human wars happen - ambition, succession crises, competing claims to power.
Final Fantasy Tactics is the first game to manage to harmoniously wed the two halves of social commentary and inhuman evil, and it succeeds for a simple reason:
The inhuman evil is the natural endpoint of the human evil.
The Lucavi are a metaphor. They've always been. Why does Lucavi possession work in the specific way it does, where the host starts out as still themselves, merely suddenly imbued with greater power and knowledge, only for them to progressively lose their human attachments, connections, emotions - even their grief and anger and hatred, until it's all subsumed into the demon and they no longer even identify themselves by their human name?
Because that's what war and the lust for power do to all of us.
Ramza fights two duels in the course of this story: Against Gaffgarion and against Wiegraf. In the first one, he fights against a man who once held a position of both leader and mentor over Ramza, and who in multiple interactions shows that he holds some fondness for his younger mercenary, however short was their time together. Gaffgarion continues to plead to Ramza that his brother is sure to forgive him if he lays down his sword after said brother has told Gaffgarion he had his approval to kill Ramza if he continued to be an obstacle. I don't think that was a lie; I think Gaff was willing to bend the truth a little hoping to sort it out later if it might mean not having to kill Ramza. Yet at the end of the day, when push comes to shove and he has to make a choice, Gaffgarion decides this affection will not stop him from doing his job and killing the boy, without particular remorse or hesitation.
In the latter duel, Ramza fought against a man who had once held great ideals of equality and justice marred by a thirst for blood for blood's own sake, a struggle he never managed to reconcile; a man who swore an oath of vengeance against him for the death of his sister, and who, bleeding out on the pavement of Orbonne, made a pact with an otherworldly power for the strength to see that vow through. And when the time of their final battle came… None of that mattered anymore. The dream of a better world, his oath to Milleuda, it was all dust in the wind. He drew his sword against Ramza out of the fading embers of a dying fire, a lingering sense of obligation that no longer bore any true emotional weight.
These two men are no different. Gaffgarion and Wiegraf both sold their souls. One of them did it figuratively, when he decided that lofty ideals of knighthood and honor, a sense of justice, or his personal fondness for a young mercenary he'd taken under his wing mattered not one whit weighed against the coin in his purse. The other did it literally, by reaching out to a greater power on the cusp of death. But they were both hollowed out all the same.
The fall of House Beoulve is civil war in a microcosm. It turns brother against brother, it reveals where our lines are drawn in the end, it unearths ancient wrongs, secret crimes and long-held grudges, it drives each of us to crime we would have once thought unthinkable. When Dycedarg bargains with the Capricorn Stone, he is already far gone. He has already killed his own father, sold out his half-brother, and turned his blade against his trueborn brother. All the stone does is give him the power to stand again and reveal the depths of the truth to Zalbaag before slaying him. And Zalbaag, the Knight Devout, Lord Commander of the Northern Sky, this pinnacle of knighthood - though in the end he did open his eyes to his brother's crimes and found the moral resolve to call him out, though he's found a core of conviction and principle… He'll never wash his hands clean of Tietra's blood.
He doesn't even realize they were stained to begin with.
This is, I think, why the ending - not the Delita epilogue, but the fight in the Airship Graveyard - struggles to land. We don't know how Folmarv-Hashmal's current state represents a supernatural exaggeration of a human fall, because we never knew Folmarv to begin with. Ultima presents the suggestion of themes surrounding false prophets, ancient crimes buried and forgotten coming back to the fore, and how the bloodshed of war nurses great evils, but it never coheres into a real idea. It is, at the end of the day, just a cool monster who says a couple of lines about "more power" and "I recognize you…" then dies. Hashmal does at least present the suggestion of loyalty, of love - that he did it all for someone, more than just the sheer love of carnage; but this too is underwritten, and that contributes to leaving the final, ambiguous fate of all our heroes unsatisfying.
It's okay if everyone died in a doomed, but heroic last stand against the return of an evil god. It's okay if their deaths were worthy. But they can't be without an antagonist strong enough, and rooted enough in the themes of the narrative, to make this sacrifice meaningful. And at the end of the day, Ultima doesn't have the juice to purchase our heroes' sacrifice, and so the game tries to land an awkward middle ground in which we see Ramza and Alma survive and leave Ivalice behind for a better life away from war and bloodshed while keeping it ambiguous whether anyone else survived and that doesn't really land.
In part because it just ends up emphasizing one of the greatest flaws of Tactics hopelessly intertwined with some of its greatest asset.
On Characters, and Emotion
Final Fantasy Tactics is home to some truly stellar character work. Foremost of it all is Delita Heiral's game-spanning arc: At the end of it all, even the player doesn't truly know the truth of Delita's heart, and in a way that is good, because no one has ever known it. Perhaps not even himself. This is his tragic flaw: Delita is so good a schemer, so skilled at presenting whichever face the situation required and finding the right words to get his ways, that anyone close to him can't help but realize it and wonder if he was ever true to them.
That's why everyone who gets close enough to see this must be pushed away or excised from his life. And that's why the one person he doesn't remove from his life, the one person he allows to stay close enough to watch him seamlessly move between his various personas and use and discard others as pieces on a board, is the one to plant a knife in his chest.
In the end Delita's cleverness buys him all the power and glory in the world and the love of the people and the adoration of historian, and it leaves him utterly alone, forever. It is excellent writing.
There are others, less front-and-center but still excellent characters arcs in the game, of course; Wiegraf's moral degeneration I'd likely rank second to Delita. It shares with it a mastery of anticlimax; both arcs end not in a big, dramatic confrontation with a character's sin; one ends in a messy and bloody struggle with a knife in which barely any words are exchanged, and only the aftermath is left to contemplate; the other ends in a shadow of the man that was Wiegraf, every cause he once upheld both righteous and vengeful forgotten. The progressive uncovering of Dycedarg's depravity forcing Zalbaag to confront his own failures and where he draws the line - also tremendous. Tactics is good at character writing. There's absolutely no doubt about this.
There's one thing in common to these characters I cited above, though:
They're all antagonists.
What are our protagonists? Well…
Ramza is fine. He's okay. His main character traits are that he's righteous and has a strong sense of justice, that he feels guilt over failing to save Tietra, and that he wants to save his sister. That's pretty much all there is to him. 80% of his dialogue in the last act of the game is variations on "Where is Alma" and "Alma, I'm coming." He has the flickers of a compelling personality early on in Act 2, when he's clearly struggling to pull himself out of the torpor of the last year in which he dissociated and killed a bunch of people and now has to realize that his past is catching up to him and there are innocents in need of saving and it turns out he can't turn his face away like Gaffgarion asks him to, and then he just spends the rest of the game just having a basic sense of ethics and experiencing no conflict. That doesn't mean he's necessarily boring - there's stuff I enjoy about Ramza: His moments of cleverness, his increasing frustration and fatigue with his enemies, the implication that he's traumatized enough by getting jumped several times in Chapter 2 that he never goes anywhere without five heavily armed maniacs lurking within earshot ready to pounce the second someone pulls shenanigans. But he's so, so far from Squall, or Cloud, or even Terra or Celes.
But hey. Ramza is our main character, and main characters in JRPGs being blandos isn't unheard of. What about the rest of the cast?
Well, it's great! Here, let's grab just one example: Agrias.
Agrias is a great foil to Ramza because she has the same basic instincts as him but she's an ass about it. Agrias is honorable, loyal, and devout. She has taken no side in the war as such, yet she is willing to go to the ends of the earth for the princess she's sworn to protect, even when all the expectations of duty start falling apart and the royal family start turning on one another over competing claims to the throne, because this princess is her princess. But she's also impulsive, prickly, and abrasive. More than that, she's proud - but proud in that particular way that is extremely sensitive to insults and condescension and willing to draw steel to settle it. And the thing is, there's a very clear gender angle to it - she is this proud and this defensive because she is frequently the target of sexist comments or expectations that strongly suggest that, even though Ivalice allows women to serve in the military and reach positions of great honor, it still labors under the shadow of centuries of patriarchal culture and social conditioning. Being willing to defend her honor with violence (the way a knight should) rather than adopting a serene and above-the-insult attitude codes Agrias as kind of a hardass, the way many women who "can't take a joke" in a sexist environment are treated as "bitchy," and just like these women, she's actually completely right to react this way. Agrias's attitude tells us a lot not just about herself, but about Ivalice as a society.
Her first loyalty is to Ovelia, and she joins Ramza in hopes of saving her. And then the paths of her desire and necessity diverge - Ovelia is unreachable at the heart of one of the Duke's domains, while there is a present threat to all of Ivalice that must be uncovered and fought. How does Agrias reconcile these two facts? How does she make the decision to let Ovelia be and pursue the Lucavi threat?
In the War of the Lions, the answer to that question is left until the very last minute of the game, moments before the point of no return. In the PSX original, there is no answer. Agrias's conflict is not even not resolved; it is simply not featured. There is no conflict, because Agrias ceases to exist entirely the moment she joins the party. In WotL she receives two (two!) scenes to slightly explore her character, one good, the other barely viable enough to justify its own existence. How does a knight of the Lionsguard resolve her conflicting loyalties to the royal family? How does a she react to the truth of the Lucavi? She doesn't. There is no Agrias past that point.
This is well-trod ground for this thread by this point, but this post just wouldn't be complete without me revisiting it and laying out all that we have in Agrias at the start of the game, and how it just vanishes into the aether past one specific milestone (her joining up).
There are 17 unique recruitable characters in Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions. All of them cease to exist within the narrative once they are recruited. This is the core failure that holds back the game from perfection.
It's not just a failure of basic writing, though. It's a disservice to these characters, sure, but there's more to it than that. It's a failure of Final Fantasy writing specifically, and that's what makes it… Interesting? Because that's the other side of the coin of "this game is really good at telling a kind of story no other FF game has told before", which is that it's bad at the things mainline games are good at.
Namely, it lacks a party. It lacks the feeling of watching a bunch of weirdos slowly grow to know each other and bond with one another. It lacks the depth and focus to really dig into the psychological frailties and trauma of a character who is more than they let on on the surface. It lacks… friendship. And because it lacks friendship, it lacks emotional peaks and valleys. The story of Tactics is grand, sweeping, operatic; it has shakespearian tragedy, yes. But it lacks a Shakespearian hero (or rather, that hero is Delita; but it's Ramza whom we follow and are asked to empathize with), and the result is… How to put it?
Final Fantasy Tactics could never make me cry.
This is obviously kind of a quippy comment. "Cryability" is not the standard of a good story. But though Tactics takes us through tragedy after tragedy, slowly mulching through 90% of its cast as the game advances, and though it keeps throwing emotional uppercuts at Ramza, there is never a scene where he is broken down and brought to his lowest point in the way Squall, Cloud, Terra, Celes, even Cecil were. And because there isn't, there's never anyone to hold his hand and guide him back to the surface. Obviously not every Final Fantasy game needs to follow the same arc, with the same beats and the same highs and lows. But Tactics just lacks that sense of digging into the psychological meat of a character's issues and flaws with your bare fingers to dig up their core and ask what makes them them, and what's a layer of emotional sediment that makes them someone else. Whether that character is Ramza, or Agrias, or Mustadio, or even Rapha or Meliadoul - all their complications are left unexplored and unaddressed.
I said early on in this playthrough that "Who can you trust?" was the core question at the heart of Tactics. And it never truly stops being so… The problem is that the answer it settles on is "Those guys over there, who will never have a spoken line again. You can trust those guys. They're your buddies, we swear. Oh, and Orran too I guess." Every other game in the series (at least since IV) manages, more or less successfully if often awkwardly, to get you to a point where you can say: Even at my lowest point, there'll be these guys by my side.
Every game except Tactics.
And that just doesn't work.
On Gameplay
Final Fantasy Tactics is the most fun I've had playing a Final Fantasy game.
There's no "since [number]." That's it, that's the whole sentence. It's the best one.
When I started playing Tactics, I thought to myself that the maps were too small, and the unit count too low. That's because I misunderstood the meaning of the word "tactics." I was expecting a slow, plodding gameplay, in which many turns were spent setting up proper positioning and conditions, approaching under cover, wearing away at enemies with high miss chances, and covering ground towards objectives.
That's not Tactics. Tactics, despite its turn-by-turn gameplay, is a brutal, fast-paced, intense battle game, in which fights are over in a handful of rounds and every decision matters. Units often die in two hits at the start of the game, one hit by the end; Assassin-type units can reshape the entire battlefield on Turn 1 before the enemy has even gotten to act, or overexpose themselves and die before they got to do anything. Defender-type units can grant themselves extremely high chances to negate attacks making them futile to take on head-on, which can be completely obviated for a one-hit kill by using back attacks or 100% accuracy moves. Support units are a force multiplicator that can't win battles on their own but which are completely indispensable to ensuring consistency in victory rather than rushing to DPS and rolling the dice every time. But the game is so deep that your best support unit can in fact also be your best assassin unit, as we saw with Gillian, the White Mage with Holy!
Tactics battles are not castle sieges. They're SWAT raids. Early advantage or disadvantage quickly snowballs into an overwhelming victory or defeat, or else everything devolves into a bloody slaughter on both sides that ends with you racing against the death clock to secure the objective win. Permadeath is, on the whole, a bad mechanic the game should have avoided; but the emergent gameplay that arises from having one unit down, no viable raise, and needing to win in three turns before their counter ticks down and it's game over is some of the most tense and satisfying gameplay in Tactics.
The Job system has been refined since V and this is something approaching its apex form. The sheer versatility enabled by the long ability lists and the Command / Command / Reaction / Support / Movement ability spread is unmatched in any other game. V needed the Freelancer because of its fairly restrictive ability slots making it hard to truly customize a character within a specific job, but it led to the homogenous endgame blobs. V does not have this issue. By the endgame, each of my six main units (Ramza, Agrias, Mustadio, Hadrian, Gillian, and Hester, with one being left out in any given fight) had a completely different build and largely different battle roles. Some absolutely dominated the early and mid-game, while others came into their own late in the game, but none of them were ever obsolete or useless.
The player-side of the gameplay is so good, it's enough to overlook its chief weakness, which is that so much diversity comes at the cost of enemy diversity. Due to sprite count restrictions, the game cannot handle very complex or varied enemy set-ups, and often defaults to very similar basic formation - two Knights, two Archers, two Mages, and variations thereof. The Knight, especially, is omnipresent among enemy squads while being a fairly boring unit except when it ruins your unique equipment and you have to reload the game. By the end of the game, you've seen enough Divine Knights that they're no longer particularly fearsome or dangerous, which contributes to the feeling of hunting down and finishing off the last few stragglers of the enemy faction, rather than going up against terrifying combat monsters. Endgame Tactics is just not very difficult, and features unexciting enemies… Which is something it largely gets away with because of how satisfying it is to see the builds you've been constructing over the past 40 hours fully come online and click and destroy your opposition. You have earned this.
Like, I've said it a few times, but it bears repeating: By the end of the game, my party was ten levels lower than their opposition, and still tore them to shreds, because of how important ability combos and equipment choices are.
I have grown so attached to these nameless generic units that I am seriously considering commissioning artwork of the full party (but I definitely can't afford it (Agrias would be a vampire in it though (it'd probably ship Mustadio and Gillian))), which is paradoxical considering everything I said about the issues with the game's character writing, but this paradox is inherent to the Tactics experience.
Is the gameplay perfect? No. Some of the classes are just not good enough or interesting enough, like Archer, or even Knight. But the thing is, if you look at the game from the perspective of first time player, these classes are entirely good enough, because their purpose is to be training wheels. Squire, Chemist, Knight, Archer; all these classes initiate you into the basic mechanics of the game without overwhelming you with early gameplay complexity. Sure, it'd be better if they were all also long-term viable in their own right at the same time, and mods have been amply discussed that change them to be that; but from my perspective as an entirely new player I was glad complexity only steadily came in over time.
Other issues are more problematic. The fact that the game is fairly fast-paced and intense makes it hard to justify using abilities which could be battle-enders if they land but have a high chance of failure, like a 60% Disable chance, when a missed turn can be so damaging. The fact that all the endgame equipment is in a bonus dungeon and requires you to engage with the Treasure Hunter mechanic, which is terrible, is incredibly annoying and, as you can see, I didn't even bother engaging with it. The Zodiac system needs to not exist.
These blemishes are not enough to drag down the gameplay's overall quality. Tactics is just fun.
And coming off VIII, that is the single most important thing I could ask for, and why I'm so glad I took a break from the main entries to play it.
On Presentation
Final Fantasy Tactics is a glimpse into another world, a path not taken - what might have happened, perhaps, if the Final Fantasy series had committed to sprite-based design as it moved to the PSX.
When I say this people tell me "and Chrono Trigger is another example" but, like, guys. No. I'm not saying Chrono Trigger isn't a masterpiece and a beautiful game, but there is a change in hardware that is fundamental and completely changes the aesthetic of the game. Because what Tactics does is set sprite-based characters in a 3D environment. This allows it to do tricks that were beyond the capabilities of the SNES, like having multiple camera angles that the player can control, or which the game itself can take control of for cinematic purposes, allowing it to use deliberate staging and blocking. The paradox of Tactics's visual design is that by using the more 'primitive' technology of sprites, it gives the player more camera control than the ultramodern 3D rendering of VII and VIII. This camera customization is possible in part because of the complexity of the sprites, with characters broken down into multiple limbs, an incredible wealth of custom poses and animation, creating character work far more alive than any previous game.
Interestingly this means that the backgrounds of the game look a lot uglier than the backgrounds of VII, because these backgrounds aren't lavish pre-renders designed for a single camera angle but crude, blocky maps that need to be twisted every which way mid-battle. But it works for the game's aesthetic! If you do pay close attention, it creates this very strange, almost surreal look to many of Tactics's maps, especially the urban ones, where instead of having clearly demarcated "streets" and "houses," you have these strange chunks of architecture that seem to merge in and out of one another, these ideas of a castle, of a church. The verticality in these terrains is frankly kind of incredible, with each individual map designed as a little scenario unto itself before the units are even introduced, with various paths upwards and downwards for units of various mobility ratings and abilities… Again; I started out thinking the maps were too small, and I eventually realized that no, they're each beautifully crafted for their specific size requirements.
The CGI cutscenes added by War of the Lions are… Hm.
I can't say they're universally a bad addition. In particular, I think the opening and ending cutscene are better in the cell-shaded WotL style. There are a couple that are more powerful, more beautiful than their sprite work version - I'm thinking of Delita and Ramza at the Mandalia Plane… And at the Church in Zeltennia? Except the Church scene is more complicated than that because it changes the setting of that encounter, and in changing the setting, it changes the meaning of their interaction. In a vacuum, I like the WotL scene better; in the context of the story, I don't know. A lot of other times, though, the CGI scenes are inferior to a sprite-based, in-engine cutscene, despite some decent voice acting and some beautiful environments, because, well, the 3D models are hideous due to their unseemly proportions and the camera work is desperate to hide this fact, leading to godawful blocking because the game is actively trying to keep the characters off-camera.
And that's just bad filmmaking.
As for the music…
…
Yeah, I'm sorry, I retain no memory of the music. By my last play session I found the intro music grating, I have heard the World Map theme so much I ended up putting it on mute by the endgame. The battle themes were mostly fine! Some of the cutscenes had some really good orchestral cutscenes! I couldn't tell you which ones, though. Sorry. I'm as bad with music as I ever was and this game has not given me a Force Your Way to stick in my mind. I apologize to those for whom this is heresy.
…
But there is one other aspect of presentation that I want to talk about, and I believe this is the first time I have ever touched upon this aspect in this category:
The prose.
Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions is incredibly beautifully written. We started this series with solid modern localizations of older scripts, and they had some cool lines, but ultimately their script rarely drew attention to itself. Then we had two straight games of barely hanging together scripts, though VIII had the merit of, like, mostly not being Literally Incorrect?
But god it's so nice to listen to the music of words for once. Yes, the WotL script is at times overwrought, sometimes too full of itself. But it earns forgiveness for those foibles, because for the most part, it's just pleasant to read.
Ramza: "I had lived my life the only way that I had known. But when the pillars of that life came crashing down, I did not stand and watch them fall. I turned, and walked away."
Ramza: "House Beoulve is no more. But what does it matter? We are the sum of our deeds, not our names."
Delita: "Forgive me. 'Tis your birth and faith that wrong you, not I."
Delita: "All of them swept up in a mighty current, a current they cannot see or feel... I simply swim against it. Nothing more."
Delita: "I will burn down this kingdom, and from its ashes build for you a new one - a kingdom worthy of you."
Ovelia: "My entire life has been spent behind sacred walls. The only sky I've known, hemmed in by slate and stone. Did you know, before I was sent to Orbonne, I was in another monastery? When I heard I was to be the adopted daughter of the late king, and after - ever in a monastery. It's not been such a bad life, I suppose. Only...Only, knowing that men die, for no more reason than that I am the princess - it's almost more than I can bear."
Wiegraf: "What troubled sleep have you known, to speak of my dreams? No matter how sweet, a dream left unrealized must fade into day. Only with power can dreams be made real! I see the truth of it now. What good, dreams, without that power? You think me a thrall? So be it! Your envenomed words succour me, for when at last you yield - as you must - their poison will consume you!"
It's good words.
Perhaps where this change elevates the material the most in the decision to make the Lucavi universally speak in (pseudo) iambic pentameter. I didn't check every bit of dialogue to make sure it always kept the meter, but even if there's sleight of hand, the vibe is there. It creates this unity among the Lucavi, where they all share a particular kind of antiquated, highly formal speech, which differentiates them from their human forms and sets them apart as older, ancient, perhaps more sophisticated beings. These demons claim to be gods, and they at least have the patter right; even when they speak of death and horror and mock mortals and promise death, they do so with the lofty airs of creatures wrought of a history book, an old play, a book of fables. Though in truth their motives are petty and base, they at least can put up the appearance of grandeur, of divinity. This is a considerable improvement from my look at the PSX script which seems to have them all talk like cackling cartoon villains, and not the cool kind either, the one-episode ones with a nasally laugh who get punted at the twenty minute mark with a lesson about friendship and never appear again.
This isn't to make a universal statement about the quality of the WotL script as pertains to things like the characterization of the cast, or specific plot events or implications of themes. This is perhaps more arguable (and people have argued it; we have a pretty comprehensive breakdown of @Egleris's particular read on the PSX script's differences which I find quite interesting and am glad was posted even if I don't necessarily agree with it), but strictly in terms of the beauty of the language, I am glad I had the WotL script. This final review would be much less kind to the game if I hadn't, purely because I would have enjoyed my time with it much less.
In Conclusion
Final Fantasy Tactics is not a perfect game. No game is. But it gets closer than many, and it could have gotten even closer without some flaws holding it back.
But it's still really, really fucking good.
It's no wonder that it gave several later FF devs brainworms so severe they would hatch in some major aspects of the award-winning MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV. Its particular storytelling sensibilities are unique in the Final Fantasy field, being, in effect, the recruiting of a guest writer from a different series to bring his own particular approach to game design and storytelling to a spinoff from the story, and like often, this produces a total banger.
It's been a fantastic experience that did not overstay its welcome, and I could absolutely see myself, later down the line, replaying the game with one of the various gameplay overhaul mods that people like to mention, in search of a more elaborate and veteran-friendly experience, with a challenging endgame and rebalanced classes and the like. I could replay it without one of these mods, just because it's that fun baseline and there are multiple classes I haven't used at all, like the Bard or the Mime, and I barely tapped the Summoner's potential, and so on! The last game for which I said this - the last game which I thought "wow, that might actually be fun to replay later!" was V, fully three games ago. God. Those were the days. And even so V's endgame was like eating an entire wheel of cheese in one sitting and I'm not eager for it.
Wait, fuck - I meant to have a section On Worldbuilding here where I'd talk about the world design of Ivalice and how it gels together but I'm running out of time, god, what was there? The way the game's handling of female characters, both actual characters and generic units, suggests a world that is just past a particular inflection point where women's place in society considerably expanded to the point of occupying a significant part of the military, yet society as a whole remains heavily patriarchal (all the major nobles and church officials are men) in a way that suggests lingering tensions that the game unfortunately left unexplored but which could be ripe for a deeper social commentary? Oh, oh! The way that magic is basically divided between 'miracles' that are poorly understood related to the auracite and the Lucavi, and magick which is a formalized science (really more of an engineering discipline) that is taught in military schools and deployed on the battlefield without fanfare or awe but as part of combined tactics units where mages act as portable artillery, medics, support units, which culminate in the ultimate magical job being Arithmetician, a unit that has literally solved magic through the power of advanced mathematics? Final Fantasy Tactics foreshadows Tactical Breach Wizards decades ahead of time! Or, or, but there's not enough time, not enough space.
I'm going to miss Tactics and its Job system as we move back into the main series, but I am satisfied by this détour, and I'm hopeful IX will be great in its own right and in its own way.
This was a great experience, and I'm glad you were there with me for it.
And we got done in time for the holidays, even!
Thank you for reading.
WAIT FUCK I FORGOT TO TALK ABOUT WHETHER RAMZA SHOULD HAVE STAYED A SQUIRE OR BECOME A DARK KNIGHT-
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- Location
- Panama City
I will say this, for whatever my opinion's worth I LOVE IX and think it's the Magnum Opus of FF (at least for the PSX era), so it should be at least comparable to FFT in terms of fun. Can't wait to watch you let's play it!
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
So, for my usual endgame round-up of the game's length, let's see where Final Fantasy Tactics places itself; I stated that I thought it would be shorter than FFVI in length, but have more images than FFVIII.
To simplify this comparison, I'm adding a "total image counter" to the list; that way we can have a better idea of how games compare to each other, with the understanding that, while each single update is limited to 50 images, most of the actual updates have less images than that (especially for the earlier games) due to the updates being mostly broken up by narrative beats. Additionally, to make the comparison more intuitive visually, I'm reordering the way I'm presenting the data, with wordcount first, image count second, and update count third.
So, let's see how it went!
So, my statement that FFVII was the longest game (as determined by wordcount, total image count, and total number of updates) remain as true now as it was last time; truer, in fact, since I assumed that the largest number of double updates meant that FFVIII had more images than FFVII, but it turns out that was not the case, as several FFVIII updates were much smaller in image count than projected. FFVII remains the longest game in the series so far (and I think it will stay that way), and FFVIII is still solid second - nothing even come close to 250k+ words, 2.4k+ images and 35+ updates.
I also said that Final Fantasy Tactics would end up proving itself shorter than FFVI, but with the most images of all the games. The first point is contentious, as FFT has two less updates than FFVI, but about 60k more words. If we go by update count, I was correct, but if we go by wordcount, I was not; I think it could be argued that FFT was shorter as a story but there was more to talk about it, but overall I can take the loss on this one. I certainly take the loss on the image count - while FFT has a very heavy amount of images, it's still not a match for either of the two longest Final Fantasy.
Amusingly though, counting the images does reveals that, in a lot of circumstances, an image is worth about one hundred words, in this let's play at least - FFT, FFVIII, FFVI and the original FF all have about one image for each one hundred words. FFIV and FFV have about one image for each sixty words and FFII and FFIII have one image for each 40 words, so I guess the four of them could be lumped into a group of "one image for roughly each fifty words", giving them a twice larger image density, whereas FFVII, a game who really relies on having the best writing (even if marred by the worst translation, let's not forgive nor forget that) is the only outlier, having one image for each hundred and thirty words.
EDIT: Upon request, I added a counter for the time that passed between the first and last update discussing a specific game were added to the thread. This once again sees me proved wrong by a hair on the length of FFT being less than FFVI - as it took a bit more than one extra week for Tactics to be completed.
This is also the only category where FFVIII manages to overtake FFVII, although I'll remind people that this time span included one month where the author of the thread made a single post in an entire month, which I don't think meant the whole month was spent playing the game, and there were other delays as well. Which is why I want people to keep in mind that, unlike the other statistics, this one is less objective. Still, it was asked for, so I included it.
I'm not sure what all of these stats means, I just find it interesting to have the comparison here, so that anybody can analyze it and make whichever deductions they feel would be more appropriate.
@Omicron, while I normally would ask here how much you know about the next game, since you already told us you made it almost to the end of FFIX, I imagine that answering about what you remember of it would be a long description best left for the opening post of that game, so I will ask something else instead: going by your memories of it, do you expect that it has any chance of proving itself the best, as I've often claimed, or do your memories suggest to you that it'll fail to measure up?
To simplify this comparison, I'm adding a "total image counter" to the list; that way we can have a better idea of how games compare to each other, with the understanding that, while each single update is limited to 50 images, most of the actual updates have less images than that (especially for the earlier games) due to the updates being mostly broken up by narrative beats. Additionally, to make the comparison more intuitive visually, I'm reordering the way I'm presenting the data, with wordcount first, image count second, and update count third.
So, let's see how it went!
| Game Name | Wordcount | Total Images | Total Updates | Single/Double/Triple | Timespan |
| Final Fantasy | 18,2 k words | 197 | 7 | 7/0/0 | 13 days |
| Final Fantasy II | 27,9 k words | 628 | 12 | 7/5/0 | 14 days |
| Final Fantasy III | 44,8 k words | 1060 | 16 | 7/9/0 | 1 month |
| Final Fantasy IV | 69 k words | 1135 | 20 | 15/5/0 | 1 month |
| Final Fantasy V | 110 k words | 1828 | 30 | 18/12/0 | 4 months, 10 days |
| Final Fantasy VI | 140,5 k words | 1347 | 26 | 21/5/0 | 2 months, 5 days |
| Final Fantasy VII | 318,5 k words | 2423 | 42 | 29/11/2 | 6 months, 4 days |
| Final Fantasy VIII | 258,8 k words | 2410 | 36 | 17/16/3 | 8 months |
| Final Fantasy Tactics | 204,6 k words | 1995 | 24 | 4/16/4 | 2 months, 15 days |
So, my statement that FFVII was the longest game (as determined by wordcount, total image count, and total number of updates) remain as true now as it was last time; truer, in fact, since I assumed that the largest number of double updates meant that FFVIII had more images than FFVII, but it turns out that was not the case, as several FFVIII updates were much smaller in image count than projected. FFVII remains the longest game in the series so far (and I think it will stay that way), and FFVIII is still solid second - nothing even come close to 250k+ words, 2.4k+ images and 35+ updates.
I also said that Final Fantasy Tactics would end up proving itself shorter than FFVI, but with the most images of all the games. The first point is contentious, as FFT has two less updates than FFVI, but about 60k more words. If we go by update count, I was correct, but if we go by wordcount, I was not; I think it could be argued that FFT was shorter as a story but there was more to talk about it, but overall I can take the loss on this one. I certainly take the loss on the image count - while FFT has a very heavy amount of images, it's still not a match for either of the two longest Final Fantasy.
Amusingly though, counting the images does reveals that, in a lot of circumstances, an image is worth about one hundred words, in this let's play at least - FFT, FFVIII, FFVI and the original FF all have about one image for each one hundred words. FFIV and FFV have about one image for each sixty words and FFII and FFIII have one image for each 40 words, so I guess the four of them could be lumped into a group of "one image for roughly each fifty words", giving them a twice larger image density, whereas FFVII, a game who really relies on having the best writing (even if marred by the worst translation, let's not forgive nor forget that) is the only outlier, having one image for each hundred and thirty words.
EDIT: Upon request, I added a counter for the time that passed between the first and last update discussing a specific game were added to the thread. This once again sees me proved wrong by a hair on the length of FFT being less than FFVI - as it took a bit more than one extra week for Tactics to be completed.
This is also the only category where FFVIII manages to overtake FFVII, although I'll remind people that this time span included one month where the author of the thread made a single post in an entire month, which I don't think meant the whole month was spent playing the game, and there were other delays as well. Which is why I want people to keep in mind that, unlike the other statistics, this one is less objective. Still, it was asked for, so I included it.
I'm not sure what all of these stats means, I just find it interesting to have the comparison here, so that anybody can analyze it and make whichever deductions they feel would be more appropriate.
@Omicron, while I normally would ask here how much you know about the next game, since you already told us you made it almost to the end of FFIX, I imagine that answering about what you remember of it would be a long description best left for the opening post of that game, so I will ask something else instead: going by your memories of it, do you expect that it has any chance of proving itself the best, as I've often claimed, or do your memories suggest to you that it'll fail to measure up?
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If there's anything, anything at all I will desperately hope for from that theoretical FFT remake that Square is totally working on and will announce any day now, honest, I really hope it gets more flags in the code just for "character X is alive, insert alternate cutscene with them involved" for all these named characters who join the party. Or hell, just more bonus content like WotL adds based on characters being alive, maybe more battle dialogue for them, I'm not picky, but it's easily one of the biggest flaws with FFT's story that even majorly important characters like Agrias turn into silent monoliths the moment they join you.
It's clearly possible to for the game to do otherwise! Even the OG game has things like Agrias talking at the execution site battle after she joins, or Mustadio being required for some Act 4 quests and cutscenes! So please, let it happen.
While I agree this obviously isn't the greatest way to measure a game's story, especially since it's pretty subjective and one person's tearjerker is another person's boring cliche... I'm also coming into this post fresh after finishing Outer Wilds for the first time a few days ago, stuck in a mental fugue state after the ending emotionally obliterated me and I will probably remember it for the rest of my life that way, I will probably tear up a bit a decade from now just listening to the ending theme. FFT doesn't have that kind of energy.
So yeah, "this game could never make me cry" is absolutely a valid statement when it comes to analyzing a game's story, because there's some games out there that really can make you cry, really can make you emotional. Hell, even just within the same series, FFVII managed everything from "no, no I'm not ready" for Aerith's sudden and abrupt end, to... well, whatever confusion there is over "wait seriously this is how the game ends?" There was a lot less of that to go around for Tactics, I feel.
While I suspect FFT is now at the top of your Final Fantasy Gameplay Tier List (and FFVIII is somewhere near the bottom), this does leave me somewhat curious: as it currently stands, in terms of Gameplay, Story, maybe the whole package, what order do you think you would rate the Final Fantasy games so far?
Yeah, can't deny that while I overall vibe with the FFT soundtrack, and there's a few that will always come to mind when I think of it like Trisection and The Pervert, there aren't any super standouts like FFVII with Aerith's Theme and One Winged Angel, or FFVIII with Force Your Way and Man With The Machine Gun.
I'm willing to contribute to something like this and I recall you have a Ko-Fi I tossed some money to after I read the story of Nemo (fucking fantastic btw thanks for linking to the "A god isn't a person, a god is a thing" line back in that one update although in retrospect I'm amused Aizen lied about the fight not being a series of aces up sleeves). How much would it be?
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- Location
- Spain
Interesting to note, while FFVIII is 50% larger in number of updates and 20% larger in word/image count, it took 8 months and FFT only 4.
- Location
- Spain
One of us one of us one of us
- Pronouns
- Him/He
While a proper Xenogears play through would probably delay you by 18 months, it's another squaresoft game that did the sprites+3D thing+Full Camera Rotation.
It also included jumping puzzles, and the exploration like you would expect from the rest of the FF games. This was very much a viable, workable system at the time for hardware, but I suspect that it had a very limited shelf-life. The blocky backgrounds and detailed sprites works fine in our heads, because the characters get more detail and focus, and the walls are just... stage lighting. Suggestions, not actual things the way characters are.
But there's a limit to how detailed and realistic you can have a sprite and show multiple people at different places at once. So there's a hard limit on how detailed the people are, but no limit on how detailed and complex the backgrounds can be. Having super detailed backgrounds with texture and graffiti and shading, while the characters are still chibi?
I don't think it would work as an artstyle, and if you're not pushing the very limits of the hardware until it screams, why are you even developing games in the 1990-2010? Why even develop for the PS2 if you could make it on the PS1 because that's the only way the style doesn't look like total ass?
There are still sprite games out there today of course. There are even sprite games that are transparently 85% entirely copied and remixed from FFT like Fell Seal: Arbiters Mark. But it does this while aligning the style of the sprites with the backgrounds. It isn't 3D rotatable, so same fixed perspective of FFT:A.
So it's really interesting to see this high quality expertly crafted technological and artistic dead end. It's influence has been huge over the rest of the RPG landscape, but the world style it pioneered was walked back from.
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Thozmp
Gets my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine.
Please tell me that Mustadio's attitude is something like "I don't know how I ended up here, but I'm not gonna argue."
- Pronouns
- Him/He
I know where I'm gonna place my chips on early.
I think Omi is going to have a much greater appreciation the story and setting in an intellectual sense, now that he has context for what lead to this and what it's calling back to, and benumbed to the tedious boring combat that doesn't do anything interesting and often has the worst of several worlds in one compact package.
And I'm sure I'm not projecting here.
And I'm sure I'm not projecting here.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
You think I should add a time counter? It'd not be especially hard to do, I suppose, but I'm not sure it's as objective a measure as the others, since unlike the rest, the length of time necessary to play through a game will also be influenced by considerations external to the game itself.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This is straight up a case of "time flies when you have fun."
- Location
- the Republic
- Pronouns
- He/They
Phenomenal stuff. FFT was the other half of the general formative period where my brain was taught what an RPG is, and getting to go back through it with your typically delightful perspective was a real treat.
I like your analysis of how the Lucavi hollow their hosts out until there's nothing but evil left. I think it also applies to Ramza, though I'm not sure this was strictly intentional on the writers' part. Much like you've said before, his story is all about a progressive abandonment of the trappings of life and material abundance, a descent from a privileged position to near universal revilement in pursuit of basic decency. Alma, his sister, is held up as a symbol of what little good can be achieved in a sinful world opposed to his existence.
By the end of the game, Ramza has literally nothing left except his goal, and he wades knee-deep through his enemies to get there, without regard for himself and supported only by a hard core of loyal followers. If you believe (like I do) that Orran only sees phantasms at the end, then it ultimately results in him giving his entire existence to see evil destroyed. He is, at the very least, not ever deterred by the prospect.
A lot of narratives, especially modern ones, aren't willing to put their protagonists through that. Dedication to good is often rewarded in the end with life, love, cash and prizes, reputation, and numerous other positive incentives. Ramza dies hated and nearly alone and bereft of material possessions. It's not clear that Arazlam actually ends up restoring his reputation, and if he does it's centuries later.
I dunno, I appreciate that message. Maybe there's no secret reward for doing good. Maybe it all goes to shit for you in the end, and the assholes get the happily ever after. But even so, the good has been done. That's what really matters.
I like your analysis of how the Lucavi hollow their hosts out until there's nothing but evil left. I think it also applies to Ramza, though I'm not sure this was strictly intentional on the writers' part. Much like you've said before, his story is all about a progressive abandonment of the trappings of life and material abundance, a descent from a privileged position to near universal revilement in pursuit of basic decency. Alma, his sister, is held up as a symbol of what little good can be achieved in a sinful world opposed to his existence.
By the end of the game, Ramza has literally nothing left except his goal, and he wades knee-deep through his enemies to get there, without regard for himself and supported only by a hard core of loyal followers. If you believe (like I do) that Orran only sees phantasms at the end, then it ultimately results in him giving his entire existence to see evil destroyed. He is, at the very least, not ever deterred by the prospect.
A lot of narratives, especially modern ones, aren't willing to put their protagonists through that. Dedication to good is often rewarded in the end with life, love, cash and prizes, reputation, and numerous other positive incentives. Ramza dies hated and nearly alone and bereft of material possessions. It's not clear that Arazlam actually ends up restoring his reputation, and if he does it's centuries later.
I dunno, I appreciate that message. Maybe there's no secret reward for doing good. Maybe it all goes to shit for you in the end, and the assholes get the happily ever after. But even so, the good has been done. That's what really matters.
cB557
voOOP
I think the way Arithmetician slots into the rest of the party's spec ops cryptids schtick is funny. Because with the rest of the classes it's like yeah, it's kind of insane how these guys are carving their way through gods and demons, but they've spent the last two years doing nothing but fighting and they've gotten really good at it, it tracks. But I feel like arithmetician implies the character has made like, a genuine academic breakthrough in all of this. Like they've figured out some unified system for both white and black magics that has even greater potential than the traditional casting disciplines. And this is just something they managed to do on their own in their spare time, sandwiched between killing a random gang of bandits and killing an unholy abomination from beyond the veil of reality.
I like to imagine a minor revelation within the Durai papers is like, "You know those writings by a schoolteacher that were the foundations of what we now call calculus, with what we thought was a rhetorical framing device of conversations between the teacher and an insightful tutor of one of his students? It turns out the tutor was real, her name was Gillian."
I like to imagine a minor revelation within the Durai papers is like, "You know those writings by a schoolteacher that were the foundations of what we now call calculus, with what we thought was a rhetorical framing device of conversations between the teacher and an insightful tutor of one of his students? It turns out the tutor was real, her name was Gillian."
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FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
You have to step on a lot of rakes to get there, but the feeling of accomplisment when your handcrafted blorbos steamroll a map is incredible.
This is why I was being such a hardass about mechanics spoilers, because I didn't want to deny you that satisfaction.
Mission Accomplished, folks.
If you want to talk about your favorite method of breaking the game over your knee, now's the time to do it.
Speaking of breaking the game over your knee, I still think you're undervaluing disabling spells. They're one of my favorite methods for controlling the battlefield and letting me face the opposition at my preferred pace.
And, sure, a 60% chance to disable a unit doesn't sound so hot when you can two shot that unit instead but...you stack things right and it's more like 80% minimum (barring bad zodiac matchups). My playthrough to refresh my memory had me using a pair of units with White/Mystic and Black/Time, and this was basically their setup the entire game and they were gamechangers the whole time. Mystic gives you Paralyse and Sleep, Time gives you Immobilize, Slow, and Stop. Only rarely did Immobilize have less than a 90% chance (frequently 100%), which obviously means at least one enemy melee unit is out of the fight for all intents and purposes. Paralyze was also pretty high success chance. Sleep and Stop were less reliable, but then they were best used to cement a units removal from the fight rather than to start things off.
Something to keep in mind if you ever revist the game to try new things.
It's OK. Sufficient Velocity is a welcoming place for everyone regardless of disability
If only. No, FFT clones can copy it, or make it even more stupid. Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth Remix does this.
- Location
- Norway
Bravo, it's always lovely to read your writeups after each game to get your complete feelings on them. Except Ramza's Job and how it pertain to his story and growth I suppose, but ce la vie. You have a way with words that are easily as delightful to read as the prose in WotL.
Guile
Having a really great time right now
Gosh, I have no idea how I would answer that question, it has such a different flavor to it. I think the devs accomplished precisely what they set out to do, for whatever that's worth?
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It's OK. Sufficient Velocity is a welcoming place for everyone regardless of disability
This is why, if Omi decides to play CT and talk about it, I am intrigued about what impact the soundtrack might make
(FWIW I have occasionally left the FFT title music on for an hour while I post on SV or whatever, so I might be a bit weird in another direction)
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While there's something to be said for time not being super objective because there can easily be things like "Omi breaks an arm and can't update for two months", time can also be the difference between "I am totally locked in and engaged with this game and want more ASAP" like happened a few times in the FFT playthrough, and "this game is a slog, I'm really not enjoying it" slowing down updates because while Omi is committed to playing every (mainline) Final Fantasy game, there have been and are likely going to be games where there's obtuse sections or game mechanics that demotivate playing, and since this isn't a paid job or anything Omi can totally just delay a bit between updates.
Chrono Trigger totally has some bops. At least a couple tunes are on that good ol' list of "music I'll grab a 1 hour loop of from Youtube and just vibe to", up there with things like Stickerbrush Symphony from DKC2, 600 A.D. and Corridors of Time in particular.This is why, if Omi decides to play CT and talk about it, I am intrigued about what impact the soundtrack might make
(FWIW I have occasionally left the FFT title music on for an hour while I post on SV or whatever, so I might be a bit weird in another direction)
So to maybe state the obvious, Ramza staying a Squire the whole way through is for the same reason he gets the best of both genders bonuses with stats, so that the player can turn him into anything…
…So long as that anything can handle Wiegraff. So long as the game can force you to diegetically establish that Ramza is officially on that level now. Dark Knight as an upgunned squire implies something about Ramza that may be completely unwarranted depending on player choices.
Also, if Ramza became a Dark Knight, then I think you would have to ask whether the game manages to keep a continuing resonance up with Gaff by that point. I like the reading that with Gaffgarion and Wiegraff being fundamentally hollowed out in the same way, and moving into Chapter 4 with one of their knight titles would be thematically inconsistent.
That said, "squire" is a weird choice to keep when the developers are turning it into super-squire. I think, just from a perspective of making it clear to the player that it is indeed becoming super-squire, changing the name as the game progresses is worthwhile.
Heretic is one suggestion I've seen tossed around, and thats serviceable but falls a little flat because the game doesn't really want to engage with the actual faith and doctrine of the religion at play in Ivalice.
Hero doesn't fit the setting (and his place in history) well unless you want to have some blatant editorializing from the future in play. Warrior of Light is awkward given he's very much NOT chosen by the crystals. The most appropriate option jumping to my mind might actually be Brave? Provides lots to riff off given the Zodiac Brave Story.
Ultimately though, Ramza's specific mechanics NOT being highlighted is probably to the benefit of the game in other ways. Because Ramza can be built like Gillian or Hadrian or Hester if you'd like, and it's quite clear that those options have lots going for them! Ramza is the most narratively present protagonist throughout the story, but for better and worse the protagonists don't carry the story as the antagonists do. And the better is that the 5 heroes you rock up to each battle with can usually be pretty much anyone. Ramza can be anything, just about. The worse has been touched on extensively, of course.
TL;DR I don't think FFTactics has the wherewithal to commit to exploring a Dark Knight protagonist properly, so it would end up disappointing and underbaked. Meanwhile, keeping it as Squire but tossing in a few special bits and bobs as part of Mettle does just about avoid either giving Ramza zero protagonist specialness or clearly making certain builds non-canonical.
…So long as that anything can handle Wiegraff. So long as the game can force you to diegetically establish that Ramza is officially on that level now. Dark Knight as an upgunned squire implies something about Ramza that may be completely unwarranted depending on player choices.
Also, if Ramza became a Dark Knight, then I think you would have to ask whether the game manages to keep a continuing resonance up with Gaff by that point. I like the reading that with Gaffgarion and Wiegraff being fundamentally hollowed out in the same way, and moving into Chapter 4 with one of their knight titles would be thematically inconsistent.
That said, "squire" is a weird choice to keep when the developers are turning it into super-squire. I think, just from a perspective of making it clear to the player that it is indeed becoming super-squire, changing the name as the game progresses is worthwhile.
Heretic is one suggestion I've seen tossed around, and thats serviceable but falls a little flat because the game doesn't really want to engage with the actual faith and doctrine of the religion at play in Ivalice.
Hero doesn't fit the setting (and his place in history) well unless you want to have some blatant editorializing from the future in play. Warrior of Light is awkward given he's very much NOT chosen by the crystals. The most appropriate option jumping to my mind might actually be Brave? Provides lots to riff off given the Zodiac Brave Story.
Ultimately though, Ramza's specific mechanics NOT being highlighted is probably to the benefit of the game in other ways. Because Ramza can be built like Gillian or Hadrian or Hester if you'd like, and it's quite clear that those options have lots going for them! Ramza is the most narratively present protagonist throughout the story, but for better and worse the protagonists don't carry the story as the antagonists do. And the better is that the 5 heroes you rock up to each battle with can usually be pretty much anyone. Ramza can be anything, just about. The worse has been touched on extensively, of course.
TL;DR I don't think FFTactics has the wherewithal to commit to exploring a Dark Knight protagonist properly, so it would end up disappointing and underbaked. Meanwhile, keeping it as Squire but tossing in a few special bits and bobs as part of Mettle does just about avoid either giving Ramza zero protagonist specialness or clearly making certain builds non-canonical.