After fourteen years of on-and-off play, I finally beat Final Fantasy Tactics last night

i wish this had a New Game+ so i could play it again without putting hundreds of hours into perfecting all my dudes again

back when there was a psn this was on it, right? assuming it comes back, will this stand up without the support of nostalgia? i have always been intrigued.

as a game it's unbelievably broken, but still somehow really fun - i dont know how it manages that. idk if the psn version retains the awful old localization, but it was pretty famous for being poorly translated back in the day (and again, somehow its still fascinating & awesome).

psp version is WONDERFULLY translated, brilliantly localized and actually makes the story sorta worth following!

quite frankly, you can get the psp for 120 and fftpsp for 15 bucks used; figure like three bucks an hour for what you put into it. totally worth it.

'team of bards/dancers' can be a very fun way to power through random encounters

i remember finding them ok @ controlling the flow of a battle (really one of the most impt things in fft) but tedious to use, mostly. why did you like using them?

rs - its a good game. i think part of what makes so many ppl love it is that i did come along when most na gamers were starved for sprgs so it seemed for unique/good than it actually was, but its still a really great game. its broken but also deep & it offers a variety of challenges for both an xp'd and a novice. also i do think it was one of the best rpg stories of any game of its era imo

playing it as a "walking around" game changes the grinding considerably btw.
when you turn off the psp, it's like you've paused the game. turning it back on resumes immediately right where you were, so there's no real issue with grabbing five minute play sessions. that innovation alone made this playthrough much more fun than some past grinds.

haha its p sad how happy i am to be talking abt fft!!! i have to exert real willpower to avoid a v long post abt how great the oracle classs is & what the best passive abilities are...

i ended up levelling everybody's chemist all the way early and then always making item the secondary skill so everybody can phoenix down or remedy or whatever
then lifefont for movement and instapotion and then got rid of all potions but xpotions so guys are basically healing full after every hit.
levelled everybody up all the way through black mage, geomancer, monk, most of them through geomancer

u r among like souls lamp, let it out........

please make the big oracle post lamp

also i do think it was one of the best rpg stories of any game of its era imo

― Lamp, Friday, May 13, 2011 1:01 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

story-wise i dont think any RPG has ever hit all the right notes for me like this one did

maybe Deus Ex or the first Fallout - certainly no other JRPG

i remember finding them ok @ controlling the flow of a battle (really one of the most impt things in fft) but tedious to use, mostly. why did you like using them?

i just found it funny that you could basically leave a battle on autopilot thanks to them - there were also a few funny times where i ended up barely scraping through a tough battle because i had a dancer tucked in a corner doing the HP damage dance or the random status dance

this shit right here is my jam forever
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGdeHJKicmc

This song is just too beautiful. Makes me think of drizzle gently falling on green fields, while kid-looking humans and magical creatures fight for survival.
tribilyan 1 year ago 26
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Imagine living in the ff tactics world. I would be a no nonsense rogue knight who wants to beat the crap out of the royal families and nobles with badass music
WillC 5 months ago

this is my jam:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azKaZUfPOJ4

haha lol @ me. the thing about oracles is that they have the best melee stats of the mage classes (iirc?) & their status-altering abilities are probably the most useful @ controlling the flow of battle & at isloating and sidelining enemies so you can stat-boost/jp milk/steal items/learn spells w/e reason you might want to prolong & manipulate an encounter.

also the combo of praise/doubt faith always you to mitigate the low base success rate of your more powerful spells, minor spells like blind & sleep are both long-lasting & effective, most of your powerful equipment can be stolen/obtained from drops early & you have a v useful built-in MP recovery system in both the drain spells & move MP up.

obv a time mage w/ math skill secondary & good spell book can break the game so hard but taking the time to master calculator is boring. in the same way you can build ninja/monk characters that are basically unbeatable but they have a hard time controlling the battle if you want to do anything other than win. oracles are both easy to master & versatile to use making them the best support class & one of the most interesting & fun to use imo

mediator's better b/c the sleep spell is called "Mimic Daravon"

the most obscure of in-geek nerd jokes

never did figure out what the hell an onion knight was.

http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110109162822/finalfantasy/images/1/1a/FF3-NES-OnionKnight.PNG

thought for just a sec that surfing was LJ

― And thusly create the illusion of babby (forksclovetofu), Friday, 29 April 2011 13:00 (2 weeks ago)

ha!

did they rename mime onion knight in the psp port? or squire?

*crosses arms* the oracle's sleep spell has a better range & success rate

as a guy who relied heavily on crowd-control stuff like sleep i totally see where you're coming from lamp, but thats why i loved the dancer's random status dance - in one move you can have the whole board incapacitated

im trying to remember what other cheap-ass cc i would use, i think calculatin' was prob my main go-to for that

time mages can be really effective controllers too esp since haste/slow are almost always 80%+ manipulating RT is one of the easiest ways to slide through tough story battles since its so cheap

who are yalls favorite characters btw... im sure we all agree the shitty twins were the worst

also, what's your preferred chocobo:person ratio in a party

i always really liked ovelia but only because she had such a sweet class *whistles*

i never use monsters in battle (except v rarely for the fun of mounted combat) but a character + one chocobo party is p cool

i used NO chocobos at any point on this last playthru
orlando breaks the game basically but damn he is a badass

'bos make good ridin, which is why i generally liked to tuck one or two into my party for characters who i need to be extra mobile

iirc correctly there are a couple of maps where you need a chocobo to reach the buried item? or maybe a ninja w/ the +1 jump shoe could reach it? i always though it was shitty you couldnt ride the wolves, wouldve been p badass

thanks for the thoughts folks. reading this thread is sealing the deal for me i think.

kinda love this thread even though i've never played fft

also forx: did you beat deep dungeon? & how many of the secret characters did you get?

on this go round, i made a real decision not to character grind or hunt for secrets or anything so i don't think i did ANY of the hidden things. i really meant to beat it this time!

so no cloud.

on my final playthrough i finally tackled deep dungeon and got every hidden character + ultima. cloud sucked :/

none of the hidden characters except MUSTADIO are all that useful (oh wait is beowulf a 'hidden character'?) esp because by the time you get that far into chapter four you probably have your preferred attack team already levelled up

yeah mustadio owns

mustadiowns

i found myself perpetually torn between fielding a team of 'names' and my loyalty to the footsoldiers who i'd been developing at the beginning of the game

how much of a pain is it to run psx roms? really want 2 play this now but dont want to deal w/ digging out my playstation...

i think on my 'perfect game' file one of the stipulations was that you only had 'name' characters (which i think means you do get the three generics that youre gifted at the end of the first castle battle) & i h8d it. partially cuz it meant levelling rafa & retard since theyre one of the few name characters you get early on but also because i loved the sprites for most of the job classes more than i loved the sprites for the pc classes

lmao 'rafa & retard'

yeah this is totally making me want to dust off my ps2 and start a new game :/

I'm telling u guys: go psp

^^^ truth bomb

seriously with the exception of brink on my pc recently, i would say 95% of my gaming in the past like 12 motnhs has been PSP, and the other 5% is iphone!

Did they improve anything in the PSP version besides the translation, particularly gameplay-wise? Your suggestion to get a PSP and this game is actually kinda tempting to me, but god knows I've failed so many times to get more than 30-40 hours into this game. The grinding and random encounters and having badly built characters always killed my interest before I get through it all. If I ever do it again, I'm probably gonna have a major plan mapped out for the classes before I even start.

Sold my copy of FFT and FFVII to some dude on CL when I needed dosh. Never really played FFT yet.

Waiting for PSN to come back up so I can get both for the psp.

on a related note, bought Ys I & II today for the plane ride home tomorrow. Let's see how long it takes me to beat 'em.

Theres new quests and local online pvp and coop, none of which got any use in my playthru.
The retranslation is great and theres a bunch of new animated sequences that any fan will appreciate.

Weirdly, the slowdown is still in play during spells

i liked the first ds fft but it doesnt have the same depth as the psx game

rn i am fighting the urge to manage my level advancement to maximize stat growth because i really dont want to fall down that rabbithole

i thought the setup of the gba one was really affecting

it sort of felt arbitrary and failed to compel once it got to landmarks on maps, though, a bit like legend of mana

yeah, i tried ffta and it's not really much of a game. but maybe i should go back to it?

1997 Developer Interview, originally featured in Famicon Tsuushin magazine, newly translated:

http://shmuplations.com/fft/

nice
i should play disgaea

disgaea is extremely anime voice but the way it encourages experimentation and exploits is sui generis and great. i haven't played since the PS2 but i've heard the recent PC port isn't great.

hmmmm
https://noisypixel.net/fae-tactics-switch-pc-spring-2020/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2OcmU-KV-I

also the tactics ost is on spotify now so i'm playing that

Given that the remaster is coming out, how is the localization? I'm way of media translated from Japanese because they tend to be stilted in a way that makes me irrationally angry.

remaster has a new translation, so can't answer that yet

tbh I can't remember the last time I played a Japanese game and thought the translation was particularly stilted... localization has come a long way!

I’m intrigued by the new version but have to prove to myself I can make time to beat the new DQ7 first.

I played this for a few hours last night. Did the first few story missions and did a little grinding. It turns out the dialogue *is* stilted, but in a faux-Shakespearean medieval fantasy way, rather than a "poorly translated" way. I suppose it suits the setting.

I've never played the original and I'm something of a tactics RPG neophyte.
Trying not to be overwhelmed with how much *stuff* there is to get to grips with.

There is so much stuff

yeah I don't want to besmirch what is widely recognized as a classic, but it feels a little over-designed, perhaps? this may just be my taste in gaming tends toward minimalism. like, one of my all-time favorites is Into the Breach, which is kind of a minimalist take on this sort of thing.

Into The Breach is closer to a puzzle game isn’t it? FFT is more of a free-for-all where you can surround your hero with nothing but Dancers and see wtf happens.

Still in Chapter 1, slowly getting to grips with this. I think I understand the job system. A question for seasoned players: how many units should I be aiming to have in my roster? I can see you can have up to 50, but I've so far recruited just 8, and I'm really only focusing on 6 of them. Given that new recruits are always level 1 Squires/Chemists, it seems like the game expects me to do a *lot* of grinding to build up a healthy roster. Does that change later? Will I be able to recruit e.g. a level 5 Black Mage to have on hand in case my current guy eats it?

Not a seasoned player at all, but I think 6 is fine because you'll be spreading the xp too thin with more, and also there are named characters who join later who will bench many of them anyway

AFAIK you still have to level new guys to unlock the jobs you want to give them, but there is a shared pool of spillover JP that gives everyone a small headstart in the job (like you will usually have a small pile of free JP in Squire with everyone because you'll have a few people adding to the pool by doing that job; this can be useful for non-squires to dip into to buy universally useful skills like Focus or JP Boost)

I think if an important character bleeds out you just kinda reload and do better unless you're really determined to be hardcore

There are also various weird gamey ways to level up quicker like mostly clearing out an easy map then spamming focus, or throwing stones at each other/a chocobo

reading the tips here closely. i think i'll get the remake and hopefully finally beat this game after like 30 years

I think if an important character bleeds out you just kinda reload and do better unless you're really determined to be hardcore

There are also various weird gamey ways to level up quicker like mostly clearing out an easy map then spamming focus, or throwing stones at each other/a chocobo

it's been a long time since i played but ^^yes on both of those. there's a mid-game point where you'll probably be grinding for a bit (in a nice way, usually it's because you want to check out a new job class or ability or something and you need a couple more job levels to get there), and those battles are kinda silly because you can kill everyone except for one enemy, put them to sleep (or wherever), and then have your whole team fight itself, heal itself, focus, buff, debuff, whatever, because you get exp points for most things you do in battle, including fighting yourself

I wish Square Enix didn't insist on using this serif font for things like FFT and Dragon Quest - it's nearly unreadable when I try to play on my (not very large) TV unless I sit up close. Maybe I should start over in Classic mode and see if it's any better

I think if an important character bleeds out you just kinda reload and do better unless you're really determined to be hardcore

failed to follow my own advice here. had a 1hr50 long play session where I did one of the three-part story/boss battles at the end of it, then had the sudden, horrible Home Alone-like realisation that Johannes was nowhere to be seen

turned out he had bled out in a minor, low-threat skirmish in Siedge Weald two hours prior without me noticing, and I'd overwritten all the save files

RIP Johannes, you were a passable monk and I hope that you at least died from like a chocobo bite or something and not me getting one of your friends to hit you for the XP and then not noticing you'd died