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

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

Im gonna say this once more and then i'll stop: if you have fond memories of fftactics and u buy a psp and ff tactics, you will not be sorry

not all of us are carpeting our mansions in ipad2s here forx...

i found my old 'perfect game' save btw... p sickening how many hours i put in w/o finishing

I should drag out my disc and finish this so I can finally closet the PS2. The thing is I have an 11 week old but she'll probably like it.

Oh and btw I have a douche party with a bard, a dancer and a calculator, and I pretty much run auto-battle all the time. Word: http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps/197339-final-fantasy-tactics/faqs/21850

speakin of gamefaqs, this is crucial for any playthru:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps/197339-final-fantasy-tactics/faqs/3876

also what are you guys talking about the story is the second best story ever told on the PS
this and xenogears

unwittingly manipulated gnostic cults ftw

smh

did anyone ever bother levelling cloud / getting all of his moves? I think i managed to get his limits but he was still under level so I never really used him, heard he is pretty dece though if you do

also anyone feel that putting Luso into the PSP port is tantamount to lucas p-shopping hayden whats his name into the original trilogy #nerdcomment #honestlyembarrassedijustsaidthat

i got all of cloud's moves. he's middling (in the original at least).

cloud's high level moves take too long to charge to be of any real use

xxp Who's Luso?

the worst thing abt cloud was that you got him too late in the game to really make much of an impact, even if you mastered the soldier class you certainly had much better options @ that point. i mean hes not really intended to be a big help, its more of an easter egg i guess

decided to start a scc game w/ chemists just because its one of the classes that i rarely put much time or thought into its going p well.

Lusio = main character of FF Tactics A2, I think, or maybe A1/Advance. He's actually kind of decent in FFT PSP too. I forget why though. Hunting maybe?

and xp -- once you get guns chemist scc doesn't seen so bad

Secondary black mage and you should be fine

I started playing this again but only because I got about twelve hours in to the new Tactics Ogre and realized I was better off playing FFT. The new TO is, however, gorgeous and it plays so smoothly. When you install the game to your memory card you will only hear the disc drive chirp when it initially loads the game. After that your PSP will be silent, and your battery life will will give you more hours than FFT. But, at least at the point I'm at, there is little actual customization of characters. They're all virtually identical, except for the dude with the wings who is just so much better than everybody else. The level design is also very flat and too spacious. So many times in FFT you have to confront someone who's shooting at you from the top of a windmill or a knight who's standing strong in a doorway or a mage that's raising hell from behind some crates.

I like this thread. I've been playing FFT for almost thirtteen years, dutifully coming back to it every year so, but have never finished it. I will probably never finish it.

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