Final Fantasy Tactics

With all due respect to the previous games and single t.v. season I've posted so far in this ridiculous month of January, they were mostly small potatoes. With the beating of Final Fantasy Tactics, I can finally feel like I've had a great month of posting. Of course, finishing almost any Final Fantasy game feels like a major accomplishment because they can be pretty tough and are usually among the longest games in my backlog. Final Fantasy Tactics is one of the toughest games in the series to get into- I started this last August and after a few hours couldn't stand it; then after getting another 10-15 hours in earlier this month I still felt like the game made no sense and had little motivation to keep going. The game required a few different conversations with Stan, who's played through it a few times, as well as multiple readings of guides on gamefaqs to figure out why I had such a shitty party who would routinely get their ass kicked. This is because I was playing Final Fantasy Tactics like any other Final Fantasy game, when truthfully it's the black sheep of the series and can't simply be brute-forced, it needs to be figured out. Seriously, the gambit system of Final Fantasy XII and the junctioning of Final Fantasy VIII are child's play compared to the learning curve in Final Fantasy Tactics. First off, there's no puzzles or quests or exploring environments- the game is made up entirely of battles, shopping/customizing characters, and cutscenes. Not even those fancy CGI cut-scenes that the PS1-era Final Fantasy games did so well, it all takes place on the battlefield. Oh yeah, speaking of which, there's a battlefield! Now your party runs around on a large grid, with attacks and spells having increased effects based on how close your target is. Leveling up solely to level up is basically pointless in Tactics, you need to grind out random battles in a very specific way. You gain job points from successfully hitting a target, or using an item, or really any successful action on the battlefield, but only for whatever job you are currently. You can then spend these points on abilities specific to your current job type in four categories- actions (different spells for a wizard, different ranged attacks for a monk, the ability to use different items as a chemist, etc.), counter abilities (counter attack, auto-potion), passive abilities (magic attack increased, increased speed), and move abilities (increase the range you can move, walk on water). Each character in your party can be set with one of each ability regardless of their current job, and then they also get a second action ability based on their current job. This means (and was something that took me a long time to figure out!) that from the start you should have some idea as to what abilities you want your characters to have, and then simply work towards that goal. Some abilities are far more powerful than others, so going in with no plan meant I was just spending all of my job points on random crap that didn't help me at all. I always thought knights were a pretty useful job in any Final Fantasy, but in Tactics they rarely are until end-game, so when I finally switched my weak-ass knight to a monk with some ranged powerful attacks, suddenly the game got much easier and started making a lot more sense. The latter half of the game turned out to be really fun, which is great because I was starting to dread the fact that the sequel, Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance was on my backlog as well. I probably won't get to that for a while, but at least now I'm looking forward to it.