Final Fantasy Tactics is the second turn based strategy game in the Final Fantasy franchise… I think. I really can’t be expected to keep straight however many hundreds of FF games there are at this point in time. Of all the franchises to have the word “final” in them, it has to be this one.
The plot is a Final Fantasy plot. Really, what more do you need? You know how it goes. The game is in isometric perspective on a square/cube grid where you move your characters around spaces like on a chess board and then tell them to take an action. Depending on what kind of battle you’re in, objectives range from beat this one person to win, beat all of them to win and/or don’t kill this guy or you lose. There are random battles but unless you’re grinding, you’ll mostly be in story related battles.
There are many branching class options for characters to train as, some of them more useful than others. Seriously now, when do white mages become useful? They're just fucking cannon fodder. They'll likely be oneshot killed five turns into a scenario because they're so physically weak. The stuff that they can do is theoretically useful but completely unfeasible in practice because they’re so severely impotent. After a certain amount of time played in the game, their healing abilities aren't worth shit because they don't increase in power at a reasonable rate with the character’s level. If I was playing a conventional FF title, this would be comparable to being stuck using the weak small potions after thirty hours in. As for using buffs and status ailment healing spells, pick one of the following issues that will negate anything you try: it missed, you are immediately targeted and killed before casting, it was blocked, your teammates had to break up and move out of the area of effect before casting, it missed, your teammates are standing on tiles with 1% inclines or other minuscule differences that disrupt the spell's area of effect, it missed or it missed. You cart out your white mage to a battle in order to level them up but then all their spells fail or they spend the whole battle unconscious, so they never gain any experience. Unlike many JRPGs, characters don’t get any experience whatsoever from standing in the background with their thumb up their ass. A character has to successfully cast a spell or hit someone in order to get EXP. I have to send my white mage off on errands to get any. It’s like when you have a shit pokemon. You dump your metapod or abra off at the sitter and say bye. See you when you’re not shit. Only a white mage is never not shit. Mine knows most of his spells but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re all inert when handled by an incompetent waif. 
Through your quest, you can meet some people in scenarios and let them join your team. Some can be permanent while others are temporary. Now let’s take a moment to recognize how shitty Rafa is. Rafa and her brother are optional characters that are skyseekers who cast spells but the spells are odd because they have a “random” aspect to them. The first couple of times she appears in a battle, she’s not in your party and you’re supposed to protect her from enemies. This is difficult because she is the stupidest AI in the game and possibly contender for all time, dethroning Natalya from Goldeneye. On top of being reckless, almost to the degree of suicidal, she casts her spells with no regard to the safety of nearby allies. She will include you in the area of effect. She doesn’t care. Back to the “random” spells, they all have a 2 tile radius area of effect, (so a little Swiss Cross or plus sign formation of five tiles.) When you cast it, it does an elemental attack “randomly” between 1-9 times on “random” tiles within that space. It almost never actually does anything. Usually you just get one or two attacks on blank tiles. It’s so shitty so often that it seems to defy statistical reasoning. One time I had three enemies clustered together at close range so I cast it on them. Then I was gobsmacked when the spell hit a total of seven times solely in the two empty tiles, hitting absolutely no one; not even once. That is not fucking random. That is bullshit. If it doesn’t work in that scenario, what scenario does it work in? I actually did a calculation to find out the mathematical odds of missing a 60% shot seven times in a row. There’s, a .016% chance of it happening. It’s statistically insignificant for this scenario...
You know, I saw a perfect baseball game once. I’ve only been to maybe fifteen to twenty MLB games in my life (and a couple of spring training games.) Most of them were to see the Giants. Two or three were to see the A’s. It was complete happenstance that I was there at the Coliseum the day Dallas Braden pitched a perfect game against the Rays. I went with a group of six and not one of them an A’s fan, a mix of Giants, Dodgers and Red Sox people but we just wanted to see cheap close baseball on Mother’s Day and we got way more than we expected. Sadly, there was hardly anyone else in the park to see it. A couple of years later, I traveled down to the Bay Area to see a Giants game in AT&T Park. I was staying in a hotel in the North Bay with my wife, planning to go to the game the next day. That night on TV we watched Matt Cain pitch a perfect game against the Astros in AT&T. Damn! We were one day off. We could have been there. I ended up seeing Barry Zito pitch his signature blowout the next day… Yippee. (I say “signature blowout” even though it wasn’t that bad and he did suspiciously phenomenal that season. If I went back in time before that and told someone that Zito will start the World Series Opener and beat Verlander, they’d think I was nuts.) In well over a century of Major League Baseball, there have only been 23 perfect games and I was lucky enough to see one of them. When I think about how I almost saw two perfect games, it blows my mind. What are the odds of seeing two perfect games in your life? Apparently a lot fucking better than seeing Rafa hit an enemy.
Pretty much all battles in the game feel incredibly scripted because the AI is so robotic and calculating. There is no sort of random factor aside from spells and attacks missing or critical hits and counter attacks. The computer makes the best possible move every single time. Every battle is like Bobby Fischer versus Deep Blue. You make a move. The computer analyzes hundreds of stats and variables, going through flowcharts and algorithms in order to determine the most annoying response. I find this incredibly obnoxious for three reasons. First, the AI comes off as a pedantic tryhard. Second, it’s unrealistic. People, (which is who I’m supposedly fighting a lot of the time,) are not robots. Sometimes they are inefficient or make mistakes. And third, it’s able to do things that not even the player can do. You know what I have to do to make a good move? I have to look at the turn list to see who gets to move in the next five or so turns. I need to know how many turns my action will take. I have to see how far I can move. I have to check my attack range. I have to check what job classes I have equipped. I have to check which skills I’ve actually learned and can use right now. I need to survey the terrain I’m on or am going to. I need to make sure I have a clear line of sight of my target. I need to be aware of whatever threats are in the area such as nearby enemies and their walking and attack ranges. I need to know where and when not to cluster my guys together. I need to be aware of rendering magic spells or other actions that I or an enemy already cast in the area that I’m moving to or away from. I need to figure out which way to face after performing whatever action, to best protect the character. I need to be aware if my character will be in the way of my other characters when they move. 
When I tell my dragoon to use jump, I don’t know how many turns it will take for him to come back down and attack. It doesn’t say. I have to just hope that the enemy will still be there when he does. When I move a character toward an enemy to use a ranged attack, I don’t know if the enemy will be in range. The two things it tells you are the walking range of your current location and the attack range of your current location. If you want to know the attack range you’ll have at the tile you’re moving to, then you have to fucking manually count tiles like an asshole to make sure you can reach your enemy from that spot. And even if you do that and don’t make any mistakes, you can still move to the spot and find that the enemy is out of range because of slight elevation differences in the tiles. There’s no undo button for moving, so you basically just wasted a turn. Can I get black magic spells with infinite range? No. Can I get summoners with infinite range and huge areas of effect that conveniently pinpoint only enemies and not allies in that area? No. Can I get archers with infinite range. Can I get an equipment rend attack that does some damage so that when the rend inevitably fails (because I’m the one that performed it,) I didn’t just waste a turn? No. Can the AI have/do/know that? It sure as fuck can. It can have it up and down the line all fucking day. There is most definitely a glass ceiling or a player skill cap. You will never be as good as them.
The first battle that I got stuck on and had to consult a walkthrough for was the second boss fight with Wiegraf. The first fight was fun because I wagered that I might just have enough power to take him if I went right at him with no regard for my well being or other enemies and I beat him with only one, (almost dead,) character left. When the second boss fight ocurs, you are one on one with him with the main character because you apparently told the rest of your party to wait out in the hall and scratch their asses. One on one in a turn based game always feels awkward. Is this supposed to be an actual battle? Because it feels like we’re a couple of prissy dandies mincing around daintily in a slap fight. When a fight only has two people, it becomes painfully reduced to a one-dimensional affair: attack, attack, heal, attack, attack, heal, attack, attack, heal, attack, attack, heal, attack, attack, heal. It’s so fucking boring and mind numbingly stupid. And it’s only exacerbated further when Wheat Grass literally blocks and counters half of your attacks. It’s also obvious that this is just jerking off before he inevitably transforms, so what’s the point? Beating him like this doesn’t achieve anything. It’s just busywork. This is one of my most hated Final Fantasy institutions. I HATE transforming bosses. Cut the bullshit and just give me the real deal so we can get this show on the road. Don’t fuck around.
This game also has one of the worst bugs I’ve ever seen in a game. And when I say that, I’m talking about glitches that affect your ability to play the game and not just aesthetics or immersion breaking problems. This one is up there with the unpassable QTE in the PC version of Dead Space 2. If you leave three characters at the sitter- er… send them to do errands, I mean, you typically come back to the same tavern where you took the job after X number of days have passed and collect your rewards and your teammates. However if your teammates happen to be on an errand or uncollected when you progress to the next chapter in the story, the job disappears and the characters become inaccessible. You can not go back to the tavern and recall them or otherwise get them back. THEY ARE FUCKING GONE FOREVER. Not only are they gone, but their spots in your roster remain full and you are not allowed to dismiss them. So your twenty-four slot roster essentially just got downsized to a twenty-one slot roster. That is just… FUCK YOU! How do you make such a horrible, obvious oversight?
I can’t see the enemies or the terrain of the battle scenario before choosing/equipping my team like you can in say Fire Emblem or even Plants Versus Zombies. If it’s my first time attempting the battle, I have no fucking idea what tactic I might want to go with. I’m just throwing darts in the dark. I also have no clue where in relation to anything else a unit is when I place them on the board. All you get is an arrow which means the enemies will be that way but sometimes that’s not even correct. For a game with “Tactics” in the title, this doesn’t seem to facilitate tactics very fucking well, does it? Guessing is not tactical. And it doesn’t even make sense. How do you not know what the environment looks like that you’re already in? Am I walking around with a fucking blindfold on? 
Random battles happen while traveling and again you can't see anything in the battle before you start. You can't reequip weapons or classes. Just pick and place people. And then deal with whatever the matchup is the best that you can. On top of that, there is no option to flee so you are literally trapped with the given scenario unless you exit the game. That is such bullshit. Realistically, you either need to give the player an out or don't force them to play Russian roulette. You can't expect them to make a bunch of random guesses EVERY SINGLE TIME and then make it work EVERY SINGLE TIME or it’s game over. 
I also find it hilarious that so often the enemies you're facing are some nonsensical team of random assholes. Why are a bomb, some geomancers and a flock of birds conspiring together to attack me? At the very least, the animals should be attacking any humans indiscriminately and more likely ANYTHING indiscriminately. But they are literally collaborating to kill just me and my party. And most things, including animals, have the same intelligence as humans so they actually heal and cure each others’ status ailments. A chocobo will go heal some elves that you injured. You'll see a bomb go up to a random summoner and use a weak attack on them to cure them of charm without hurting them too bad. A BOMB does that, a creature named after an inanimate object and which possesses no logical collaborative association with said person. I didn’t even know you could cure charm with an attack until I witnessed this phenomenon. A fucking BOMB taught me this. This crosses the line over into fucking ludicrous. The game goes so, so far out of its way to be a shit to you that it completely abandons logic and reason. You’ve heard of the rule of cool? Where the amount of awesome something is is inversely proportional to the amount of suspension of disbelief it requires from the audience? This is the rule of bullshit where bullshit takes precedence over everything including logic and the laws of nature.
On several occasions you’ll come across some character in trouble and you’ll have to protect them from whoever or it’s game over. A lot of times you’ll start out on the board far away from the character and you’ll need to go join up with them quick before they get the shit beaten out of them. But on multiple occasions I’ve tried to play one of these battles and it was literally impossible to get within range of anyone before the character died. Well that’s real fucking nice. You, without reservation, just made me play a no-win scenario. What was the point of that? If I restarted the same scenario off the same way, It would all happen again in the exact same way. This is because of how the AI works. It always does the best possible move. The only way you can get through this type of problem is to somehow present the enemies with an alternative “better” move which distracts them from the other character. The only thing in your power to try is scramble your party members or formation until you find something that makes them deviate from those calculated actions. Hey guys, look over here! It’s a shitty fucking mage! He’s trying to cast a spell of some sort! You’re not going to to just let him get away with that, are you? It’s so stupid. This game is so flawed and I don’t know if I’ll ever have the constitution to pick it back up again and actually finish it.There is one thing that I thought was awesome and actually kind of levels the playing field so to speak, (in some scenarios.) I believe it was an ability called “ignore terrain.” Basically it treats any terrain as level ground and takes the same number of moves to cross. Even if it’s something that’s twenty stories high. The downside is that it takes a significant amount of training to learn. I made a couple of my characters learn this when I got stuck on a scenario where archers and long range castors are camped up really high on a cathedral roof. It would take me so long to climb up there that I’d get reamed on the approach and be unable to withstand a fight once at the top. After playing the entire game up to this point in an uphill battle against enemies continuously holed up like little bitches behind their battlements and castles, I finally had something to bring them down to my level. Oh look, I just jumped onto your roof in two turns and started slapping your shit. Not so smug now, are you? If there are two passive abilities that you want every character to have, it’s auto-potion and this.
