One of the greatest video games of all time... a timeless RPG.
Final Fantasy Tactics is a masterpiece, and probably the best strategy-RPG game ever made. This game explores the themes of justice, empathy, and betrayal like no other game before it, or since it's release. It is the embodiment of many RPG fans dream of a game based on tragedy (similar to the way FF7 was).
The story here revolves around the land of Ivalice, and is told through the eyes of J.D. Alazlam, a historian of Ivalice and a blood relative of one of the central characters in the game, Olan Durai (the D in J.D. stands for Durai). At the very beginning of this game, Alazlam presents the gamer with a questioning of the truth. The old tale of the second emergence of the Zodiac Braves and the Lion War tells of a hero named Delita Hyral who seemingly came out from nowhere and put an end to the war. Thus, the gamer is sent back to play out the Lion War through the eyes of the true hero as you reminisce the events of Ramza Beoulve (pronounced Rahm-za Bee O La Vay), son of the legendary hero Balbanes Beoulve, who played a huge part in the ending of the 50 Year War. Under the Hokuten flag, noble Balbanes reached the state of Heavenly Knight and pretty much solely ended the war because of his power. The player starts the game right after the death of Balbanes from poisoning, in between the Fifty Year War and the start of the Lion War. The aforementioned themes will play out this story like none other in a video game to date.
Gameplay in Final Fantasy Tactics was at the time, and innovative turn-based grid system, similar to Tactics Ogre and Ogre Battle. However, here Squaresoft really had the ability to and did, make improvements on the genre by using Final Fantasy themes that really just make this game nearly perfect. In FFT, you will take turns between sides, moving a certain amount of spaces and attacking on each turn, while forming strategies to defeat enemies. Without using the leveling-up method that I invented for this game, some of the battles can be extremely difficult and call for a lot of character refining by the player. However, this is extremely rewarding, as beating a boss character here is not usually an easy task (I'm looking at you Velius).
Leveling up here is generally a system of going to your favorite map and fighting monsters to gain EXP and Job points to level up your characters and their statistics. Doing so will gain you new classes and magic, most of which are designed just right, and really look great. At any given time, you will not have more than six of your characters in one battle, which can be difficult when you are facing 12 enemies. This only makes for a more rewarding experience.
But what really makes FFT stand out are two things.... the sheer amount of cool items and customization available, including secrets; and also the little bits of the game that you cannot touch. By this I mean the game keeps you hoping that Ramza will eventually promote into something more powerful like his father, but yet he stays just as strong being a regular knight. I also am talking about the times you wish that YOU could have your own Lune Knight or White Knight, but those are classes that you cannot get, thus you are forced to play the game over again, just to see the boss characters that are in these awesome classes (Dycedarg, Zalbag, Wiegraf, Elmdor, Kletian, etc.) I even went back and used a whole memory card to make a new save right before each of these battles.
For die hard RPG fans, there are also hours and hours of extras to do, such as trying to make that perfect game, which took me over 10 play-throughs to finally do (see if you can get Javelin II and Estucheon II), and also the Deep Dungeon where you can get the best items in the game, and also fight the game's secret boss Elidibs, and get the final summon spell, Zodiac.
I could go on for hours about this game's good points, but I must mention the one bad thing about this game..... grammar. In times, especially when you look at character profiles and the Zodiac Brave Story there are a lot of grammar and spelling problems where you are kind of like.......what??
This however, is not enough for me to subtract anything from a perfect review.
This is sheer gaming bliss.
-Jon-