Blame yourself or God! Let's Play Final Fantasy Tactics!

Nah, you're taking the right approach. It's an interesting history lesson. "Back in my day, games were barely coherent! And we liked it that way! Well, not really."

this game is fucking great, and will stand on its own merits, haters be damned.

For some reason I always put Ramza into mage classes - as a calculator I breezed through those battles everyone else has trouble with. Although I guess I cheated in reading the class requirements ahead of time.

Oh FYI if you're OCD enough to get a calculator early enough there's a strange coincidence in the chapter 1 battles - all of them start with enemy ct(? the turn indicator) starting as a multiple of 5. Which makes it easy to target everyone at once - yeah at some point I had a lot of time on my hands. That gets fixed in Chapter 2 and beyond, though.

So there's a little bad grammar and the occasional nonsensical (but easily understandable) sentence, here and there. Parish blows this and FF7's (provided it's the same EU translation as it is in the US) translation issues way out of proportion.

In WotL, I decided I wanted to make Ramza a Dark Knight --which requires, among other things, Mastered Black Mage and Mastered Knight. I went BM first. The result: by the end of Chapter 1, without much grinding beyond the required Dorter Slums hump, Ramza was my most powerful spellcaster and his Black Magic was a mainstay support skill through most of the game. And when I made Summoners and another Dark Knight, the trickle-down JP was enough to help him buy every Black Magic ability in the list, pushing him into Mastery by mid-Chapter 3.

Doesn't everyone start at CT 100? My WotL grinding sessions (using the Berserked Frog method) always opened with CT 4(x) Faith, targeting every unit in the field.

If everyone has the same speed value, then yes, everyone will 'start' with 100 CT. It gets 'fixed' because once you hit chapter 2, classes start getting high enough in level that they start hitting their next increase in speed.

On the subject of hidden class statistics (which will be covered in detail in a later post) I wanted to correct something:

Classes in general, get more MA from two things: their class multiplier, and their gender. Every basic unit has the exact same MA "growth" regardless of their class, with one exception, Mimes.

Thus, keeping a potential Samurai in Knight does nothing to affect their eventual MA growth. A Knight's PA growth however, is topped only by the aforementioned Mimes. Knights match up with Lancers nearly identically in terms of base stat growth, but they have slightly better multipliers.

Technically, it'd probably be better to turn said Samurai/Lancer into a Ninja to boost speed (As the "Jump" skill is based off of it) but we'll see. Can one have too many Ninjas?

- Eddie

Oh, I was thinking that the multipliers were taken into effect when leveling. My bad.

Edit: I still stand by my assertion that Geomancer is a better class to hang around in due to their versatility, and Lancer + Equip Sword would be better than Knight because you could be working on Ignore Height. And I guess the extra jump point is ok, too.

Stat growth is job-based in FFT Advance, and it is terrible. If you want to achieve optimal stat growth (WHICH I DO), then you have to make sure that a character never levels up unless they have the job equipped that will give them the stat gains that you want. The worst thing about it is that if you don't do that then your characters can end up gimped by the end of the game, with messy pools of mediocre stats. Despair as your Bangaa never gets a turn because his speed stat is so low! Marvel as everyone stands around and watches your Viera kill everything on screen because she's faster and more powerful than any of them!

Grr! I don't like you, FFT Advance!

I like the system in FFT a lot better, because you can freely switch between jobs without worrying about ruining the stat growth of your characters.

Stat growth is based on jobs in FFT too, though.

It just also has a stat multiplier for each class in addition to the stat growth variables. Someone that's been a Bard for 80 levels won't be hitting as hard as your other fighters even if you change him to Lancer or Knight or something.

I like it more because jobs aren't species-specific. Kind of crimps of the customization that way.

I liked there being different species available, but if I wanted a Viera Gadgeteer, or a Hume Dragoon, why should I be restricted?

No! Don't tell me these things! I WANTED TO BELIEVE

You make it sound like competent writing is a bad thing.

Bards are in fact, one of the worst classes to level in beyond their miserable PA growth; but I'll save that for a later post.

The important thing to know is that each class has a stat multiplier and a stat growth, but in terms of MA (which governs the strength of your magic, along side of "Faith") growth, it increases at the same rate for almost every class you can expect to use, no matter if it's a Knight, Monk, Wizard, or Sorcerer.

PA IS quite heavily affected by your choice in classes, but most casual players are unlikely to notice; the effect isn't so strong as to be readily apparent (someone going from Bard to Lancer will see their PA jump from base PA x 0.3 to base PA x 1.2, a HUGE difference even ignoring the raw increments...). It really takes some abuse to create truly monstrous characters; I agree with the comments about FFT Advance, the way they handled stat growth led to incredibly uneven characters. FFT handles is in a way that means any character (yes, even Rafa and Malak) can be excellent as long as you're willing to invest the time.

And man, Hume Dragoons should be in every game!

- Eddie

Well that makes me feel better. I was already thinking about how I was going to handle stat growth differently on my next playthrough, but with the game being as well balanced as it is I can probably let my need for perfection in my characters relax a bit in this case.

I'll still end up manipulating their stats, though. I just know it.

I hope you touch on the unsavory things that certain obsessive types can do with level down traps in that post.

It will blow Bungle's mind.

I am... unsavory?

):

Maybe I'll mark that post, whenever it comes, with a giant "BUNGLE WARNING."

- Eddie

Well, I was trying to make it sound like the writing in FFT and FF7 is entirely serviceable and does not interfere with understanding in the slightest. I didn't get anything plot-wise from the PSP remake I hadn't understood from going through the original as a young teen. FF7 is even less guilty of this, and I do have to wonder if the translation was tweaked on its journey across the pond.

I've already figured it out, actually.

Basically, this means I can never play this game again for fear of what I might do.

I blame all of you!

EDIT: Noooo I'm doing research!

ONE OF US, ONE OF US!

Don't blame us. Blame yourself or God.

FFT has no defense stats. FFTA does.

This is why you tend to "fall behind the curve" in FFTA. Enemies' defense can rise faster than your character's attack, and their HP is always growing too. Then there's the possibility that you could be using a weak weapon because it teaches a good ability... ugh! That's where I stopped enjoying FFTA.

I appologize in advance for not knowing a whole lot about this particular game. I've played both FFTA and A2 and I own FFT, but I've never gotten very far into it, so please bear with the noob questions.

In the explaination of Brave/Faith, Eddie mentioned that he typically might get a couple good units and have to dump the rest and recruit new ones with better values, but then in the 2nd battle, you used the two units that had crappy brave and faith. I started up a game and had 4 units with either a high brave or faith but not both (above 65 like you said) but 2 had low 50s for both. Would you dump them and try to recruit better units or should I do like Eddie did and use them anyways because you can apparently modify their values later? In other words why did Eddie keep the two low brave/faith units?

I guess my 2nd kinda confusing thing is that I was following along really well for the 2nd update where it was like switch these guys so they can learn these abilities. Then, in the suplemental, all of a sudden you've got a bunch of different jobs. Why did you grind up to those jobs so soon? I guess the first two posts felt like a normal game flow that I would understand, and then you really kicked it into pro gear and the change may have just been shocking for me. Did you just grind all the jobs because the LP asked for those jobs?

Thanks for helping the new kid to understand...

In brief:
Characters with low Brave can find items more easily with Move-Find, and characters with low Faith are more resistant to magical attacks.

I wouldn't be overly concerned about starting off with characters with Br/Fa in the 50s, since you can get plenty of abilities that can modify it.

I'm sure someone else can explain it better then I can, since I almost never bothered with it, other then making sure that my units with high Faith were mages and ones with high Bravery were fighters.

He used the two weaker guys for the sake of variety, I think.

It's pretty time consuming to actually permanently alter Brave/Faith, so it's much better to get values closer to what you want simply to cut down on how long it takes to min/max or to just have better values to begin with when you give up out of boredom.

As for the classes, people in the thread have been requesting class combinations, and he's just setting these guys on the path to get to their final classes ASAP. He probably ran through a couple of random battles for them to get to the point they're at now and just didn't show it.

Which is fine, because it's honestly kind of boring. Just imagine five dudes standing around screaming like a DBZ character for half an hour and you'll have a pretty good idea of how job grinding goes down.

I'm glad you're asking these questions.

Ultimately, you can use any units. Mediators can mess with Brave and Faith values, meaning you can give any unit nearly any Brave or Faith value you desire. All it takes is time. Now, after the first real battle (Gariland Magic City), there's little reason not to junk your crappy guys in favour of recruiting some stronger units; all it costs is some gold, and if you grind at all you should get that in spades.

There were a few requests however, to use what the game gave me for names. Since I could ultimately mold these characters, I gave in, especially because, you know. One of the dudes names was Junk. That was too good not to keep.

I'm sorry for using all these new classes without an explanation; while I COULD introduce them all immediately, I don't want to hammer a new player with Spreadsheet: The game. I'll be adding a new class with each post, and I'll be explaining game mechanics along the way. The next post for example, will talk a lot about casting spells and charge time, and will introduce the Wizard. I think it'll be one of the most important posts for new players to learn, so hopefully you'll find it engaging.

There were two reasons why I made the supplemental post and went into the slightly advanced classes before I introduced them. For one, it was simply inevitable that I would enter them before I'd have the chance to properly introduce them all (i.e. one per post). The game opens four new classes after squire and chemists pretty quickly, and then even more for those. Staying in earlier classes for the sake of newcomers would likely encourage more harm than good; I'd rather teach people to take what they need from a class, and then jump into the one they really want to be in.

Secondly, it's MUCH easier to tell units apart when they're all different classes. It makes the screenshots more interesting too!

So, take the supplemental posts as the "advanced" look into strategy. Everything will be explained in time; there's a ton of content to look at, and I'll get to it all in time.

Regardless, sorry for the confusion! It's not you, it's me!

- Eddie

I would like to add that the class explanations/comments are my favorite part of the updates so far.

I must say, I'm still a fan of "Surrender or die in obscurity!" The line does touch upon a major theme of the game: History's tendency to forget. It's an over-the-top phrasing, but it's almost inspired.

Eddie, thanks for clarifying. I assumed you used the "junk" (ha!) characters for the sake of the LP.

I agree that it will be more intresting with all the other jobs. I also agree that explaining them all at once would be overwhelming. I really appreciate the time and consideration you've taken to each step of crafting this LP including the formatting and presentation, and the class explainations. I will keep waiting and reading and hopefully more will make sense as you reveal more of the game.

Thanks a ton for doing this LP again.