Notes On My Experiences Revisiting Final Fantasy Tactics

[Fyonn]

Notes On My Experiences Revisiting Final Fantasy Tactics
OR...
Why Burst Damage And Playing By The Rules Is Bad
OR...
Fuck Holy Sword Skills, Like What The Actual Fuck, Game

For context, I am playing Final Fantasy Tactics with a varied squad of about ten units that fill different combat niches. Other than a brief bit where I did some grinding to get Agrias Equip Sword and get my Ninja out of the "stuck as a Thief" part of her career, I have only fought random battles when they happen to occur. This might seem like a no-grinding challenge run to some. To me, it seems like "the way you play RPGs, especially RPGs where a single battle can be a ten-twenty minute investment of time." Consequently, I have spent many battles with characters in less than optimal Jobs, but by around Lionel Castle Oratory I had a pinch-hitter squad capable of each pumping out an average of a hundred-fifty damage per turn. Eva the Black Mage definitely accounts for the majority of the damage for a while, then later Ramza started hitting for like 200 damage per swing, with a honorable mention going to Agrias's "low" but reliable 80 damage ranged instants.



Guys. I hate to break this to you. But Final Fantasy Tactics is a bad game. I know what you're thinking: I loved Final Fantasy Tactics! Final Fantasy Tactics can't be bad!

And maybe that's unfair. In truth, Final Fantasy Tactics is an incredible set of mechanics with some of the worst campaign design in video games. See, unlike most tactical RPGs (I'm counting Fire Emblem, for the record), Final Fantasy Tactics was clearly designed expecting you to grind. Several encounters, from the very beginning of the game onward, are built for you to bring an unlikely amount of force or build a boutique party composition to disarm them.

I don't even really have to tell you which battles I'm talking about. You already know. But for posterity's sake, here they are: Dorter Slums, Ziekden Fortress, The Castled City of Zaland, Golgollada Gallows, Lionel Castle Gate, Lionel Castle Oratory, Riovanes Castle Gate, Riovanes Castle Keep, Riovanes Castle Roof. There might be more of these, I don't know, I haven't reached them yet. I spent hours formulating plans with the aid of an expert (waves at Mogri) just to get through Riovanes Castle Keep, and then Riovanes Castle Roof was a fight so bad that I had to go to sleep after completing it. I think all of these fights have the exact same problem: the action economy is heavily in the enemy's favor. I suspect the only reason a lot of us put up with them is because we played FFT a ton when we were teenagers with loads of free time.

And yes, I'm going to describe all of them.

Dorter Slums – you're outnumbered and your two Guest units will immediately waste a ton of time climbing a tower of trash to deal with one enemy.
Ziekden Fortress – you're outnumbered and your deployment zones are deliberately bad, isolating your party from one another.
The Castled City of Zaland – you have to protect a Guest who has no idea what they're doing. Thanks to high city walls and a troupe of archers and mages, you are effectively outnumbered until you can squeeze your units into the front gate.
Golgollada Gallows – hey look it's our old friend being outnumbered AND our old friend “your deployments are garbage for no reason.” This one has the extra sass to throw in two Time Mages because fighting eight enemies with five units, two of which will start in a kill zone where they die almost immediately, wasn't an uneven enough fight.
Lionel Castle Gate – a cinematic two-part battle, one part of which being a 1v1 duel between Ramza and a boss! Problem: if Ramza is not built in a physical Job with high HP, the boss can just one-shot Ramza and that's it, you lose.
Lionel Castle Oratory – a boss fight, the first real one, even! This enemy deals massive damage and can inflict Sleep on swathes of your party. If you didn't come prepared for that, guess it's up to luck whether you can try to win or not. Still, this is the least bad of the boss fights, probably because it's the first one and the game doesn't expect you to be a walking nuke yet.
Monastery Vaults First Level – there's a boss in this level with really powerful, instant, ranged AoE attacks with high enough speed and positioned as such that he can easily kill multiple characters before you get to issue your first order. Winning is a matter of hitting him a couple times before he (and his squad) hit each of your units one or two times.
Riovanes Castle Gate – what if perfectly-placed archers spent all day taking pot-shots at the Guest you have to protect? Even once you get the Guest out of there, you still have to deal with those archers, which can hit practically the entire battlefield and have the focused DPS to take out any unit they please.
Riovanes Castle Keep – stop me if you've heard this one before. The boss has a really high speed score, and really powerful instant ranged attacks that can easily two-shot a melee character. Oh, but this time, it's 1v1. You need to find a way to outlive / outheal the 140 damage you will take per turn. If Ramza isn't built melee combat, he might die immediately before you get to issue any commands. If he is built for melee, you had best hope you can heal 140 damage every turn and somehow also be able to fight back. The easiest way to do this is via AI exploits – if you're in range of the boss when they do their thing, they'll retreat. You can walk into their range every time they advance to effectively buy yourself two turns. You still need a source of instant healing (i.e. Chakra) and enough buffer HP that you can spend one of your two turns per round of this ridiculous dance attacking at range somehow. The real thing you should do is use Tailwind / Yell to stack your Speed into the stratosphere alongside Focus / Accumulate to stack your Physical Attack into the stratosphere because if you don't...
Riovanes Castle Keep ROUND 2 – will absolutely annihilate you. Three demon buddies and one demon boss. The boss has an AoE spell (thank god for once it's not an instant, small miracles) that will deal more damage in a massive spread than anyone other than fully kitted out Knights can survive. The three demons have single-target spells that also will kill a unit per attack. If you just barely made it through round 1, you're probably already screwed. I don't know how much HP the boss has, but I do know that after breaking round 1 out of sheer rage, I still had to have 99 PA, 50 Speed Ramza hit the boss for 999 damage TWICE. Hopefully it's just 1,000 HP, a nice even number. Anyway, deal like 1,000 HP of damage before any spells go off or you lose, sorry.
Riovanes Castle Roof – this one's like a greatest hits of bad design. First off, you're protecting a Guest who is positioned as such that she will lose half her HP before you can do anything every single time. Second, there are two characters in this battle who have both a 100% chance ranged instant Stop and a 100% chance melee instant Death. The boss you have to kill, of course, has high damage output and high speed. To make things worse, your deployment is garbage – your party intentionally start facing the wrong direction and has to double time it to even get into the fight. If they do – remember that 100% instant ranged Stop that the enemy can do twice every “round” of combat? And god forbid if you actually try to fight those characters – because of the 100% chance instant melee Death. They also both have dual wield so honestly they don't even need the instant death move. Can't remember if the boss has dual wield, but he definitely has First Strike so even trying to attack him means sometimes your unit just fucking dies instead. Much like every humanoid boss in the game so far, it's a matter of hitting the boss twice before the boss hits you. Which is just... the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen in a strategy game. The difference between victory and defeat was literally which characters the assassins decided to Stop on round 1.



I think the problem is that Final Fantasy Tactics is a really powerful engine for making characters with ridiculously high burst damage. So every fight has been balanced with the idea that you can just tear through enemies like butter. But if you don't already know which Jobs are broken in such a way to pump out hundreds of damage per turn, you're going to spend time with Jobs that deal like 40 damage a turn. The balance is so wildly swingy and so easy to tip that the developers had no choice but to balance fights assuming every member of the player's party is built to deal 350 damage in one melee attack.

It's essentially the D&D encounter problem – when everyone is playing by roughly the same rules and players get access to a bunch of tools that can let them apply absurd amounts of damage to a single target, the action economy becomes everything. Getting more actions than your opponent means you win. And when you apply that to boss fights, the bosses have to get a free opening move on you, have to hit like a truck to put you on the defensive immediately, and have to abuse the action economy in some way. It's the only way to make a fight like that “fair” - both sides need to be equal in the amount of unfair power they can bring to the table.

I've got an alternate solution to this dilemma though: stop making bosses play by the rules for no dang reason! Give bosses multiple actions per round or wide AoEs that deal less damage than the players do, introduce status moves that players don't have access to so you can do things like a very short-term version of Stop, and give bosses just an absolute ton of HP. This way, instead of every fight being a race to attack twice, boss fights become endurance matches that give your entire party a chance to shine – it might take two or three hits from a boss to kill a character, but it'll take four or five rounds of focusing damage to take the boss down.

Now. You might be thinking, “hold on isn't that how, like, every boss fight in a JRPG works ever?”
And you would be correct.
And if you've ever wondered why, well, this post is why. Boss fights against equal opponents are really awful when both sides have huge burst damage!

also stop giving the enemy like four extra guys, it's already sad enough that you only get to use five units at most

also no one is allowed to say Vagrant Story is hard anymore, Riovanes Castle is the greatest single stretch of absolute bullshit I've ever witnessed in a video game
same goes for Dark Souls
look Final Fantasy Tactics is such a raging jerk for those three fights that the entire concept of difficulty has to be graded on a curve now

 

[Mogri]

I beat FFT as a solo Priest (the dummy version that can equip anything but has 0 evade instead of 5), so I am unqualified to speak to the game's difficulty on any reasonable, objective level.

But then I also reimplemented the entire game twice over, so I might just be unable to think about the game objectively. You are kinda making me want to replay it, though.

 

[Regulus]

It's worth noting that the original NA version rebalanced the JP costs of most of the abilities. One of the reasons it's arguably superior to War of the Lions.

 

[Kishi]

I'm fundamentally opposed to grinding in most cases, but FFT happens to be a rare game where grinding itself is so fun that I can't resist it. The last time I played, I think I got somewhere in Chapter 3 before I gave in to the temptation (and inevitably made the story battles so easy that they were boring, but oh, well). But it is interesting to think about how the developers were limited by building enemy units in the same mold as player units.

One minor annoyance I do share is the inability to see where you're placing your characters on the map at the beginning of each battle. The abstract arrangement of tiles you're shown may allow you to make some broad strategic decision about who goes where, but your choice could easily backfire depending on terrain you can't see until the battle has started. I can't count how many times I've started a battle and thought, "I wouldn't have placed them there if I'd known."

 

[gorha]

You're basically right about the way FFT is designed: you build your characters however you want until you get to a map you can't beat, then come up with a party setup that can beat it, then grind as much as it takes to achieve that setup. The grinding itself is more fun than in most RPGs, so it's not a game breaker on its own, at least for me. On a replay, you can aim for the good jobs and abilities from the beginning and not have to grind, but then you miss out on the fun of doing whatever you want until it doesn't work anymore. On the other hand, if you get to a hard fight (Dorter Slums is indeed a likely suspect) before you know what the good jobs and abilities are or how to unlock them, you could end up grinding aimlessly for a long time.

Riovanes is pretty bad. I think you can break the boss' weapon in the 1v1 fight with the Knight skill that does that, and that seems like the intended weakness of sword skill units, but it is my understanding that bosses in the Japanese version and the PSP/phone versions all have Maintenance, which suggests that it isn't. Running around yelling is probably the best solution, but it sure as hell doesn't feel like an intended one, especially when it makes the second part of the map so trivial. The worst thing about the whole sequence, though, is that it breaks its own design by putting multiple potential roadblock fights in a place where you can't back out of them, in a game for a system that heavily disincentivizes making multiple saves. You could easily put yourself in a position where you couldn't grind your way past those fights even if you wanted to. But you already beat it, so you're over the hump. Everything after Riovanes feels like a victory lap in comparison.

FFT is a good game to play over and over as a kid with lots of free time and l i t t l e m o n e y, certainly. It's still fun to think about and talk about, but I don't know if I'd have the patience to actually play it again.

 

[Fyonn]

excuse me, you misspelled l i t t l e m o n e y

 

[Mightyblue]

There are clever ways around most of those fights that don't require specific job or ability comps though; Gafgarion is mostly nerfed by wearing anything that nulls or absorbs Dark element, stacking phys evade mostly defangs Elmdor outside Draw Art and Drink Blood, etc.

 

[gorha]

excuse me, you misspelled l i t t l e m o n e y

thanks, I fixed it

 

[Mogri]

There are clever ways around most of those fights that don't require specific job or ability comps though; Gafgarion is mostly nerfed by wearing anything that nulls or absorbs Dark element, stacking phys evade mostly defangs Elmdor outside Draw Art and Drink Blood, etc.

For sure FFT is more fun on a second run, once you know what to expect.

 

[ThricebornPhoenix]

One minor annoyance I do share is the inability to see where you're placing your characters on the map at the beginning of each battle.

Fixing this is probably the single best thing FFTA did.

There are clever ways around most of those fights that don't require specific job or ability comps though; Gafgarion is mostly nerfed by wearing anything that nulls or absorbs Dark element, stacking phys evade mostly defangs Elmdor outside Draw Art and Drink Blood, etc.

Yell is the cleverest. Speed is the only stat that always matters. Being faster than the enemy is always superior to being stronger (this is why black magic gets less useful over time). Move is the next most important.

Tactical use of buffs and debuffs is also better than just relying on pure damage (exception for Riovanes Rooftop; having fast, high-power units like ninja or red chocobo is a godsend there since the battle ends when one enemy drops to critical HP). Disabling some enemy units, even temporarily, with Charm, Sleep, Don't Act, etc. can turn the odds in a tough fight in your favor. I'm gonna say it: Mustadio is more useful than Agrias.

And, of course, you can Speed Break enemy units down to 1 then Slow them for extra cruelty/hilarity.

 

[Fyonn]

Yeah Mustadio is in my regular rotation for that reason, sitting in the Chemist Job.

 

[Pajaro Pete]

my spicy FFT-in-2020 take is that healing magic that can miss is a mistake especially when the job tier below white mage already has ranged heals

 

[Mightyblue]

Yes, but MP is free while gil is not

 

[Fyonn]

my 99 Hi Potions and Phoenix Downs dispute this claim

if there's one thing FFT's good about, it's handing you stacks of cash so that any given item is usually only one or two fights away from being purchased

Game definitely could have used Phoenix Pinions, though, Phoenix Downs stop healing a usable amount of HP approximately five minutes after you start the game

 

[Mogri]

I'd argue that instant, guaranteed, repeatable revival is in fact one of the most powerful abilities in the game.

 

[Fyonn]

Oh yeah, it's still really good, but you need the turn order to cooperate with you or it won't mean much beyond sand-bagging a character so you don't lose them. Which is still really valuable.

It would just be nice to have a late-game version of it that heals like 30-50% max HP. Or maybe a Chemist passive that boosts item effectiveness or something.

 

[Torzelbaum]

Gafgarion is mostly nerfed by wearing anything that nulls or absorbs Dark element

OK, but what is there that does that?

 

[Mightyblue]

At the time of the Gaf fights, I believe your only reasonably acquired option are the N-Kai Armlets in the PSX trans, which halve Dark element damage.

 

[Regulus]

It's been a while, but IIRC, Night Sword and/or Dark Sword are "weapon" element, so they don't actually do dark elemental damage. Even if the AI believes they're dark elemental, it will probably still use them against you unless you can nullify or absorb dark.

 

[Mommi]

I remember Dorter Slums being really hard as a kid, but have no issue going right into it now. If you immediately recruit or promote a couple of archers and follow your guests up to the high ground you can focus down the enemies from relative safety. Of course if you beat it straight off, every single battle for the rest of chapter 1 ends up being super dicey.

 

[Issun]

I would just like to say, as someone who generally sucks at these kinds of games, that the ability to grind is why FFT is the only one so far that has resonated with me. So no, I don't think grinding makes it bad, I think it makes it more friendly to entry level players, which was part of its appeal back in the day, I think.

 

[Mommi]

If the action economy drives you nuts in FFT, definitely don't play Gungnir. Your party shares a single activation (you choose who to activate each time) but the enemies all get their own. Plus you start out hugely outnumbered most of the time.

 

[Sarcasmorator]

I do love the game. But I had to start over after getting stuck against Velius/Belias in my first run of FFT. It's hard and some sequences are ridiculous, but the real problem with the campaign design isn't in the encounters themselves but in how you can save-lock yourself into an unwinnable situation.

If you could LEAVE Riovanes to grind when you realize you're out of your league, it would be fine, but you can't, and if you save after that first battle without an alternate slot you're stuck. As it is you have to grind hard before ever going there, you have to KNOW you have to do that, and after a certain point you have, IIRC, exactly one battleground to grind on, and will get very sick of fighting squidheads on that map before you're bulked up in the right way.

My solution to Riovanes was to go heavy on Dragoon stuff for Ramza, because Weigraf can't hit what's not on the map and jumping at him from ten squares away. Mustadio has been a main in every playthrough, my Chemist-Sniper with Knight break abilities dealt out from halfway across the map.

 

[Mogri]

You're thinking of Golgorand on the grind. Riovanes is at the end of the chapter, and you have your run of the map if you had the presence of mind to save outside.

Isn't Balthier a better Mustadio? Never played the rerelease, but I thought he had the Snipe skillset plus some extras. Maybe you also get him late enough that he's not especially relevant.

 

[Mightyblue]

Balthier and Ludo are Chapter 4, yeah.

 

[Juno]

I’m a big fan of SRPGs and tried to get into FFT two different times, and on both I ended up quitting due to the problems mentioned here. I endorse the OP.

 

[Zef]

Balthier and Ludo are Chapter 4, yeah.

However, Chapter 4 is by itself longer than the sum of at least two previous chapters, and IIRC you get Balthier early enough that you can develop not just his job but multiple others, so he can outpace Mustadio pretty quickly. Barrage is a pretty broken skill.

 

[MetManMas]

On the subject of guests, it's a shame the remake didn't do anything to make Cloud more viable. It already takes a bunch of specific side questing stuff to get him, then he starts at Lv.1, then you have to go item hunting at some random volcano to get a unique sword that is mandatory to even use his signature Limit Break abilities.

Like, I know there's gunmen and thunder gods and math teachers breaking the game in half by that point, but it'd still be nice to actually be able to use Cloud.

I wonder if locking him behind some bullshit and making him suck is some kinda commentary by the dev team...

 

[Torzelbaum]

He sure does hinder you...

 

[estragon]

I wonder if locking him behind some bullshit and making him suck is some kinda commentary by the dev team...

The commentary: "Please buy the strategy guide."