And why grinding shouldn’t exist. No, I will not stop, I can’t sleep.
Playing Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis on GBA has me thinking about this again: it absolutely blows me away to this day that I played a huge amount of Tactics Ogre(TO) on PS1 but could not get past the battle in Dorter where you see the swordsman guy. Got decimated by blackmages and archers. That’s still the tutorial. You can’t even buy gear for classes other than Squires yet. And I was at the same level as the enemy.
I got roadblocked like this in Tacitcs Ogre: Wheel of Fortune on PSP as well, because really what the hell? What on earth was wrong with Training?
So I get that the Training Battles from original TO are a cludge of a thing. Yes, it is kind of weird to set the game down and let it play itself to level your units. Probably shouldn’t exist, sure. The removal of this in every subsequent Yasumi Matsuno tactics game really shows off exactly why it was there, though: grinding in an SRPG is fuckin stupid. Quick question: how good would XCOM be if a story mission wiped your squad in two turns and told you to go grind random worldmap battles? Not fun! This is what Final Fantasy Tactics, (FFT) and also TO Wheel of Fortune and Reborn, actually expect you to do, apparently. Every time I have asked, this is the answer: grind random battles.
Grinding is kind of stupid in any game, “you must advance to arbitrary number to continue”. Some of it happens because a designer can’t really predict how a player will level, but whatever, it’s something to be done away with. Turn based RPGs that don’t suck commonly integrate Auto Battle so that if you need to grind it’s quicker. And turn based RPGs usually have battles that can go by in a minute or two.
Battles were already kind of slow in TO, but in FFT they’re excruciating. Lots of stuff is slower, with bigger fancier animations, the camera always swings around, so on. It makes a nine-tile magic spell in TO look fast. So immediately this is a dumb waste of time that takes forever, even before the XP curve forces you to do several. But also, that early in the game, when you only have squires, FFT is shockingly rude. I didn’t take any deaths but I came close many times. Battling those dumb forest creatures is a real slog at that point, which is why I gave up last time. Like, fuck any game that tells me to go grind tedious battles for literal hours before the tutorial is up.
It also doesn’t help that I think every single other element of FFT is worse than TO, that’s just a bonus. Why is gear locked to classes? Is it such a problem if a Knight uses a shortsword, for fuck’s sake? It limits your class choices to whatever is available in the shop basically. I thought switching my Squires to Knights might help me through that battle, but oops no gear at all!
Why is the squad size six tops and as small as four? Pokemon parties are larger. I can’t do anything, how can I split my forces for instance to do a basic pincer when each formation has at max three guys? Every early battle is “turtle up around spawn and let the enemy come to you”, riveting.
Why are the battlefields so small? 16×16? The GBA game has battlefields that are larger. Hell, TO has battlefields that are larger… I miss the huge castle ramparts with pockmarked fields leading up to a drawbridge, actually organic believable environments. (For an isometric game) There’s never any room to get away… As a result of this movement and attack ranges are limited heavily as well.
Why is healing a throwable? I know there’d be healing magic later but having early game healing be dependent on throwing potions is just hateful. I miss Kachua, who limps you through early TO with extreme range heals, to help get your game started.
Why is magic awful? What are those mages actually doing? They put their hands up, a marker appears at Ramza’s feet, and in a turn he goes up in flames. What kinda shit is this? How the hell do you counter that?
Why are Matsuno and the gang so obsessee with SKILLS? Take away a core mechanic, make it a SKILL!!! In TO everyone could throw stones, block hits, counterattack. Now all of that has to be specced into with skills? Which are classlocked? I really hate this to death, seriously. When every unit can counterattack, battles are deadly and you have to consider the counter before going in for a move. I miss it, now you can just bonk half the time.
Why is Wait Turn gone? This is a niche one but Wait Turn is so cool because your character’s class, stats and equipment all affect it, so while it’s innate to an extent you can influence it, move faster. Have lightweight, weakly-armoured high-speed killsquads. FFT’s turns are just decided by speed like it’s Shining Force II, which is fine I guess I just miss Wait Turn.
The end result is that I have the single dumbest take online: Tactics Ogre Good, Final Fantasy Tactics bad. I hear it said constantly that FFT is designed for beginners, but how? I have played many tactics games (Tactics Ogre, XCOM EU and 2, Fire Emblem Awakening and Fates, Shining Force Sword of Hajya, Valkyria Chronicles) and somehow I get stopped like five hours in. Real video game???
Even though a Skyrim or a Sonic Adventure 2 or an Assassin’s Creed 1 are way worse games that are way worse to play, and I really do not like them at all, Final Fantasy Tactics frustrates me infinitely. It really makes my lil gamer peabrain angry. It’s such a slam-dunk idea: graft the Final Fantasy job system onto Tactics Ogre. Awesome! But they seem to have fucked it up in basically every possible way and now I have this game that I hate. Grrrr, why?
How do I enjoy FFT?
I wouldn’t say FFT is specifically for beginners at all. I played a ton of Ogre Battle and FFT and I failed miserably at both of them quite a few times. The systems are very strange and deep compared to most RPGs of the time.
The game has a weird difficulty curve that is totally knowledge based and it doesn’t do a great job of telling you what is really important, so I can definitely understand the frustrations.
The best early tips I ever got were:
Secondary class abilities are very important - a very fast way to make the game easier, spend a battle or two as Chemist and learn Auto Potion. Auto potion will always use the lowest power potion in your inventory - so you can game the skill by selling or using all your normal potions and keeping only hi-potions stocked when things get difficult.
Monk class + the Squire’s accumulate ability will carry you through like 90% of the game with not much grinding involved at all. There are other such combos, but they take more time to unlock.
Speed stat is very important. Gear that adds speed or classes that are naturally more speedy tend to get caught in big spells less.
It is silly but males have higher Physical Attack and females have higher magic attack. Named characters are sometimes an exception to this. Ramza’s stats are high across the board.
Your faith stat is tied to how much magic damage you deal, and take. Higher faith will let you deal more magic damage but you will also take increased magic damage. Choose a char with high faith to be a magic user - or use the Mediator’s talk abilities to raise their faith permanently. Frontliners, and physical attackers can greatly benefit from having low faith.
Tactics Ogre is a pretty impolite game itself but I adapted after a bit. The physics stuff is weird and classes/character building is complex, but very rewarding imo. Also though to be real it seems like most people’s first SRPG was probably FFT, if it wasn’t like Shining Force.
Did not have access to these yet, again all squires.
Can’t swap to or equip a monk yet. I did get Accumulate on a few of my units fwiw.
Got none of this yet! How does speed impact spell avoidance though, is this like a secret Dodge stat?
What are you supposed to do if the game vibe checks you at like, battle #4 though?
The gendered attack stats is goofy, but Quest games are full of goofy. Tactics Ogre has gender locked classes where a man cannot be an archer and a woman cannot be a knight, very silly. Removed from all subsequent games lol
You can set a squire to have the Item skill as soon as you are able to edit your party, some of them will come with potion already known, or enough JP in chemist to learn it - if you have a chemist in the party all your other guys will slowly gain chemist JP as well. So you can also just keep one chemist in the party for a while to passively learn chemist skills.
One of the biggest things I forgot to mention is grinding can actually be pretty bad unless you know what you’re doing with your party. The scaling of random battles is based on your highest level - story battles always have a set difficulty. Draw battles out to farm JP when the win is secured instead of doing battle after battle. Heal the enemies if you have to. This is prob one of the worst parts of the game that make it feel very punishing.
Squires can use items??? What the hell. Idk how much chemist skills will help when a mage is decimating one of my guys for a third to half of their health though.
Instantly ruined, what happens if I have an underlevelled guy? Explains why I was getting systematically dismantled though.
Waow this sounds really profoundly dumb! Very high maintenance game, considerably more needlessly complex than just hitting “Training” in a menu…
Yep it took me a while to learn why I was losing in like the 2nd battle over and over - you can have most your squires potion themselves right away. Game doesn’t teach you that at all, so I know what you mean for sure. Its also Ok to spend quite a bit of money on potions, eventually gil becomes unimportant. Potioning yourself even when you’re a little bit low is better than passing your turn, because you get a bunch of JP for potioning yourself.
Is this good viddy jaem design??
Tactics Ogre also has an issue with not tutorialising enough, I probably spent like ten hours just reading gamefaqs guides and luct.tacticsogre.com and shit. There are so many tiny nuances to uncover…
but then TO did not need a healing tutorialI ended up kinda broke early on so Idk. The ways you gain JP are really weird…
The early game is actually significantly harder than the rest of the game, barring a few notorious spikes of difficulty. Once you get like one solid character built you will fly through most of the game and it feels too easy. Its hard to explain but yea, the game is all over the place for sure.
Sorry for the billion replies I just really dig the game, probably because it owned me over and over as a kid. I promise it feels good once you get a decent party figured out - for what its worth.
That’s absurd and I hate it to death. The more I needle this game’s difficulty, the less I like it. This is what Thallo said too and it bugs me to hell.
Naw that’s okay :) I just dunno if it’s worth spending like ten hours manipulating battles for JP and shit to get through the early game?
You can unlock monk after only a handful of battles if you’re using dead turns to level JP, but it does take a bit of grind. A few hours maybe, but not 10. Attacking your own party also rewards JP, so if you know one party member is safe and can potion themselves, might as well hit them instead of pass.
Knight class is one of the worst classes in the game, but a knight at job level 3 will unlock monk so I’d rush that for 1-2 of your chars then you’ll be a lot more free to experiment. Only other req for becoming godly is Accumulate. All the monks abilities are based on phys attack power - so accumulating will make even your healing skill stronger. Rotate your save slots in case you need to go back a battle, or rotate save states if you’re using those.
If you decide to try again I’ll happily give you advice if you want, but I also don’t blame you for not wanting to beat your head against it.