I Got A Good Feeling!

Well, I decided that since I have to put the Final Mix campaign on hold for a little while, I'd take a break from rambling about slightly stale games to rambling about one that's old enough to drive.


Final Fantasy Tactics, that whackadoo game with weird translations, a gazillion ways to break the game (two gazillion with glitches) and a passive-aggressive grudge against chocobos.


Yes, I've beaten it.  Yes, I got Cloud and opened up the Lighthouse (didn't beat the Lighthouse, though).  And I found a way to beat Wiegraf without redonkulous setups or grinding (Protip:  The Lancer sucks in group battles, but rules against Big Bad Bosses).  So there!


Its still awesome.  Square knew what it was doing when it snapped up Matsuno and friends to give a new spin on Final Fantasy, and it shows.  Even now, there's something special about assembling a pack of generic types and tuning them into proper agents of the Harvest.  You take them a-questing, make them smack the forces of badness and banditry and unlock all the abilities so you can make them into classes that smack them even harder, and then go and burninate the remains with all sorts of flashy doom.


That's really what SRPGs were lacking up to FFT, and didn't really get again until Disgaea.  There's this whole layer of spectacle that actually helps keeps things fresh and interesting.  A great deal of the cool-looking spells and abilities are impractical, but damn if they don't look cool, and sometimes the difficulty just adds spice to when you pull off that Fire 4 spell or manage to make the Cyclops summon actually hit things.  A nice bonus was when the user belted out a line or two, like they're actually invoking things and not just doing glorified jumping jacks.


The story is overall pretty good, but gets bogged down in increasing layers of plot, then bombarded with increasingly bad and bizarre translation problems.  The PSP remake supposedly fixed all that, but I don't own one so I might never know for sure.  I can tell you that there were lots of grimdark political machinations (including an engineered succession crisis) by various self-important blueblood jerkwads, that wound up being manipulated by the local church (video games hate organized religion), and that was in turn being controlled by a pack of demons trying to resurrect their leader and other evil things.  It's convoluted and fairly abstruse, but understandable if you beat at things and read all the little tidbits. 


There is a faction within the fandom that feels the whole Lucavi (big nasty demons o' doom) concept was just tacked on to Matsuno's political grimfest, and while I understand how they feel, the signs actually point to the Lucavi being part of the story from the get-go.  Personally, I feel that they should have been more subtle about how they were handled (imagine something more like multiple copies of the One Ring floating around and corrupting folk) then just big nasty generic freaks with just enough taste for the Byzantine, but really still have all the subtlety and stealth of a chainsaw to the face when the chips are down.


One last point, since this is already to damn wordy.  Why the hell did they go out of their way to make chocobo riding suck from a mechanics standpoint.  It would have worked out better to not have them included at all outside of cutscenes and background fluff.  Wark!