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?
FFT is my mother’s favorite game, but I have not played it myself. No investigation, no right to speak
Your mother has bad taste but I still respect her
She also really enjoys FE and Tactics Ogre, though I think she’s only played Reborn for Ogre and Three Houses + Engage for Fire Emblem. I did get her to play Sacred Echoes on the Fire Emblem front though, and she’s really enjoying it. She’s really into the grid-style tactics games, as am I.
Oh that’s actually really based, damn I wish my mom was that cool. The grid style tactics… I’m also disappointed because while I have opinions about all of the turn based strategies, FFT is the first one I have played and disliked which is very sad.
Once again, Ashinadash with a hot take.
Color me convinced, I’ll also have to throw Tactics Ogre in my backlog
This is my attempt to play up a (genuine, real) hot take and artificially generate a 450 comment Skyrim thread again :3
I recommend Tactics Ogre always, it’s soooooo good…
That Skyrim thread was so funny, you were 100% correct and it even spread to Reddit, that was wild lmao
Any advice on which TO to start with if FFT is my only exposure to sRPGs?
That was terrifying
ledditors coming from far and wide to say HOW DARE YOU INSULT MY TREATS 
I will always recommend the original game on Saturn or Super Nintendo with a fan translation, that’s where so many unique mechanics are. The PSP and Reborn versions have Skill systems and shit that hew very close to FFT so those might be more comfortable, and they’re still good looking games with excellent stories. I wouldn’t be against playing Knight of Lodis as a bridge game either, I guess. Hard to go wrong with Ogre Tactics…
Gotcha! I’ll throw it in the Emu list, then, and go with the oldies. Thanks!
Another FFT enjoyer down!
I need to see the Skyrim thread, I don’t remember it
Have fun, and I sure wish I could conjure up the guts of 500 replies out of nowhere like that. Trans mega would move so goddamn fast.
time to put you down, comrade.You can kill me, but you’ll never kill the idea that FFT is bad
How do I enjoy FFT?
Probably go back in time and first play it when you’re, like, 12 or so lol.
I feel like you mentioned the only Fire Emblem games you’ve played being the 3DS era ones, and I think you disliked Awakening or whatever for similar reasons to FFT - which totally makes sense!
Wha the fugg :( I only played Ogre recently, why is FFT a nostalgia meme?
I have criticism for Awakening, mostly the waifu stuff and pretty standard issue combat but it’s not a bad game at all actually. Got me back into SRPGs kinda.
The grind bothers you less when you’re a dumb kid or have nostalgia lol.
I have criticism for Awakening, mostly the waifu stuff and pretty standard issue combat but it’s not a bad game at all actually. Got me back into SRPGs kinda.
Yeah, the waifu and kids stuff makes a lot less sense in Awakening when it’s a fan service for Genealogy of the Holy War fans (which had a time skip and no Support scenes, so it worked a little better there).
Oh no
me when I didn’t play FFT in 1997!!!Lmao fanservice for Genealogy fans… didn’t even come out here, smdh… Mostly I just thought the writing was all too weak to justify it. Also I had to mod in homosexuality.
Also I had to mod in homosexuality.
Yeah, it took like until Three Houses in 2019 to finally have
canonnon-modded gays in Fire Emblem (and there’s only a few options). Fuckin Nintendo lolEdited because I kinda used the wrong word
Why It’s Morally Okay To Pirate All Of Nintendo’s Games:
I gave up on FFT for GBA after a short time and ended up doing another playthrough of KoL.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Aw hell yeah KoL gang!
FFT is literally my favorite game, and all of the aspects of it that you hate, I love.
Why is the squad size six tops and as small as four?
if squad sizes were larger, battles would stretch on into eternity.
Why are the battlefields so small?
Same reason, although it might have to do with hardware limitations of PSX also.
Why is healing a throwable?
Probably to support early game, Chemists have a smaller move stat than other classes, and so wouldn’t be able to keep up with Squires that need healing if they’re required to be in 1 tile range.
Why is magic awful?
I’m sorry, are you sure you’re playing the right game? Magic is so busted in FFT I sometimes don’t use it just to increase the challenge.
Why is Wait Turn gone?
Sorry, I don’t understand your point here? If you use Wait and you don’t move or act, then it preserves a substantial amount of that character’s CT, and their next turn comes up sooner. Using move consumes 30CT if I recall correctly, and Act the other 70.
Nice, I dig it!!
squad size
Well it’s good they cut them down I guess, but Ogre has hourlong battles that fuck, Idk.
battlefields
Yeah a ram limitation IIRC. I think it’s a huge mistake though, maybe the game should have stayed 2D. I do like the increased focus on height though, Ogre doesn’t really have overhangs or cliffs due to its fixed perspective, jumping on stuff is super cool.
healing
In Ogre you get Kachua early game who just has a single target Heal spell with like a 10×10 range… better, no physics shenanigans…
magic
When I say “awful”, I mean “blackmages are cooking me alive and my best strat is literally a kamikaze run right at them so they burn themselves too”! I hate!
Wait Turn
As I say, Wait Turn is the system in Tactics Ogre that dictates battle order. Each character has a set amount of WT points that all tick down as the battle goes on. Whoever’s WT reaches zero first can do an action. This means you can level up or swap classes or change gear to alter turn order, which fucks. I explain it more in this chonky boi. So CT is kind of like WT but not as good.
I think maybe the struggle you’re having with FFT is in large part due to your comparison of the two games. Let go of trying to hold one up to the other and you might have a better time :)
Yeah but also no. None of these goofy systemic problems are dealbreakers, they bug me but I would have kept playing. Knight of Lodis is also technically worse than Ogre in many ways but I enjoy it a lot. It’s the fucked-sideways difficulty curve and bizarre progression/grinding that kills FFT dead for me.
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.
Secondary class abilities
Did not have access to these yet, again all squires.
Monk class + the Squire’s accumulate
Can’t swap to or equip a monk yet. I did get Accumulate on a few of my units fwiw.
Gear that adds speed
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.
The scaling of random battles is based on your highest level
Instantly ruined, what happens if I have an underlevelled guy? Explains why I was getting systematically dismantled though.
Draw battles out to farm JP when the win is secured instead of doing battle after battle. Heal the enemies if you have to.
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?
This is an insult to Last Bible 3
Lmao, I only did it 'cause I expected nobody would show up to defend the MegaTen fantasy srpg gameboy spinoff…
Also I meant Another Bible lol my bad
FFT is one of my favorite games how could you do this to me
Mostly because I was hyped out of my mind to play FFT after Tactics Ogre, but then I hated it absolutely to death which was crushing. I also dislike the Ogre remakes for what it’s worth, as well as the sounds of the FFT Advance games, so I kinda disagree with everything Yasumi Matsuno and the gang did after 1995 lol
Pay Tactics Advance instead. The story isn’t nearly as good but it’s at least fun to play
Knight of Lodis > Tactics Advance. But also Idk, the story and setting are pretty key to Ogre for me. The strategy battles are great but I wouldn’t be so invested if I wasn’t locked in a duel to the death with Vice over our ideals (committing murder for fun vs not doing that) you know?
Agreed. Ogres are just better than FF in general. Ffta having lots of little mission and a really fun unit building system that could produce some massively unfair characters if you put in the effort. It’s a good pick up and play
Ooh what’s the character/unit building in FFTA like?
Has a job system and your job determines you stats on level up but abilities have their own experience system called AP and come attached to equipment, gain enough AP while wearing that equipment and you get the ability permanently. You can use the action abilities of the class your character is in and the action ability from one other class. New classes are unlocked by having enough abilities in a different class or combination. So say a standard soldier unlocks fighter and paladin after gaining 3 abilities, they can then choose to keep the soldier abilities. There’s a passive and reactive ability slot for each character as well and those can be applied to any job once unlocked.
That actually sounds kinda fun
hmmm…I still have my gba cart from like 22 years ago and it’s got about 400 hours in just one save file.
The story in the original FFT is great, as we at Hexbear have covered before.
I’d say play the PSP version emulated so you can turn up the speed, and it includes some better cutscene animations. Same with the GBA versions, emulate them and turn up the speed.
If you get lucky you don’t need to grind much if at all in those games, if you go the route of having a few extra characters with heals or the throw command. Then if you have a battle wrapped up you can spend the last few rounds attacking and healing each other to get extra experience points.
Well I can ‘turn up the speed’ on anything, there are enough buttons on a pad to let me map a fastforward hotkey. But I never once felt the need to fastforward Tactics Ogre, and the same goes for most SRPGs I’ve played.
I don’t really like the look of the Advance games, aside from the goofy setting the lacking permadeath isn’t very good. I read some other things about em that sound bad.
“If you get lucky” cool game design… at the battle I got stopped at, I can’t even recruit yet. I literally got stopped in the tutorial.
Then if you have a battle wrapped up you can spend the last few rounds attacking and healing each other to get extra experience points.
Final Fantasy II, noooooooo! What the fuck!!!
I ran into the issue of my party members permadying when I first started playing and I had a rough going in FFT.
The FF Tactics games aren’t the best SRPGs, but I played them before any others so I’m used to the shortcomings. A few tips I remember helping are to let some characters die because you have a few turns to either end the match or revive them, take care of the archers and mages with characters that have high jump/move stats right away, and use a text guide. I can’t stand videos, but a quick primer on each story-mode battle gives you a good start.
You got my special interest in this jump started again, so I’m going back into FFT Advance on my phone emulator now
I can handle members dying, in fact early in Ogre I took a bunch of Ls and had some named characters kick it, lmao.
The “three turns then cooked” system is interesting, I’ve made extensive use of it. I think I can accept it. Guides… might be nice I guess. Also I get pwned by archers and especially mages every time lmao. First battle with mages curbstomped me.
Glad I kickstarted your SI again
Have you ever played FFTA2? I played it for hundreds of hours as a child.
Nah, that’s the game where the lead guy has suspenders and a pizza cutter right? Lol… I’ve heard mixed things about the FFTA games but their setting is offputting ig.
That’s super valid. It’s a really nostalgic game for me lol.
Tell us more, brave downbearer…
no
