Ok, so, I like the background and the style and the story- what of the game?
Well, the job system will be familiar to many. Basically, there are many different jobs with their own conditions of what equipment people in them can use. The more you stay in a job, the more ‘job points; you get, which an then be spent on learning skills related to that job. In FFT, you get job points for performing just about any action, which is nice. You do also get experience points, and hence levels, for winning battles. Instead of sticking to one job, the idea is that you pick up skills from lots of jobs. In a fight, as well as moving and fighting, you get one set of abilities related to your job (say, White Magic for a White mage) and one set of abilities that you can choose based on any other skill the character has mastered from a different job. The idea is to make for very flexible and customisable characters and for the most part I think it works very well.
However. The reason this will be familiar to many of you is because the job system is taken, and adapted. From FFV, which in turn developed the one from FFIII. FFV has recently been re-released on GBA, and FIII entirely re-made for the DS, not that it has come out in Europe yet. I mention this because one of the big changes for FFIII was the re-design of the job system which was otherwise badly unbalanced. The one we see in FFT… is still badly unbalanced. There is no getting around it- some classes are just plain better than others and no-one in their right mind would use the crappy jobs. The ‘ultimate’ job, the Mime, manages to be twice as useless in FFT as FFV because of the different fight system- it mimics the movement as well of the actions of the person it is copying, and try and think about that on a grid based system… basically it goes absolutely nowhere useful! Spends all its time slashing at mid-air. A shame.
Most of your non-descript characters have a base ‘Squire’ class that they start from. Ramza’s Squire class is very powerful, and he will certainly end up going back to it. The various character personalities who join your party over time have a unique class instead of Squire. Here the bad imbalance strikes again- some of these classes are utterly useless, whereas one- the Holy Swordsman- is so powerful that many guides note that he himself can complete the game for you solo. Weird that this slipped by play testing.
The grid-based combat section is fair enough. A character can move and ‘Act’ each turn (be that act attacking, spell casting, using an item, or whatever) and this will burn up a certain amount of time for that character. That character will act again later depending on how much time got used up. And so good and bad guys move around at their various times. Now, a grid based system works great on a board game, but often looks odd on a computer, as you mess around trying to get to the flanks or rear of a foe. It’s certainly much harder to get into than normal FF battles, and rather clunky in some areas. But it lives up to the name, because this is indeed a game of Tactics, of trying to maximise force in the right place rather than just hit as fast and hard as possible, as is the case in all FF games. When it comes down to it, the combat formula is still very simple and rather attritional, but it does require more thought than mainstream FF and that is all very well and exactly what they wanted.
Irritatingly, the AI is not up to much and they counter-balance this by simply outnumbering you. That is a real pain because, out of your main party of 12 (or maybe 16, I cannot remember), you can only pick five to go into each battle, which means more than half your ground hang around off-screen doing nothing whilst the AI happily gets to play with two or three times your numbers- always a lazy way to provide challenge, especially, when the tactics portion of the game is certainly not so flexible as to allow you to reasonably fight against so many without a. trusting to luck or b. simply re-loading a fight so often that you know it all backwards, which is also a shame.
Not all fights are scripted. You spend much of the time moving place to place on a simple map- it is a similar basic set-up to most FF games, simply stripped down to its bare essentials. Some fans may find this a bit sparse, but I found it fine, and even the random encounters were not THAT annoying. Ok, still a bit annoying though.
Definite irritations with the game system, then, but- especially with some perseverance- I can honestly say that I ultimately found the combat in this game the most deep and interesting of any FF game I have ever played. Maybe not as much fun as the sheer insanity of your typical late-gamer FF fight, but with definite qualities that put it above and beyond in many ways.
Fertile ground, I thought when playing it, for a sequel that irons out many of these troubles Sadly, as I relate above, the sequel, when it came, actually was worse, gameplay wise, and perhaps a bigger sin than that, had a kiddy-style juvenile plot. Treachery! I hear rumour the DS may get another sequel… we shall see.
One definite plus for the game is its comprehensive reference system, which will give you full details of all plot events, histories and character biographies., heck, the mainstream FF games should have this! I would have made it a big criticism of this game that it is very easy to totally lose track of the plot and what you are doing- the reference library removes this criticism. Twinned with this are a series of references to other FF games which are not intrusive on the main plot and just prominent enough to tickle the long-term fans. You get many opportunities to send sections of your party on off-screen quests to explore places or find certain items (basically, you just need to pick the right people; you do not control such quests yourself). The places and items they find are all places in one of the first six Final Fantasy games, with its history and relevance all kept inside the reference library for you.
The reference to FFVII is rather more direct- Cloud can be found as a character in the game (washed up on this world by error after he jumps into the lifestream halfway through VII), complete with Aeris-a-like flower girl he is after. Complete a sub quest and Cloud will actually join your party; find his sword and he will start to pull off all his Limit Breaks. A nice touch for an optional extra, and so only a shame that they mysteriously make him level 1 and hence entirely useless to you.
I think that might sum up a lot about FFT- brilliant ideas, just somewhat let down by execution in several areas. I think the biggest sin is definitely messing up the chance of a sequel to put that right. As it is, FFT’s qualities as a game are enough for me to forgive its sins. If you don’t mind the old-school presentation, can handle some strategy, and want to see what happens when Final Fantasy moves to a rather more noir style of plot… definitely see if you can find a way to check this game out.
Cardinal Sins: Serious gameplay inbalances
Rating: 8/10
Comments: Flawed, but forgivably so because the ultimate experience is worth it. Final Fantasy as you have never seen it before.