Final Fantasy Tactics

Final Fantasy Tactics has got to be the most disappointing game I’ve ever played. I’d heard a lot about it, recently as well as when it came out, and with the FF name attached, I had high expectations. But the game was awful.

I quite liked the unusual battle system – as the title suggests, more tactical than in most FF games. With a team of (usually) five players, you traverse a large playing area and defeat large numbers of enemies, adapting to their different powers. The trouble with this is that (a) it’s piss easy, since you can level up by attacking your own team-mates, so you can just wait until you have a weak enemy and level up to high heaven killing and healing yourself while the enemy chips ineffectually at you, and (b) if you leave a character knocked out for too long, they die and become unusable for the rest of the game. My characters I’ve spent hours building up? Uh-uh. I don’t think so. I’ve never reset a game so much in my life, usually simply because my revive spell didn’t work, since the ground was a bit slanted next to the body. Ugh.

Still, it’s quite fun, and the different job classes keep things interesting. So all could be forgiven (in this particular case; Wild ARMS’ deathly slow battles killed it) if the story was good. And I’d heard good things. It starts out well - a young noble called Ramza fails to prevent a kidnapping, and sees that one of the enemies is his old friend - but soon spiralls out of control, with a convoluted story of political intrigue where most of the large cast is totally flat, stupid McGuffins in the form of balls of power that turn you into a monster and then get swept under the carpet when they get in the way of a tacked-on ending, and characters who don’t develop at all, but just go through the motions. Not all of this can be blamed on bad translation, though I’ve never seen such a poor rush-job in an official release.

And Cloud? Totally not worth the 5 minutes or so it took to get him.

What a waste of 60+ hours. Oh well, it was fun getting a mime, and developing my magicians to take everyone on the field out on the first turn. But please, please let the next game I play be more interesting story-wise.

You could see that Suikoden II had been influenced by this game, and it in turn by the first Suikoden, but both were SO much better than this in story terms.

Narutimate Portable

The second game wasn’t nearly as fun as the first, half because you only got three characters (and I only really liked playing as Jiraiya) and half because two of the most fun game modes (copying Shikamaru and tree-climbing) were absent. Plus towards the end the fighting got quite dull; once you and the computer were adept at defence all that happened would be that you kept swapping places with the kawarimi no jutsu ad infinitum until one of you left an opening and got hit with a combo. Plus the story wasn’t as interesting in the second part. Still, a fun game. Not much replay value, but I enjoyed it while it lasted, and it was good for my Japanese practice.