I’ve been replaying the original FFT yet again, and contemplating starting an ‘Adventures of Fudge’ aarpg. This game has been on my top 5 of all time list since I first played it, and still is…if anything, it’s moved up a few spots. This game should be included in every game development course in whatever flim flam game design courses are offered these days. The emotion they coax out of really simple assets is just amazing…the music, the facial cues, the camera panning. A laughably rudimentary set of dev tools to work with, and somehow these people made so many good choices. Such a well produced game in my opinion, and the best Final Fantasy game by a huge margin.
Hmmm, maybe I should approach it in a roguelike fashion…perma death, no reloads… it would be interesting to see how far I could get. There are quite a few gottcha moments in this game if you don’t happen to have the right combination of job and item equipped.
I guess I’ll do an emotional kickstarter for characters, anyone interested in staking a claim in one of these fearsome 5/4/3 characters? If only there were a way to adjust the main characters weight, to really accentuate the ‘fudge’ moniker…
I’m sympathetic to the idea, but the first thing you’re going to have to address is the elephant in the room: Tactics Ogre. So much of FFT was… let’s say “influenced” by TO. The translation on the original NA edition also straddled the line between “unfortunate” and “charming”, not always in the best way (much like the SNES FF translations, actually). That said, I will always have a soft spot for building Ramza into an early Ninja and just letting him go to town.
(For the record, I’d put both FFT and TO in my personal top 5, but I have a pretty big bias towards tactical RPG type games.)
I played TO as well, and I guess it’s just me, but there was magic in FFT, and none in TO. I know that FFT is a huge rabbit hole, and one that most people don’t bother going down lol. I think the one thing that always amazed me about FFT, is how coherent the story is… certainly not something that comes with the genre. I’m not sure I’ve ever followed any other game from this genre at all, but the story in FFT was pretty well done I think.
I know this game is one of those games like Alpha Protocol for me…I just happened to play it long enough to really get it, and it stuck with me. I certainly don’t expect many people to get on board the fudge train…wait…that sounded wrong… I know from a forum search there are probably a grand total of 5 people that ever did care about FFT in the first place lol.
Brian, you are a known fetishist for space games, which makes it hard to even come up with an anti troll message… I’m going to go with ‘I know you are but what am I?’.
If you want a J-Tactical Game, go Fire Emblem. The latest one for the 3DS is pretty amazing. If you like perma death, just don’t play in casual mode, once a character dies in a battle, they will no longer be available.
Nope, not even in the top echelon of its own genre. And that’s despite my agreeing with almost every point you made in the original post. It does have amazing music, a great story, and an excellent production that wrings plenty of emotion from limited tools. The character building system is one of the deepest and most fascinating ever made for tinkering with.
BUT:
The one area where a TRPG absolutely must excel, the element so important that both the genre and the game include it in their names, feels like an afterthought. There’s just not much to the on-battlefield tactics, with small parties, little emphasis on terrain or positioning, and few turns where there’s a really interesting decision about what ability to use or who to target. All of the interesting stuff comes before battle, in building, equipping, and choosing your characters, and the battle is 85% won or lost by the time the first blow is swung. When I failed a battle, the answer was almost always “try again with a different set of skills or equipment”, not “execute smarter tactics during the fight”.
That’s exacerbated by the fact that the game’s structure encourages grinding both on a micro level (gains are awarded per action, so toying with enemies and throwing rocks at each other is rewarded far more than fighting efficiently) and on a macro level (random encounters are freely available, and the most interesting thing about the game is building characters rather than actually using them on the battlefield, so you might as well hurry to get the points to build characters in the most efficient manner possible). And of course, if you do succeed at the character-building sub-game, even without grinding, there are any number of broken builds such that your characters can wind up steamrolling the second half of the game.
So despite the aspects that are absolutely top-notch, when I want to play a tactics game, I want to be regularly challenged with interesting tactical decisions. And on that most important score, FFT falls far behind Fire Emblem, Gladius, Elven Legacy, and various other games. It’s a lot of beautiful, well-constructed fluff surrounding a hollow core.
Is Final Fantasy Tactics the best game ever made?
I’m with you on the art direction and general charm and will not comment on the plot (which I have failed to follow in any translation), but the mechanics are primitive and exploitative, and the difficulty curve is botched. It’s amusing in the way Saints Row 4 is: superpowers for everyone, so you can bypass all design shortcomings and just stomp on hordes of enemies.
I actually disagree with most of that. There are quite a few different outcomes you can have via positioning and understanding movement phase, timing, and power of whatever particular combo you have running. Without a doubt there are a few gotchas in regards to having a certain combo built, but by and large, there are a lot of ways to skin the cat in that game. I’ve beaten the game with roflstomp melee heavy parties, and full on magic parties, and everything in between, and the way you have to approach battles is vastly different depending on skill set. I understand your point, and I can agree on it at some points in the game, I just think you’re mostly wrong lol.
For instance, playing the game by just doing a simple monk/squire party…accumulation and whatever monk skill = laughable destruction…combine that with chakra and unlimited support/mana for whatever casters you have included makes for one type of playstyle… Depending on how your party is built, the variance in gameplay is monumental, and it’s one of the best things about this game, depending on how you stack your party it can be a wildly different experience.
For whatever reason, this is a game I connected with, I’m sure everyone has games like that. Heck, the music alone, especially given whatever limitations were placed on what that was composed on, is amazing. It’s the little things, like the facial expressions that they managed to pull of with 20 pixels or whatever it was…there is an art to this game, and to me, that’s what games are all about. Art is most certainly subjective, and to me, FFT is art.
Mmm I did fin FFT better than TO, but the TO PSP remake (which changes the mechanics enough to be considered a completely different game) feels so superior to FFT. I guess I’m a sucker for modern, more convenient, mechanics…
other than that, yes. These two games are some of the very best experiences I’ve had. I don’t get what people are saying about tactical battles, but the variety and possibilities are staggering. If there’s a better TBT game out there, please do tell! (JA2 and XCOM, both of which I love, are definitely inferior in my book).
Also, no offense but pretty much everything you said after this:
directly supports Boojum’s points. I like FFT and even the FFTA series, but the games don’t have much oomph in the actual battle tactics.
What I’ve always wished for is a cross between FFT and X-Com, with the battles leaning much more towards the difficult tactical challenges of X-Com and maybe even including fog of war and stuff.
I love this genre, and I’d say for me TO on the PSP and Fire Emblem: Awakenings on the 3DS are two of the best ever. FFT is good but I tend to side with Boojum over Ultrazen on this one. Jean D’Arc on the PSP is also worth a look.
This thread sparks my interest in attempting to pick-up a Tactics Ogre game-in-progress I had on my PSP. To do that though I’d need to find a way to get that working on a PC PSP emulator. I still have an actual PSP but . . . . I no longer have a TV that I could connect it to and I found that I really only enjoyed playing Tactics Ogre when I used a bigger screen to play it with (via outputting from the PSP to a TV)
I’m no analyst of them, but I do very much love turn-based tactical games. I’ve played Fire Emblems on various Nintendo’s, Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Jeanne D’Arc etc on Playstations, and probably just about anything you’d care to name that has appeared on PC. Of these, none really compare to Jagged Alliance 2 but if you’d ask me to pick the few that had lasting impact and appeal they would be JA2, Tactics Ogre and . . . . Gladius (which is kinda different, but I think fits here). I admired FFT more than I enjoyed it.
