A Tale of Ordinary Madness:

NO red mage?!?

So I picked up that new Final Fantasy Tactics for the PSP used. After my first 5 minutes, i realized it was a stupid idea since the game is so freakin complicated, and there's more story than I though (which i'm a huge sucker for)
BUT! After some (not so)intense internet browsing, I found translations online from the original one, and after hours of play i've got the game system down.
Anyways, this entire post is going to be about this videogame, and it's battle system. You might not care. There's my warning. I've always KNOWN this game was a classic, and even though i got hooked on the GBA version, i dunno, i didn't expect it to be this... GOOD.
I think as I've gotten older, I just want to dig my hands into the meatiest form of battle. I want to liberally switch job classes, I want full flexibility in my abilities, I crave those 100% successful hits and the job points that pop above your head afterwards. This game seems to be perfect.
Lemme go over some of the best points of the game, because I'm gonna get to one simple and fatal flaw that may prevent me from playing it at all.
So, everyone knows that the jobs (ninja, samurai, dragoon, black mage, white mage, etc...) are the coolest part of final fantasy. To me, anyways. And the great part about it, is it's not a character class -- in most games, you choose your class, then that's it.(usually a fighter is just a fighter, right? You choose that class and you can kiss magic out the window) But with a "job" you can take it up and leave it, so your character can be max level in all of those jobs, and switch between them whenever you feel appropriate. So for every successful action you take in the game, you earn job points. For example, i switch my white mage to a black mage, so my main action changes from white magic to black magic. Then I successfully cast fire with my black mage. I earn some job points for it, which i can use to buy blizzard, thunder, etc.. Then after the battle I switch my character from black mage BACK to white mage. Now my action is white magic again, but I have a 2nd one that's empty, and since i LEARNED fire and thunder, I can put black magic there. Now i have a healer who can cast black magic spells. There are also a few other types of abilities you can swap, like responsive and move abilities. you could next switch to a thief, and learn "catch" as a responsive action; then if someone throws a shuriken at me or something, i will automatically catch it. That is a different slot than black magic (response, not action) so i have this ultimate magic user who catches shit.
Anyways, this is all perfect. And the game is freakin hard, so you need this versatality and power to be successful, and you need to be smart with it.
But...
Death. it's permanent.
So, when you go unconscious, in most games you stay at 0 points and lay on the ground, and you can be revived, or if you're not, your character is still at 0 points after the battle, and then you can use items or magic to revive him out of battle. Anyways, if you survive the battle, you can always bring your characters back.
But not here. Once you KO, a timer starts above your head, so you have like 3 rounds to revive that character or else they disappear forever. You can win the battle, and they're just gone out of your party. It's stupid. It's not "fair" like it seems on the surface, let me explain.
I already went into how thick the system is. So, you put a lot of time leveling all of your characters, switching their jobs around, learning abilities, etc... They are NOT disposable. It's just not acceptable. I already mentioned the game is challenging, so in order not to get totally screwed, you're expected to win every battle flawlessly?? I mean, you have those 3 rounds to revive them, but that means I have to put item use or white magic as the 2nd ability on almost every character, rather than I want or what would be best for them. Lets take that to the next step. I want white magic or item use on all of my fighter type characters. So to do that, which is stupid in the first place, now I have to switch ALL of my characters over to chemist or white mage and earn them the job points to buy the ability in the first place. It's fucking stuuuuuuuuuuuuuupid!
And I'm gonna backtrack on my save point (Because 2 of my characters are non existent now) and log another 10 hours into this game, then I'll update you with whether i can stand it or not. I dunno. When i found this out late last night ("so THATS where my characters went!!! WTF?!?") I almost threw my PSP out the window; i had to settle for punching the wooden floor with my bare fist, which i'm regretting today.

and i'm still pissed about it....

oh, also, my FAVORITE final fantasy class is red mage, and they're not in the game!! that peeves me a lot. That's not a fatal error like the previously mentioned one that would ever make me quit the game, it's just...it just makes me sad and a little frustrated, because they would be SOOO good in a strategical RPG like this.

Anyways, i KNOW one of you knows dave baryeuther(sp?)'s email address, you know, hairy dave. I'm ashamed to say that i don't, so can someone tell me? I gotta talk to him.

~D

posted by Dan @ 4:05 PM