Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lion is an updated version from the PS1. It is a tactical role-playing game in the Final Fantasy series of games. The story itself has no tutorial. If you want a tutorial, then you’ll have to select it from the menu and it is a beefy thing. That’s because there are many facets to the game and it is extremely confusing for a newcomer with little idea of what to do, what stats mean, and what the abilities are. Even the controls for more intricate stuff can be confusing so it is best to click around and get used to it. The game has a high learning curve due to the sheer number of systems and mechanics in play. This means if you have little experience with SRPGs, or you’re a first timer in this game, then you’ll struggle with even the first random encounters. This is doubly so since you have limited options and abilities at this early point of the game but the good news is that once you’ve played a few levels, you will slowly find yourself becoming familiarized with how it works and become comfortable with it.
Battles take place on a grid-based map. You select the party members to use before the battle begins. Once it is your turn, you can move and perform a variety of actions which are dictated by the job of your current character. They can move on the map and the objective of each battle is usually to either defeat all enemies or defeat a certain enemy. The maps have different features on them such as different heights and other types of obstacles. Thus, character and enemy placement is extremely important. Another big element is that if you attack from the side or behind, that character will have a higher chance of successfully damaging the enemy, and the same is true for the enemy attacking your characters. The battles have an isometric view which is not the best given this camera angle makes it difficult to gauge the grid and placements. As it is, you will constantly try to shift the camera, only for the different heights of things on the map to continue blocking your sight.
The game provides you with a huge cast of playable characters, with the potential for infinitely more as you can generate new generic characters to join your team. Each character can freely change jobs, which allows them to learn new abilities that they can take to other jobs. this gives the player a lot of options and sometimes it can feel like there are too many options so that you are not sure what job and ability you should spend the time for. By performing actions during battle, you gain experience points and job points, the latter of which are used to unlock the job abilities. This is somewhat annoying in that a specific character must do something in order to get those points, so you are forced to use them in battle and do something with them. This isn’t too great when their current job is more of a defensive role rather than an offensive one. There are some quirks to the game, one of which is the uneven difficulty. Some story battles are extremely easy, while others are annoying, especially the ones where enemies can heal and revive. Then there is the fact that enemies can easily cause status effects on your characters, steal your equipment, or destroy your equipment. Yet on the flipside when you try out those skills, there is an abysmal success rate so it can feel unfair. There is no quick way to restart a battle, you will have to reset the game and sit through the unskippable cutscenes first. There is also no way to run from a battle, so you must waste time fighting the random encounters. Considering that battles do not take a short amount of time, this is not great. Given the ease of getting yourself into a bad situation, you end up saving after every single battle, which is tedious and a hallmark of bad game design.
Another quirk is that the enemies always target your weakest character. This makes sense as that is what you would do but unfortunately when all of them move halfway across the map to target that one character, they are bound to die. It can be a vicious cycle given that the character needs to do something before they can gain the experience points to get stronger but aren’t given that opportunity as they’re quickly killed. Then there’s the fact that every single character that’s not the protagonist can be perma-killed (hence the ability to generate more generic characters). Certain enemies do excessive amounts of damage where one hit can take down over half a character’s health. Yes, you can manipulate the game’s AI but for most players who just want a decently good and fun time, this is not great. The enemy will constantly outnumber you and will attempt to surround you, and the RNG element is incredibly painful. All that said and it takes around the first chapter for the player to really get the hang of the gameplay. Once it has clicked for you and you’ve started to fiddle around with the characters, it gets addictive. You’ll fall into the temptation of wanting to grind for those extra job points to unlock a new ability that would pair extremely well with another job. You can’t help but look at it after every single battle, and the same goes for the equipment upgrades which come thick and fast. The game constantly introduces new characters who will join your team, and these ones are often much stronger than the starting generics. However, by the time they arrive, you would have already spent a long time on developing your beginning characters, so you have to decide whether to start afresh on a stronger one, or just keep your existing team. It’s usually worth it to swap characters but it does feel like you have wasted a lot of your time in doing so.
The game is mainly told via in-game cutscenes where the characters speak in dialogue boxes on the battle map. There are occasionally animated cutscenes that are fully voiced, which looks great due to the art style. The story is often touted as one of the best in the Final Fantasy series, but it depends on your tastes. It is more serious, and it has a bit of politics with a grander scale throughout the whole game. Yet there are times where you might just not care, and the second half is weaker given that the characters end up being forced to go along a specific path due to a smaller scaled reason. The story battles towards the end of the game can also feel more like filler rather than something that was required for the story. The game takes 30 to 40 hours to complete, and the final boss can be cheap because it likes to rapidly cast every single status ailment onto multiple characters at once. This is slightly softened by the fact that the final boss is otherwise easy. The game has several sidequests and they can be missable. Once you finish the game though, you cannot go back, and you may have locked yourself into the final series of battle without being able to exit. This is another annoying quirk of the game, you are easily able to accidentally save yourself into an unwinnable or unescapable position.
Overall, Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions is a fun but also incredibly annoying game. It has some frustratingly stupid game designs such as the enemy easily destroying your characters equipment, or easily infecting your characters with a debilitating status effect. Other than those annoying quirks, the game itself has a lot of depth. The job system can be overwhelming at first, especially when you are trying to decide on how to build your characters. The game is winnable with many combinations but it’s just finding the one that suits your playstyle. The story is okay, it can become dry towards the end but all in all, this is a fantastic game that has aged well considering when it was released.
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