Final Fantasy Tactics Is An Industrial-Grade Dryer For My Brain

or “How Daleetah became Daleetah in one silly little game disc”

I was barely 11 when I discovered Final Fantasy Tactics. It was my introduction to drama.

OK, to be realistic, I came to Tactics after Fire Emblem and after Final Fantasy VII which are both sufficiently narrative-driven & dramatic (and whose synthesis lead me into the lap of this game), but in any case, it was monumental. A place to explore new dramatic heights. A heady story of betrayal, murder, warfare, politics, broken friendships, demonic possession, and Christian allegories. In the moment of its January 1998 release, Lord of the Rings hadn’t been directed by Peter Jackson to Academy Award-winning acclaim just yet. George R.R. Martin’s first novel in the Song Of Ice & Fire series — A Game Of Thrones — was not yet a year old and was not a culture shifting program on HBO. And furthermore, The Witcher series of novels was cult at best, and was over a decade from a much more popular TV series adaptation. All of this is to say that politically-minded fantasy was not the juggernaut it would become. Final Fantasy Tactics took the only months old name recognition and goodwill won from the massively famous and successful Final Fantasy VII and parlayed it into a difficult story of war & tragedy, set in the politically-charged, grounded, yet fantastical continent of Ivalice. It was a bold move.

It paid off. Kinda. It sold almost 3 million copies for the PlayStation. It earned that green “Greatest Hits” seal on its spine. Nearly 3 million isn’t too bad, especially for a strategy JRPG, but it was still the worst-selling Final Fantasy title on the PlayStation. Each successive game in the Final Fantasy Tactics trilogy — encompassing the original, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for the Nintendo GameBoy Advance and Final Fantasy Tactics A2 for the Nintendo DS — sold worse than the last. The subseries has seen a quiet retirement for over a decade now, and now the torch of its legacy is mostly kept burning by the already converted.

I don’t bemoan this fact, in fact, I viscerally, personally understand it. The tactical JRPG is such a tough sell that I’m not fully convinced I can ever sell it to myself anymore. Triangle Strategy, Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark, Disgaea, Tactics Ogre… I almost dread the idea of trying to get into one of these games. Not because I’m under any impression that they’re bad, just that the investment versus return just might not be worth it. I’ll admit some minor affinity for Disgaea but only for the reason that I was able to get into the first couple of games in the series as a teenager, and that’ll certainly soften my impression of things. I don’t think I would play even my favorite Disgaea game, Disgaea: Hour Of Darkness nowadays, in light of how embarrassing many of the plot beats read to me now. You know the whole “13-year-old-looking-girl is actually 4000 years old so no this isn’t creepy?” trope? Disgaea does that! Hey you can equip a horse penis as an accessory! Isn’t that so… endearingly quirky? How about grinding until you can eventually unlock the Angel class, only for your save data to corrupt? OK, that last one’s pretty personal, but it contributes towards my impressions inalienably, nonetheless.

All of this is to say, that given the slow pace, steep learning curves, and relative difficulty of so many of these games, I can see how the genre would be a tough sell. All that said, I still love Final Fantasy Tactics. I’m pretty sure I always will. It got to me at the right time, and for that, it’s fortunate. Or, more accurately, I’m fortunate. I sweat at it’s tougher encounters, I cheer it’s mind-melting array of systems, I contemplate aspects of its story in quiet moments, I hum its music to myself, and I always keep it nearby, should the itch strike.

And it’s not just the story, despite my opening thoughts in this essay. Sure, my online handle may be modeled after how antagonist Delita Heiral’s name is pronounced, but that’s just incidental. My love for the game evolved meaningfully throughout time- my fascination with its aesthetics, bombast, and depth of presentation as a child, my growing appreciation for its tangled web of systems as a teenager, my admiration for its ambitious political storyline as an adult, and the eventual settling of the game into a permanent residency somewhere in the back of my brain. Each successive period built cumulatively on each past one. At this point, my impression of the game is like layers of semi-transparent portraits stacked somewhat incongruously on top of each other. The resultant image is messy, even discombobulated, but beautiful, nonetheless.

And in a way, such is the nature of the JRPGs more generally. It’s hard to appreciate JRPGs on an entirely holistic level. There always seems to be some manner of incongruity in all of them. Take one of the most famous and formative JRPGs of all time — Final Fantasy VII. It’s a game that seems to thrive on and feed off of incongruity. The atmospheric shift from the opening acts of the game in the highly urbanized Midgar to the bucolic presentation of most of the remaining game, the disconnect between the character models presented in the separate fields of world navigation, combat, and cutscenes, and the tonal whiplash of moving from tragedy, to revenge story, to comedy, to farce, to barely concealed fetish content, to heart-rending personal stories.

Final Fantasy VII (and Final Fantasy VIII while we’re at it), are particularly lurid examples of this sort of aesthetic and conceptual discombobulation, but that doesn’t mean that the forgotten middle sibling of these two games birthed from different parentage gets by unfazed. It can be difficult to reconcile the heady, serious narrative of this game with the goofy presentation of its pixilated, chibi-esque character designs. It can hard to perceive the massive scale of the narrative and the conflicts within them when each battle in the game is the scale of maybe a dozen or so combatants. It can be hard to even parse the events of the storyline through the rough translation of the original on PSX, or the elevated Shakespearean English of the War of the Lions port on PlayStation Portable. At every turn, Final Fantasy Tactics seems to invite critique of its messiness, and yet, here I live permanently among its squalor like a cat who’s gotten used to sleeping on plastic Wal-Mart bags. Why?

To put it simply, almost reductively even, they really don’t make them like this anymore. To allow for yet another cliché — sure, Tactics is a mess, but it’s my mess. The narrative is a long succession of burying the lead. Backstory is elucidated largely through pages and pages of text nested in the deepest parts of menus. Important plot actors are given obfuscating titles like “The Order of the Southern Sky” “The Bart Corporation” and “The Church of Glabados”. This is not to get into the glut of interrelated and variably aligned individual plot actors. Or the various objects & locations of importance to the story. Tactics, broken down to its simplest narrative conceits, is a game of many layers of interconnected and beguiling nouns.

The gameplay is immediately comprehensible and even pretty simple early on, but gets more complicated and difficult as you wade into it. The game starts you with only two class options — Squire & Chemist — but as you unlock more jobs, more & more skills and abilities become available to any given member of your battle squad. And with that increase of options comes an increase in potential interactions between said abilities and how they work in any of the 20 different available job classes. The complexity grows exponentially with each new job iterating upon the existing bedrock of jobs that you’ve already unlocked. This complexity also invites a huge amount of potential. How about an Archer who can break enemy equipment from a distance? How about a Wizard who unleashes the cursed powers of Katana to turn into a walking, melee-range, glass cannon nuke? How about a Monk of disciplined body who can use both fists to deliver one-two blows downing nearly any enemy in seconds? How about a teleporting ninja? How about a Chemist who can scale mountains in one leap? How about a Man of the Church who can block sword strikes with his bare hands? How about a mathematical wizard who can call on the powers of heaven to smite every single person on the field in one blow (including themselves)? Tactics’ array of potential combinations is overwhelming at first glance, and downright silly at all further glances.

To the trained game critiquing eye, this is prime ludo-narrative dissonance. The gravitas of the story consistently undercut by Rad, your faithful beast-tamer who can sprint up mountains and throws fire balls when he gets angry. Technically, these well-intentioned critics are correct. Maybe it’s a critical fault that Tactics cannot thread its story and gameplay into one seamless, integrated whole just as Final Fantasy VII has Cloud crossdressing at one of the story’s most critical plot moments. For me, each of these elements is separately joy-bringing and life-changing in completely disparate ways. And maybe, just maybe, that incoherence is its own sort of aesthetic.

That last one is admittedly a bold take, especially given that I began this essay by proclaiming that Tactics was my introduction to drama. And what drama should have the outright silliness of teleporting Thieves, flying dragon-people, angry sentient bombs, and Mimes wearing Kitsune masks? Probably not many, but I will also argue, not none. There’s a delicate, failing art to video games that balance the profound with the profoundly stupid. Sure, Ramza’s duel with Wiegraf is a weighty moment of a man fully succumb to the tragedy of his life and having given to complete cynicism. But it’s also a memorably stupid, imbalanced, and poorly considered moment of the game that is best tackled by Ramza punching Wiegraf really hard in the face really fast. Games nowadays are so in terror of seeming unserious when they’re attempting drama that they allow so little space for the silliness and joy of games as exploitable systems to bleed through. Tactics holds not even one iota of that fear, probably because it didn’t even know such a fear could exist. You see what I mean when I say, “They don’t make them like this anymore”? It’s not just that they don’t, there’s an amount of understanding of game design and programming at this point that precludes things like this from happening. Just like I can’t play guitar like I did when I was 15 and didn’t know any chords, scales, theory, or even how to tune the instrument. This is like that… in a good way.

Furthermore, Tactics’ magic is that it gets the best of both worlds in a sense. Its narrative is more consistently serious in tone than most of its contemporaries. The story operates for all intents and purposes as a tragedy, and filled with all the aforementioned political import that keeps the story feeling consistently heavy, with little room for levity. The gameplay, in contrast, is something of a freewheeling playground. Downright silly when you truly get into the mud with it. A tangled jungle of classes, abilities, features, and equipment that invite experimentation, alongside a difficulty curve that begs to be utterly shattered by your creativity more than your pure tactical knowledge.

Once you beat chapter 2, in many ways the game ceases to be as strictly tactical as it had once been. In tandem with this, the story moves more towards the supernatural and surreal. Your team is likely well-fashioned and efficient at combat as all your character builds settle into place. And the game furthermore hands you a game-breaking human weapon in the form of Cidolfus Orlandeau, who comes with a sword that grants him perma-haste, and enough sword spells of varying range, area of effect, and ability that he can usually kill at least one enemy per turn, if not more. Combine that with a life leeching ability he can learn and the game may as well hand you the credits. Just as the game loses some steam on the level of political messaging, it also loses interest in keeping the string of its tactical gameplay pulled as taut as it had been.

Most importantly, none of this bothers me. It’s not so much that Tactics is an experience that defines perfection to me, for that, look at the next, notably lower entry on this list of my favorite games. Tactics is a game that embodies greatness. For all of its big swings it can be argued that it suffers its shares of strikes. It carries with it the incoherence of trying to smash a heady, philosophical, and highly politicized story into the mutant shape of hyper-deformed grid graphics. It comes from a moment of time when games were striving, but not yet fully arriving. And hence, the excitement of metamorphosis, the rapt anticipation native to the pupya state drips off of it.

So much more impressive than a game like The Last Of Us, which aspires to the paper firmament of an HBO drama while equipped with top of the line graphics and obvious cinematic aspirations, is a game like Final Fantasy Tactics which aspires to the philosophical level of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good And Evil whilst it can’t even decide how a translation to a western audience should be handled.

Some people view that as hubristic. For me, that audacity is bracing and inspiring. It’s part of why I always loved the rackish and earthy translation of the PSX original over the flowery and purple poetics of the War of the Lions remake for PSP. Certainly the latter is better on paper, or at least more in the pocket with regards to clarity, but something of directness is lost in the translation. And again — audacity. Final Fantasy at this time had the bold-faced, arrogant audacity to assume that any western audience member at all should give a single shit about it. And with more haste (cast by a Time Wizard, no less) than careful consideration, they spun that audacity into roughly hewn gold.

VII is similarly daring, VIII is daring in a altogether different way, but Tactics is the game that always struck the deepest chord for me. It’s a moving document and a stupid playground. It’s a disjointed mess and a beautiful web of interlocking customization systems. It’s great. It’s garbage. It’s a mess. It’s my mess. And as long as there are people to talk about this game, there will be that obnoxious minority who will see fit to scream about it. Count me safely among them. And hand me my megaphone.