Final Fantasy Tactics is partly responsible for my joining RH. Like many people, my entry point into Retro Handhelds came through Retro Game Corps, after I found an RG280V on sale locally and wondered what the hell it was. Russ from Retro Game Corps would go on to be a guest on an episode of the RH Podcast, and that led me to check out some of the back catalog.

In the December 2022 edition, Stubbs spent the countdown to the New Year wrestling with whether to vote for Super Mario World or Final Fantasy Tactics for RH’s Game of the Year. In the end, like the bad guy in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, he chose poorly.

But the fact that Final Fantasy Tactics came second in the server’s GOTY voting was enough for me to join the Discord. From there, I took a few short hops through GotX and the Patreon chat, eventually joining the RH Writing Team.

The “Zodiac Brave Story”

Final Fantasy Tactics humanises both sides of the fight

There’s a theory, which I subscribe to, that states JRPGs never made it to the big time in the West until Final Fantasy 7 launched on PS1. Certain FF7 is one of the three games which considered to have expanded my appreciation of what level of storytelling is possible within the medium of video games.

Final Fantasy Tactics launched a year after FF7. While it wasn’t a mainline Final Fantasy game, it was the first game since 7 to bear the “Final Fantasy” name, and as such, it had a lot to live up to.

In a story that draws inspiration from the British “War of the Roses,” from the 1400s, you play as Ramza, who is technically a noble, but was born out of wedlock, the result of your dad falling in love with a commoner after his first wife died.

While your older brothers do care for you, they don’t really consider you “one of them,” and while your friends outside of the upper classes also don’t mind you, they know you are part of the aristocracy, which sees them as little more than pieces of meat who were born to do their every bidding without complaint.

The way that the high-born view their commoner counterparts in-game is sometimes shocking, and while, in the early game, rebels are presented as the enemy, their cause is presented in a way that’s sympathetic to the player.

Android screenshot taken from Nate Ewert-Krocker on Medium

In many ways, FFT is a story about the causes of Class War. Commoners are treated appallingly, sometimes by your allies, sometimes by your enemies, sometimes in a way that is even shocking to a grizzled game player like myself. In a world where twists and turns in stories are often contrived just for the shock value, the FFT game fully fleshed out characters in a fully fleshed out world that tells a logical, emotional, yet surprising tale.

Battles in FFT are based on a kind of isometric checkerboard combat field, with the direction a unit is facing being disproportionately important. On their turn, each until can complete a move and an action, being that an attack, an item, or a spell.

Other than guest characters, who are present in battles for plot reasons, you (the player) have control over the progression of your team, from equipment to skills and character class. Players who are anything like me quickly become attached to the characters, which is a problem in a game where character death is permanent.

If anyone gets cut down, you have 3 turns to revive them with, for example, a Phoenix Down, or they’re gone forever. This wasn’t helped by the fact that, in many places, the combat was HARD, and save points weren’t possible during a battle.

While it was harder than the average game I’d play, the difficulty didn’t bother me, and I enjoyed the combat; however, it was the characters and the story that fully sank their claws into me.

Final Fantasy Tactics — Released 1997 (PS1)

FFT goes hard against the monarchy and assorted aristocracy

As I mentioned, the original FFT was never officially released in Europe, where I live, so my only experience of it was through emulation. While this meant I had massive FOMO at the time, it meant that I only experienced FFT as a handheld game, which could be saved at any point.

Looking back, I see a game which was hampered by the limitations of the home console system it was released on, and the less-than-friendly UI, which was the tradition of the time. Probably my favorite PS1 from the time of original release was Vagrant Story, a game written and directed by Yasumi Matsuno, the same person responsible for FFT, and set in the same world (albeit in a totally different era).

When I revisited Vagrant Story as part of the RH GOTM Macabre May 2023, I found a game whose story was still unbelievably good, but whose menu system was in desperate need of reinvention. FFT suffers from the same issue, often, when looking at turn order on a battlefield. It’s hard to work out which action will happen first, leading to situations where a unit tries to throw a potion to a character who has just been sliced to death a turn earlier.

It is also harder to keep track of which character is which as the plot progresses due to the similar look of some characters, and while there are some abilities to get story summaries from landlords in taverns, the result is not as clear as I think it was intended. Nothing is a deal breaker, but at the same time, many aspects haven’t aged well.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of The Lions — Released 2007 (Initially on PSP)

The War of the Lions introduced Cell-Shaded cut scenes and less clear dialogue (image taken from RPGFan)

The War of the Lions was my personal introduction to FFT. It sat alongside Football Manager Handheld and GTA Liberty City Stories, as the UMD most likely to be in my PSP at any point. The game was a complete remake, which sought to improve almost every aspect of the game; it did, other for one aspect, which it totally ruined.

Compared to the PS1 original, this game had additional dialogue to flesh out characters, better graphics with the difference between characters better defined, and additional characters, including an appearance by Balthier from Final Fantasy 12 (another game written & directed by the author of FFT, and set in the same game world). As I mentioned before, FFT is a game that is a good fit for a handheld device, and for a while there, especially when hacked, I thought the PSP was the greatest device ever made.

The only issue with The Lions War was the English script, which wasn’t written by the original author. While apparently not an issue in other languages (for example, it flowed naturally in Japanese, apparently), the writers of The War of the Lions made the frankly baffling decision to write all the dialogue as a sort of faux-Shakespearean Middle English.

Speaking as a Brit who had Shakespeare force-fed to us in school, and speaking as a fan of understandable dialogue, this made following both the emotional journey of the characters. And the morality of the game world is denser than it needed to be, and separates the gamer from the plot. Frankly, the writing was the one part of this version I hated.

Years later, the game was released with upgraded graphics for iOS and Android; however, these versions don’t support controllers, and the touchscreen controls are frustrating as hell.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Lions War — Released 2013 (PS1 Emulation Mod)

The Lions War’s interpretation of the same dialogue as the previous screenshot (also taken from RPGFan)

One thing I didn’t predict was the sizable mod scene that would come out of Final Fantasy Tactics, with many modders building their own non-canon splinoffs or fanfic. One place that hosted a number of these was the Final Fantasy Hacktics website, and I think it’s fair to say that The Lions War was their crowning glory.

The Lions War looked to take every game addition which was introduced on the PSP version and backport it to the original game engine. More importantly, they took every single line of dialogue from The War of the Lions, both new and old, and rewrote it in the standard, easy-to-follow English used in the original game.

Ashley Riot from Vagrant Story can join your party in this Rom Hack

While the addition of the PSP features was cool, it was the improved dialogue that made this my definitive experience prior to the upcoming remaster. There were additional quality-of-life features relating to character management and classes, too.

The game is not perfect, and there are a couple of additional scenes that provide little apart from fan service. For example, Ashley Riot from Vagrant Story makes an appearance, despite there being hundreds of years between the settings of the two games, but the good far far far outweighs the bad.

For years, this was the way to experience FFT that I’d recommend to others. The only issue is one of compatibility. While this version is apparently playable on modded OG hardware, it has only been confirmed to fully work with two PS1 emulators, DuckStation and the RetroArch Beetle core. While it may be fine with others, the fear of getting a way through only to find an impassable crash meant I didn’t experiment.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Lions War of The Lions — Released 2022 (PS1 Emulation Mod)

Fan-made cover art for The Lions War of the Lions

Following The Lions War, a project followed, which sort of kept most of the improvements of The Lions War, but with the Shakespearean English dialogue of the PSP version intact. The ended up being The Lions War of the Lions.

While it isn’t a version I’ve dabbled with, due to the aforementioned dialogue, it does have an audience. However, other than being playable on lower-powered hardware or having reduced loading times, I’m not sure of the advantages of this version over the PSP release.

Stay tuned for part two of this, as I explain why I ultimately decided to pre-order the next Final Fantasy Tactics release.

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