726: Final Fantasy Tactics Revisited

... Yes. Yeah, even if it did have to have that neon green. And I came to it because of the Final Fantasy name, but I think ultimately what has made it feel, you know, maybe a step above a lot of the games in the series is the sense of delayed gratification to it. You know, when you're just a bunch of squires and chemists rolling around, you know, in Final Fantasy 7, you're casting lightning right off the gate, right? And here I am throwing rocks and potions. It's just really underwhelming. You're doing real small…

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again, many people would say is the better game, but it's not as pretty, it's not as accessible, it's not as the customization is not as extensive. So, you know, I think people tend to lean more toward Final Fantasy. Also, it has the name Final Fantasy in it, which counts for a lot. I think that's one of my favorite things about this game is how they how well they shoehorned the Final Fantasy stuff into the Tactics Ogre framework. And I really do think to your point that really goes a long, long way. And the…

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... It wasn't something like, you know, even the the HD2D stuff like the Octopath Traveler stuff that's that's like using the sprites to recreate what it might look like on like a Super NES and it's not the same as like the little action figures that are basically running around in Final Fantasy Tactics. So I think this game is probably inherently better off for that kind of thing, but even to your point, it's not as smudgy and weird as those other upscaled games are. ...

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creating the the look of the world and Minigawa especially I think is kind of under respected, you know, people talk about Yoshida's character designs, and then sort of assume that translates into everything visual about the games that he worked on. But no, like, the uniform consistency of the world in this and Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy 12 and then you know Crimson Shroud like that is Minigawa style like you Yoshida's art style kind of changed a lot from game to game, he got the little weird Disney people…

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i you know no quarter elmiv wayo do it yes i i concur okay so final fantasy tactics what a cool game that we've barely even scratched the surface on with this conversation we got about as as usual for most retronauts episodes these days halfway through my planned conversation we are on page uh let's see five of twelve five of twelve right on okay so folks there is another episode about final fantasy tactics cooking it is simmering on the stove right as we speak yes we'll be regrouping uh before too long just…

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... Yeah, I mean, we'll get to it later when we talk about the story. But Final Fantasy Tactics begins with a framing device. And then immediately you move to another framing device after the prologue battle. So it's like, I love it. Here's a story that we're looking back into the past. Now, let's look further back into the past of the story. And then you can go into the taverns and you're like, Hey, let me tell you about the past that that brought us to this point. Yeah, I think I think Matano is someone who as you…

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n m comic.com it is uh inspired by uh dungeons and dragons rpgs and uh no particular group of teenagers and their pet dog it is a mystery that machine of yours yeah and i'm on blue sky uh at lead it mellow uh m e hello um i post a lot of final fantasy opinions on there as one should and finally you can find me jeremy parish here on retronauts also on the internet uh you can find me on blue sky as j parish one r in parish thank you j p a r i s h dot b s k y dot social uh you can find me on youtube masquerading as…

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for that. Because Tactics Ogre, you know, the the remakes have really refined it, and made it a much more manageable game without necessarily defanging it. But it was, you know, I didn't play the super NES version, but I played the PlayStation version that came out after Tactics, Final Fantasy Tactics. And it was it was tough to coax joy out of that game at times. Really? I would say so for me, I don't know, maybe I'm just a big baby. But I feel like, you know, everyone talks about the Weegrath battle at…

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soaker and what does it take from tactic soaker because uh you know tactic soaker deserves its own episodes um but for the moment just kind of saying like where's the starting point and what does this do different um i think kind of helps define what final fantasy tactics is about like fundamentally they are based on the same thing which is um three-dimensional chess with rpg elements and the three-dimensional chess element is apparently based on european computer games like solstice and night lore um like that…

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... I think the really interesting thing about Matsuno is that if you look at Tactics, the Ogre Battle series, Tactics Ogre Ogre Battle, and you look at Final Fantasy Tactics, they are the most hymn that I think a game could probably be. One of his original hobbies was World War II dioramas, where he would create these battle dioramas and come up with stories for the scenes. ...

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now that they've relocalized the game a few times because those supplemental texts in the original ps1 version of the game were a little hard to process they were not they were not the most smoothly translated um and that was a that was a big flaw with final fantasy tactics when it first came out like there is some some good localization some punchy localization it doesn't necessarily fit the the vibe of the environment and the time but you know there's there's some great lines like surrender or die in obscurity…

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other over land and blood in eastern or western europe so you know it's um it's all kind of cut from like coming drawing from the same source yeah the the story is that tactics ogre is inspired by the yugoslav war and then uh i've heard it inferred but i don't think confirmed that final fantasy tactics is inspired by her pulse from the war the roses um i don't know if i've heard that one straight from the horse's mouth but yugoslav and tactics ogre i know for sure yeah so so kind of working backward with fantasy…

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all right so the the other big thing we haven't really talked about in terms of systems and world for final fantasy tactics is how much it owes to final fantasy 5 and exactly how the job system works because it is so good it has like maybe this was the first game i think where i ever really experienced that compulsive one more battle sensation because you start earning job points for characters and you're so close to unlocking this ability you want or unlocking the next job or something and you're like you know…

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episode because that is that is the the rough spot um yeah so so jobs basically there are magic jobs physical jobs hybrid jobs um but there's a lot that you can do with jobs and again this is based pretty heavily on the final fantasy five system most of this uh the classes come from five there are a few new ones and there are some that kind of combine competencies i believe and you know some of the the skills you may not think like this is a very useful job like geomancer does not initially seem like the…

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but they have different means of getting there um so i just remember that war the lions does throw you into a battle or two where you play as delita protecting ovelia at the waterfall which was not in the original final fantasy tactics i don't know i'm not up to chapter two yet um in the replay but i want to say that was added to war the lions uh so maybe that was pulled from the original plan or maybe that's you know some some attempt to manifest that i don't know that's in chapter two yeah right i'm not i'm…

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the dynamic of chess, basically, like if you know, your bishop has a faster speed rating than your pawn, then the bishop is going to move more frequently than the pawn, which would, you know, just totally, totally mess up Garry Kasparov. But in Final Fantasy Tactics, it works great. And it's a really effective system here. And it lends itself to a lot of interesting ideas. ...

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like, I really, really need a healer right now, or I really need somebody who, you know, just whoever is moving up next needs to be able to kill this guy who's going to be a bigger threat to somebody else. You get those really dramatic kind of moments through that. Yeah, the original version didn't have the timeline, I think that's, was that like a Final Fantasy 10 innovation? That was 10. Yeah, right. In any game before that, like, that's the first time I remember seeing that. ...

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they will have taken out the battle with zombie argath that they added to war the lions it was it was it was totally superfluous and didn't do anything to move the story but just the opportunity to kill argath again oh yeah thank you you know exactly what i played this game before go play hundreds of hours of final fantasy 14 so you can kill argath the argath again one more time i mean that's a lot of commitment but knowing that i can do that i might i might just try it my favorite thing about the voice acting…

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in a coat of gold a coat of red a lion still has claws and mine alone and sharp my lord as long and sharp as yours all right so my my um thought here is that if tactics ogre was a novel final fantasy tactics is the movie um it's simpler more accessible more linear um i do feel like there are inevitably comparisons being made with game of thrones specifically a song of ice and fire the books because the first book in that series did come out in 1996 but i don't think there's any merit to those in a funny…

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that you can kind of slip in so if you want to like block the front door and have another guy go around back you can do that um and so on top of just what it unlocks in terms of just strategy like there's just like such a a feeling to some of these places and i'm i'm looking at the there's a website where you can look at uh different final fantasy maps and pan through them in like full 3d and like you know i'm looking at like the execution site i'm looking at the falls and everything like these these battles…

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He's very, or at least he seems very tortured artists to me. So as Greg was mentioning earlier, that he's really sort of putting on display the things that he's very, very into. And if he's not doing that, and that includes things like managing other people, these things just don't quite happen. Or if they happen after he leaves, in the case of Final Fantasy 12 anyway. So I mean, he's a guy I think that is really driven by system design, even though he didn't do the lion's share of the system design in this…

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cast and it is that the designs have just the right level of detail that they can really do a lot of acting with them um like it's kind of easy to forget like because immediately it kind of turns into cartoons but if you think about like what had been done previously you know like final fantasy six you get a lot by just having uh edgar do like the uh uh uh kind of thing with his finger you know here like having these detailed sprites able to be so expressive without actually needing to go into an actual like…

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