The game is a tactical RPG in the purest form. The towns and overworld are stripped down in favor of fights and more fights. There are shops and taverns, but you don't get to move you character around in them. This always annoyed me a little. Every shopkeeper looks the same, and often they have the same equipment for sale as other nearby shopkeepers. Seems like they could've just let you push a button to go shopping if they didn't want you to explore the towns. The fights are slow paced but engaging. I loved the battles where I had to take out the whole enemy team, especially that moment where the tide turned and I finally felt like I was winning. I did hate how easy it was to put my character in the wrong spot and not be able to attack. So many times I would place my character in what looked like the right spot only to find out that I was one space away from attacking. By then it was too late to move my character back. I don't think this ever caused me to lose a fight though, and for the most part I had a great time battling my way across Ivalice.
This game also brings up some interesting observations about gaming spinoffs. I think at the time there were four main series Final Fantasy games released in America. We also had four games on Game Boy that had Final Fantasy in their titles. These games, however, were all parts of other series in Japan. The only spinoff that was made as a Final Fantasy game was Mystic Quest which was a simplified game made specifically for the US market. Tactics was the game where Square truly started to dip their feet in the franchise water and make different types of games using the FF title. There are many notable differences in tone between this game and the games in the main series. First of all it is very bloody. Just about every character that doesn't join your party ends up getting violently stabbed in the stomach with their blood splattering everywhere. Then the stabbed people sometimes get in one last stab before they die causing even more blood to splatter. It is a bit jarring for a series that never had much blood before. This game also seems more realistic than what the series is known for. The more sci-fi and supernatural elements are kept to a minimum, and the story mostly deals with nobles and priests having trouble knowing who to trust during a war. This is about as realistic as a Final Fantasy game gets, but it does still have magical stones that turn people into monsters. This could be seen as a metaphor about how power corrupts. I'm sorry, sometimes my English degree pops out when I don't mean for it to.
So was this game meant as a break in the regular series to give Square developers a chance to make a different kind of game, or a game that was slapped with a familiar title so that people would buy it? This is a difficult question to answer. It does have enough references to traditional Final Fantasy games to make it seem like a deliberate creative choice. There are chocobos and a Cid. You do also have an encounter with a certain flower girl which references one of the most famous scenes from FF7. I suppose I shouldn't worry about it with a game as fun as this one is. Even after one of the more lengthy and frustrating battles I felt like I wanted to keep going. One of my main themes on this blog is to not worry about series so much and just enjoy the games. Of course, I'm probably the only one thinking about this anyway. This is a great game that deserves to have the name Final Fantasy title attached to it. I'm glad I finally got around to playing through it after all these years.
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