Here, it’s made even greater with the addition of a larger possible cast of characters, as well as a permadeath system that makes losing a character you put so much time and thought into all the more painful.Įven better, it turns a genre that too often falls into a rock, paper, scissors type affair into something more closely resembling the game of chess so many strategy games aspire to be. We’ve seen this idea of assigning characters certain skill sets, and balancing your party with them to try to create the most exceptional party possible. This is of course in companionship with the Final Fantasy series’ typical character, world and sound design standards of excellence.Īnother carry over from that series makes the next largest contribution, and that’s the job system.

The movement and information system, both vital to such a title, are so cleanly laid out and smoothly integrated into the action, that they have this miraculous way of being immediately understandable yet infinitely deep. Instead, though it may have been inspired by many before it, Tactics did just enough on its own accord to make even experienced gamers in the genre, feel like they were experiencing it for the first time.Ī part of this are the graphics and presentation.

To be clear it was a tactical-RPG at the time, but due to a terrible tendency for publishers to not want to expose American console audiences to something different, one that once plagued Western gaming, many people remained unaware of the genre at large.īut the bliss of Final Fantasy Tactics did not lie in our ignorance. Not only did it carry the Final Fantasy name and not be of the traditional JRPG mold, but it was this weird little strategy title where you moved your characters around a map through their grid-like movement system, and pitted them against various foes spread about. Released in America in January of 1998 (some 6 months following its release in Japan), Final Fantasy Tactics was treated by most American gamers as something of an enigma. That being the case, let me approach this differently. It seems fewer and fewer people are as aware of…well, everything that Final Fantasy Tactics is, even as seemingly every other game from that era becomes legendary whether it deserves it or not. I assume that you know about, and therefore care about, Final Fantasy Tactics just as much as I do.Īnd yet, as times goes on it becomes ever more apparent that despite the game’s legacy, and the legacy of the name it carries, not to mention the games numerous re-releases and countless influences, the opposite tends to be true. I find that whenever I talk about an absolute classic like Final Fantasy Tactics, I have this bad tendency to make an assumption about my audience.

Final fantasy tactics ios review