the first two japanese role-playing games i played were final fantasy 7 and final fantasy tactics. though i didn't know it at the time, 7 was the one that used characters in a style that matched almost every mainline game in this franchise and just about every other japanese rpg before and after. you're allowed to change the name of your protagonists – a nice feature made impossible later, in the era of full voice acting – but they are nonetheless unique, fully written and characterized, with story arcs embedded into the dialogue and cutscenes. like characters in a movie or tv show, in other words – though you control their actions in a fight and might make a few dialogue choices, their emotional throughlines and their impact on the world and story are out of your hands, something you watch rather than steer.
tactics has named and unique characters too – protagonist ramza, most obviously, but also a wide swath of named characters who may join you as a temporary guest or eventually offer to join your party permanently – but it also relies on a system of “generic” characters. when you first start the game, your party consists of ramza and half a dozen of these randomly named and gendered characters, who pull from the same pool of job-based appearances.
i have played many games that could claim to be the next final fantasy tactics. i didn't hate all of them, but every single one of them just made me want to play final fantasy tactics again.
the fire emblem series shares a lot of similar concepts – grid-based positional strategy, turn-based battling mechanics, a swords-and-wands fantasy aesthetic. but i found the game boy advance games dull, and could not really stand the “surrounded by anime girlfriends and boyfriends” dynamics of three houses.
i've tried a few disgaea games and find them both tonally off-putting and mechanically far more complex than i want. tactics tip-toes you into granularity as best as it can and allows certain linear paths of development as a crutch if you need it; looking at disgaea's skill trees and statistical systems has always felt to me like being kicked headfirst into a waterfall. ditto tactics ogre.
well, this isn’t quite right. I instead adapted someone else’s widescreen hack, because their hack was not actually a widescreen patch but instead widescreen and a patch to add noses to all the portrait sprites. it’s literally called Final Fantasy Tactics – Nose Edition.
i miss relying on gameFAQs. they didn’t just have insanely plain-text guides for the most inscrutably granular details of game mechanics, you know! they also had some truly wonderful MS-Paint charts for handy reference. let’s look at some of those, for final fantasy tactics (the PS1 version of course, is it not clear yet that the PS1 version is the only good version)
yeah I’ve played my share of final fantasy games. not all of them by any means; VII was my first and I’ve played through the other mainline titles up through a few hours of XIII, plus some dabbling into the older titles.
(hot take: why ever play a SNES final fantasy when chrono trigger is right there)
“murder the gods and topple their thrones” is kind of a recurring narrative in JRPGs and Final Fantasy specifically — see FFX — mostly because it allows you to raise the narrative stakes to such a highly absurd level that your aesthetics can reasonably go somewhere like this
after the tutorial battle at Orbonne Monastery, a narrative sequence plays out in which Ramza’s old buddy Delita kidnaps Princess Ovelia.
in the original, superior PS1 translation, where the dialog plays as part of an in-engine cutscene, Delita says this to Ovelia’s currently failing-at-her-job bodyguard Agrias:
