whoa hey it's actually fun to play???
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)
the thing about this era of RPGs, by which I mean anything that would be considered a “JRPG” by those interested in such classifications, is that they are extremely happy to waste your time. VII remake/rebirth as a project seems to be intent on doubling down on this particular “feature” of the genre, which, OK I guess.
but especially back in the day, gameplay could be best summarized as a combination of “bad spreadsheet management” and “willfully overlong animations.” there is a reason why speed multipliers are a must-have QoL addition to any re-release of a PS1-era role playing game.
it is probably ironic to contrast games to final fantasy tactics by calling them “spreadsheet management” given the sheer complexity of character building on display here, but it’s a completely different take and resulting feel. the dynamics of party play and skill distribution are entirely in the player’s control. in my youth I always ended up with a Samurai Ramza surrounded by lady ninjas; others of course relied on the game-breaking Mathematician; no one really likes using magic proper because the game seems determined to make it too awkward and double-edged to be truly useful but you could, if you wanted to, just have a whole party of Black Mages or a mix of mages casting Haste and Wall on each other before trying to throw summons onto chunks of the field that will be easily avoided by most enemies
this leads to some fascinating game-design issues. there are parts of the game that represent near-softlocks for players who are not working to exploit mechanics; two that always come to mind are the mano-a-mano duel with weigraf, where your Ramza’s particular skillset may make him absolutely unable to deal with the situation, or the rooftop escape sequence later in the game that can be unwinnable if you’re not able to catch up to the very stupid AI of the character you’re meant to protect. the game sort of expects you to just save-scum through it, to tinker and rebuild and back up if you have to, though this is never stated so explicitly.
ah but the tinkering is so fun! and the gameplay itself — what a joy. I’ve tried to recapture my love of this game through other tactics games, including its inspiration in the Ogre Tactics series, but for some reason or another they’ve all fallen much flatter for me than this. for whatever reason Tactics hits the right complexity-to-accessibility balance for a strategic doofus like me to still occasionally feel clever, or at least capable.
battles are longer than in your standard turn-based RPGs, but a) not overly so unless you’re deliberately stretching things out and letting everyone bonk Ramza on the head to farm XP, and b) the game is built around this, so that the flow and pacing of play is never disrupted. the tactical style also makes the battles themselves capable of so much more storytelling and dramatic movement than FF games typically muster: castle sieges, mid-fight ambushes, walks through a town square that turn ugly, and so on. one of the reasons I’ve always kind of hated war of the lions’ addition of CGI cutscenes is that it’s entirely unnecessary; the game’s engine is remarkably capable already of portraying dramatic events in seamless concert with the gameplay itself.