final fantasy tactics is the only good final fantasy

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.

these generics won't speak during cutscenes, but they'll appear at ramza's side in critical sequences, and they are the primary means through which a player can explore the full breadth of the job and skill systems tactics offers. it is unreasonably time-consuming to progress a single character to the point that they have access to all of the game's skills and techniques, and even if you spend all the time do to that, any one character can only utilize active skills from a maximum of two job trees, and only a tiny fraction of other skills besides. the game encourages you to instead move characters into divergent progression paths – the healers, the warriors, the fist-fighters, the sorcerers, and so on. but unlike a game like final fantasy 7, where aeris is pre-established as your staff-wielding healer while tifa or cloud might serve better as your front-line fighter, in tactics you choose who follows what path; even the relatively subtle innate strengths and weaknesses of certain units doesn't stop you from creating whatever party mix caters to how you want to play the game.

i've played tactics with a few different variations on this. sometimes i spread wide, and have a couple front-liners supported by magic-wielding heavies in a careful balance. sometimes i go for a team of ramza and four or five ninjas, or a half-dozen monks throwing punches all over the battlefield, or i just throw balance to the wind and whip out a couple of calculators who can instantly obliterate the enemy with the terrifying power of math.

your control over how your team looks and plays, along with some other key aspects of tactics' gameplay loops, has interesting narrative implications even if the game never actually folds them into the storytelling. games like far cry pioneered an idea now known as “emergent gameplay,” where instead of pre-writing scenarios for the player to tackle, designers can place certain elements into a single context and let them play off against each other in organic and surprising ways, so that the story the player remembers is a unique thing that happened to them while playing rather than a scripted event the designers intended. maybe you roll out of your jeep in metal gear solid 5, toss a grenade into the bed, and let it crash into a guard tower, creating explosive chaos that lets you sneak around unseen to your true objective. maybe you misfire an explosive arrow in breath of the wild and wake up a lumbering giant when you were struggling enough already with a few goblins, but then the giant wanders over and stomps the goblins' skulls flat, solving one problem by introducing a much bigger one. emergent gameplay is kind of like being a dungeon master in d&d, at least as i understand it – you're not writing a story, so much as you are handing tools that can create story over to the players.

tactics has a variation of this that feels somehow more written and emotionally resonant to me, perhaps in part because it's a group of people you're controlling rather than a single protagonist, but also because of mechanics like permadeath. if you don't revive a knocked-out compatriot in sufficient time, they will be permanently removed from the game. it's easy for a new player to get caught enough off guard by certain scenarios or combinations of enemies that they lose an ally without the phoenix downs or magic points required to bring them back, and without the firepower to take down the enemy quickly enough to stop death's approach.

you grow attached to your generics as you develop them, a sort of emotional story arc built into the investment of time and resources, and with the risk of death around the corner their lives feel important in a different way than the unique, developer-crafted characters.

i remember having a deep emotional attachment to my first set of generics in my first-ever playthrough of tactics, and because it was my first playthrough, all the game's traps caught me by surprise, and a few of those generics didn't make it through to the end. they had faces i had given them, strengths and victories i'd authored, implicit bonds within the party. certain dynamics made me likely to keep certain pairs or small groups together at all times on the battlefield, leading me to think of them as particularly close friends within the larger group. and the game forced me to mourn each fallen friend even if all this weren't true, with their loss felt in the extra time required to compensate for a new lack of skillset or advantage, the growth of a careful and risk-calculating approach as i moved further into the game.

you can replace these generics with overpowered ringers like orlandu or agrias or mustadio, and each of these characters brings their own certain charm and personality, but the utterly un-scripted way in which the generics can feel personalized and connected to you brings a rare thrill to each new playthrough of final fantasy tactics. who will my choices lead me to meet this time through?