This is my personal favorite game of all time, so keep that in mind as you read. This game is a perfect example of when something as a sum of it's parts ends up being something so much greater than the individual elements. Most of what is here isn't the best of the franchise, much less the parent genre. The story isn't even among the top 5 just considering Final Fantasy's, much less RPG's in general. The character design isn't in the upper echelon either. The pacing can be a mess and the difficulty curve feels at times like it's a mess. But when it all comes together with the combat and class system somehow everything just feels right to me. As someone who put over 200+ hours on their original save file and more than I care to remember over the years total in revisiting it, I feel that for me it is the most enjoyable grind I've been presented with in a game. This was the game that showed me that SRPG's are my favorite type of RPG, and my favorite of the bunch will always be this one. For most, this title is likely middling at best, and that is absolutely understandable because unless you really love this type of combat the pacing alone is probably going to drive you nuts.

Although I love this game, I still can see many flaws. Apart of one of the best stories of the Final Fantasy series, it's an unbalanced game.
The 3 battle sequence of Velius is unforgiven, total out of proportion compared to what we have seen before and after (it's like a true final boss). If it would be a side quest, like in other Final Fantasy that are optional super bosses, it would be ok. On the other side of the balance, there is Orlando. One of the most overpower character I've seen in any JRPG. The guy is a killing machine, he's able to solo most of the missions and the game becomes a walk in the park.
I'm not a fan of the waiting for the skill to be carried out during the battle, mainly for the mages. It's easy to be interrupted, it's such a horrible engine, that fortunately was cut out in the following FF Tactics.

This is one of my favorite games to replay and I can see myself going back to it again and again without getting bored, but equally, whenever I go back to it its flaws stand out clearly to me. Two major issues in particular:

- FFV is my favorite game of all time (thanks largely to its superlative take on the job system), and the job system here is possibly even better, with tons more depth and customization. But the more I play this game the more I realize that a great job system is only half the battle: the game's difficulty curve has to be carefully curated in order to make tinkering with your jobs feel rewarding. FFV did a much better job of that than this game, which had a backwards difficulty curve with strange spikes. I think the main issue is that with a few exceptions, the enemies in this game are all human and therefore play by the same rules as you (i.e. they have primary classes, secondary skillsets, movement abilities, reaction abilities and passive abilities). But rather than having coherent builds, their ability sets seem to be determined at random. It isn't noticeable at the beginning, but by the endgame you will have crazy focused builds like teleporting wizards who evade 97% of physical attacks, and barehanded ninjas who can yell at themselves to go faster, and you'll be facing mages who jump on you for pitiful damage, or dragoons (lowest magic stat in the game) who waste their turns healing for single-digit HP instead of attacking you.

- The story is probably the best of any JRPG I've played. Or at least, I realized that it was the best after I read a plot analysis online, because the translation was utter steaming garbage. There are technically worse translations, but they tended to be early JRPGs with tropey stories you could get the gist of anyway; this web of political intrigue and double and triple-crossing deserved better. I honestly think any English-speaker with a Japanese dictionary could have done a better job - from how unwieldy a lot of the dialogue was, it seems almost like it was translated by one guy with a Japanese-English dictionary with no knowledge of either language.

Despite the two issues above, I would say that this is actually one of the RPGs I've played that comes closest to a 10/10 in both story and game mechanics. It is well worth playing and replaying.

The argument surrounding what the term “RPG” entails has been going on for decades, and at this rate, it will probably go on forever. Some people argue that it refers to leveling up a character, some argue it’s about narrative choices, but I would say the key ingredient is player expressiveness, in whatever form that may take. Set-character stories like The Witcher are usually on the low end of the spectrum, with the existing personality of the protagonist taking precedence over the player's. Freeform narratives like Fallout: New Vegas are on the other end, where players can make up their own backstory and choose their own path. However, since expressiveness can come in a variety of forms, even a set-character story with few narrative decisions can afford players plenty of freedom. Final Fantasy Tactics might be the best example of this, with the unprecedented amount of depth it allows for when customizing your party. In classic Final Fantasy games, characters are assigned a job that defines their specialty in combat and limits what abilities they can use, but the rules were loosened up in Tactics to reflect the game’s focus on strategy. Your party members are still assigned jobs, but the job-specific skills can be mastered over time and then used with any class. There are twenty jobs each with an entire menu of skills to use, five characters participating in each battle, and each character having four skill slots. The amount of ways to customize your team is absolutely staggering, and the potential for interesting synergies is limitless. There’s still a vibrant romhacking community for this game over twenty years later because the depth afforded by all these options has kept people playing for years.

As interesting as the RPG theorycrafting is though, I still haven’t even mentioned the second half of the title: Tactics. If there are so many possible builds, how are players kept from accidentally screwing themselves with a bad setup, or destroying the difficulty curve with a good one? In short, the answer is “they aren’t”. This game is legendary for having a couple difficulty spikes that softlocked players who saved over their file in the middle of a mission that was too hard for their suboptimal team to complete. Meanwhile, a certain job provides an ability that synergizes so powerfully that a single character can destroy half the enemies on the map in a single turn with it. It’s also well-known in the Tactics community that some of the companion characters have unique abilities that trivialize the majority of the game, creating a dominant strategy and removing the need for tactics at all. This is the biggest problem with Tactics, its balancing is handled so poorly that you either run into unbreakable walls or thoughtlessly plow through the game. For me, I experienced both sides of this. Since I was warned about the overpowered options, I decided to avoid them and use only the default companions. This went well for about half the game, before the legendary difficulty spike made it impossible for me to progress, even with hours of farming. After that, I abandoned the balance limitations, and steamrolled the second half of the game. For most tactical games, that would be a failing grade, but I truly did have an amazing time in that first half and enjoyed the unparalleled amount of freedom. The story is also fantastic, albeit with some awkward translations that made comprehension difficult in places. Luckily, there was an updated PSP version of the game titled War of the Lions that adjusted the balance to make it more tactical, fixed the translation issues, and added new cutscenes, so that’s the version I would have to recommend, even without having played it yet. Those are the exact changes needed to make the strategy worthy of the amazingly expressive RPG it’s tied to.

+Epic political plot full of twists and turns
+Job System (yeah...)
+Beautifully detailed sprite work
-Poorly balanced gameplay, from broken classes and units, to inconsistent enemy level scaling, and an infamously brutal boss fight
-Doesn't do a great job at presenting its story due to its awkward translation and unnecessary exposition dump

One of my all time faves. Beat the hell out of this thing five, six, seven times way back when, and haven't touched it in close to twenty years. Finally played the War of the Lions version for the first time - not logging it separately, sorry - and it's thankfully just "more" all around. That's good, because if this game leaves you wanting anything, it's "more." You spend thirty or forty hours training an intricately assembled party but by the end of the game you're overpowered enough to fly right through the story's conclusion. The only reward for managing to find, poach, or steal the rarest and best items in the game is the items themselves. I've done a handful of self-imposed challenges and this time opted for a "no duplicate equipment" run. Gotta keep things fresh and interesting, you know? The difficulty is still way too unbalanced with three or four insanely hard battles and a shitload of creampuffs, and the learning curve is laughably steep in 2021 - mostly because of how opaque the game is about everything - but man do I love this game and its characters and engine and story. Always have, always will.