By way of this game's literal content, here are some trigger warnings. I'm not censoring them because they'll mess up an e-reader. Also, as per the last one, this one meanders, and it gets repetitive. The game is better than my experience.

murder, coprophagia, torture, self-harm
Other general triggers include:
Misinterpreting words, ignoring complaints, an anxiety attack that crept up in text format, friends who don't listen. there are probably more.

Directory:

000 (background info)
--- (General walkthrough of our Deer friend)
=== (general issues and how it affected personal experience)
333 (detailed grievances and personal experience)
444 (Reason for putting this review out here) <-- This actually expands further on detailed grievances and personal experiences

000 (background info)

I have to set some background information up. I am a streamer with a small audience. Most of the time, it's full of lurkers, so I play in textual silence. I stream, not for the same meta others do, but as an interactive medium for some sort of connection with others. I also realize my own general negative disposition.

I had gone two weeks without streaming (my schedule is inconsistent), but within those two weeks, I had been active on Smule, a karaoke app. For those who are curious, the etymology of karaoke is a portmanteau from Japanese, combining kara (空), which means empty, and the first half of orchestra (オーケストラ). I bring this up because despite how detached that sounds, I have been having fun, interacting with others on the app. I know I'm not the best singer—far from it. I'm partly there doing voice acting skits as a hobbyist. I'm also experiencing more interactivity on there than I do streaming video games.

So when I did decide to stream the game, it was partially on a whim. I had already had the game downloaded onto my PC for a while, and I had checked to see on howlongtobeat that it takes around 3-4 hours. That seemed like a reasonable amount to stream. And it was. I knew I'd get sleepy halfway through, and I did. So things had gone predictably.

I had started up playing when I had a fairly newer follower, who I've interacted with before get excited about me starting up this game. They were doing their best not to spoil, though without much interaction prior, I know most people don't quite understand how little talk of the game I mean. But this game by its very nature invites conversation. The game's UI has options to check out other games from the devs, including other games in the series. You can join their Discord server, or even watch Walkthrough videos. By its very design, it elicits a communal discussion centered around it. But. That isn't the kind of interaction I want. I don't expect others to understand this mentality, but it's my preference in a mystery puzzle point and click adventure game that I at least experience this on my own.

--- (General walkthrough of our Deer friend)

I'm going to cover the first night as best as I can from memory. So it's a partial walkthrough.

So yes. Those are the general gameplay and thematic genres. Except, all I'm told as a player is that a bunch of people are joining me on an island with a hotel. The gameplay is split up into nights, and you can choose which hotel patron you can visit for the night. Before doing so, you can also talk to the guests, whose dialog doesn't really change throughout the different nights. I didn't really know what I was doing, but once you choose a potential victim, you have two other optional items you can collect. The UI does give these objectives when talking to the chef. And all of the main objectives involve a form of animal protein. I haven't mentioned it yet, but the characters are all portrayed as anthropomorphic creatures. The guests are what's for dinner.

I thought the game was silly for having access to the dining room, only to be told dinner time is only at night. Apparently, this is still displayed even after you complete your objective, which always takes place at night.

The first victim I chose happened to be the occupant on the first floor in the first room. That's about the first and last time logic really set in concretely. Once you enter a room, attempts to leave will be met with a message in the lines of not being able to leave until you get their meat. I want to say protein. The game doesn't say flesh. Okay, so I'm here to murder someone in a hotel. And it's a puzzle game with point and click adventure controls.

This deer I'm sent to kill makes a stink about me needing to make him a Bloody Mary. The game gives you a recipe to follow. You have vodka, blood, tabasco, and a secret ingredient. Vodka is tucked away in a canteen and the easiest ingredient to get, behind an object. It's not asking for pixel perfection, so that's neat. The second ingredient had me worried so I avoided it while doing everything else I could in the room.

This is where I had collected a screwable jar for a grinder. This jar was the main vessel for everything despite a perfectly good canteen (hip flask) that could have done the trick as well. The canteen took up inventory space once used. The jar on the other hand had about three or more purposes. Early on, you can catch a butterfly with the jar. You use that butterfly to pin it in a lepidoptera display with two other butterflies. You can click them. And. nothing. In another location, they have another lepidoptera display, but they're all shaded out.

Other fixings in the house included mounted skulls of other animals, a chemical lab, and other things. The lab involves several puzzles. One is using a bucket (that you easily find) of water to try and get 8(milliliters?) while only ever pouring from one container to another. Very logically sound. And I had done a similar puzzle in the visual novel iteration of Silent Hill for the Gameboy Advance. Nothing of course is ever told to you, so everything is quite obtuse. I would just stumble onto puzzles and clickables until things worked.

The lab also has weights and a scale. Two of the weights have numbers, and three of them have weights. The numbers are on opposite sides and can only be placed as such. The weights with symbols are a mystery, but you can deduce their value through comparative weighing. The symbols on the weights correspond to the shapes on a safe, so it's a completely logical puzzle with variables for weights that you can solve.

I mentioned tabasco earlier as an ingredient for a Bloody Mary. Well, fortunately, there isn't anything complicated with that one. Find the mounted skull of a deer and click on both sides to make the antlers grow so much, that you can click on the tabasco-dispensing lever. The tabasco comes out the nostril. It's not blood. You collect it with the jar. Yay! You can keep getting more tabasco after you use your tabasco jar in the Bloody Mary cup. There's nothing stopping you! It's only visually disturbing, but overall weird. So that's a curveball compared to the lab. The antler on the left also has a cooking herb, one of the optional ingredients! Thanks. Okay.

That safe I mentioned earlier? It gives you a knife. Cut the deer. You got blood! Yay! I was worried that I might get deer meat this way, but it's not how you get it. So. Yes. You can cut him. But cutting him gives you blood. That you use for the Bloody Mary he demands. Unlike the tabasco, you can't keep cutting him to get more blood.

But there's a secret ingredient? Apparently, vodka, blood, and tabasco are not enough. I tried giving him the concoction early, but the game refused. It became clear that the fourth ingredient was poison. So in order to get the poison, you have to... not collect more butterflies, but follow the shaded lepidoptera case's patterns (left to right, which is assumed) by tapping on the butterflies in the other case. This will inexplicably open up the butterfly you placed in the case, revealing a plant seed. This plant seed goes into what you eventually realize is dirt. Your bucket hopefully has water, and you can water the dirt. Then you click on the seed, which isn't pixel perfect, but still tight, to force grow the flower. It was some sort of bellflower on rows. It could be a nightshade or foxglove, I'm not a botanist. You click it even further for the flowers to wilt. Click it again and you get seeds. Go back to the grinder, reattach the screwable jar, and put the seeds inside the grinder. You have poison powder. Take that poison powder and attach it to the distillation apparatus in the chem lab. Don't forget the water you balanced. Click a few more times to receive poison. Put it into the Bloody Mary. Give it to the deer. Watch him convulse and die. Yay, you got deer meat!

Well, that was an unequal amount of puzzles and time put into this one room. But wait. I only have the main ingredient and one optional ingredient. I missed another one? Turns out I missed the optional ingredient before even going into his room. I was supposed to pick up the phone at the receptionist's desk (which I had done) and click it again to answer. Mind you, I thought I attempted the second click. But behind the phone is the rack of keys (there are no keys, it's a key rack) that takes me into another window. So I thought I couldn't pick up the phone. And that's when I realized.

=== (general issues and how it affected personal experience)

This game autosaves. There are no save slots. If I want that other ingredient, I need to start over from the beginning and do that puzzle process all over again.

And that's when my brain switched from enjoying-to-tolerating an obtuse murdery puzzle game into realizing that this game isn't for me. I wanted to find everything the game was offering. I didn't want to skip things. But worse: If I were to find everything, that would mean never making a mistake. This made me view the game from a fairly free puzzle game into the most linear chore list.

I wanted to know more about this game, whose art intrigued me. I had no way of knowing what the missable content could be if I didn't clear it. I also didn't have enough energy to replay a puzzle game where half the logic it ran on was moon logic. The person I mentioned earlier dropped a line about the guests being cold despite the food I served them earlier (shrimp cocktails). They had also mentioned how this game works fine as a standalone entry.

333 (detailed grievances and personal experience)

So. From my experience, I didn't feel like this game was much of a standalone. It's apparently the first in the franchise, but chronologically third, says a friend. Mechanically, it's supposedly similar to the previous games the devs worked on as well. I went in as blind as I could into a game that had barebones narrative, along with being this surreal mystery. I never learned why I was murdering everyone and feeding them to each other. I could barely infer anything from the characters I was murdering with the puzzle rooms. Half the time, I was solving canonical moon logic puzzles to murder people who, from my understanding, definitely saw me plan the most Rube Golberg machines of death traps. None of the guests seemed to care that the guests' numbers were dwindling. At one point, one of the guests, a literal pig, demanded I make him a sandwich, and I kept feeding him a turd sandwich. The game forced me to do it to progress, this wasn't an optional event. I was purposely being cruel. To get an optional item, the game asks of the player to torture an anthropomorphic bird child (a chick if you will) and electrocute them six times. The child still helps you for some reason for the main story. The game really wanted to make the player feel uncomfortable, while the avatar was just going through the motions. The shock value is strong. But.

I also assumed this was a point-and-click adventure game. It is not. The hotel has little to explore, and every night, you're trapped in a room until you can get out. Point-and-click is its method of gameplay, but there is no adventure. I didn't get to read much, so there wasn't much dialog. My expectations were shaped by that, but I kept playing. I solved puzzles that I thought I could do, but the fear of missing out on extra items for a potentially different ending had me follow a walkthrough after a while. I actually did have to restart my file after the second or third victim. Ironically enough, I would have followed the game's intended route for the secret ending because I still for the most part found different optional items that would lead to the next intended victim. But no. The lack of a manual save was a psychologically crippling affect. It was self-induced pain though.

The reward for playing perfectly was a 4 digit code you can use in the next game. I wasn't enticed to go onto the next game. I wanted to be rewarded for the game I played and owned now. It felt like such a letdown that I put in that work for nothing.

444 (Reason for putting this review out here)

The main reason why I was inspired to write this review is not about the game itself though. Despite how much I wrote, I wouldn't have written it had it not been my interaction with another friend. And this may or may not be relatable, but it sure stoked a fire in me. They had also popped into my stream and saw I wasn't having as much fun with the game. I was in their stream, and they asked me how it went afterwards. I had told them how I approached the game, and how someone else said it was a standalone. But. They kept relating it to their experience and how I'm viewing the game wrong. And it felt like I was having my experience invalidated. And every time they'd say something, I'd say how things felt to me. And how the experience wasn't to my liking. And they were going on and on about how there weren't achievements at the time, but they still did secret items. My mindset wasn't on the achievements themselves, but literally the same items. There weren't any achievements separate from the 100% run. The ones I missed are ones the game just didn't read up on. But because the game is part of this greater mystery franchise, they didn't want to go in depth because they didn't want to ruin the experience for others.

Except, the way they kept talking down about my opinion while trying to make it seem like I was "hyperfocused on a specific angle that wasn't there" felt like I wasn't being heard. The game literally only has an autosave. No matter how short a game, a click and point puzzle game with multiple approaches to its gameplay should have saves. That's just a whole quality of life option games need. That was honestly my biggest gripe, because it affected how I played and viewed the game. The irony is that now I have someone telling me that I'm hyper-focused on an angle about how this game with barebones storytelling is actually the most standalone game in the franchise. You know how much that doesn't make me want to check out the franchise? It literally makes it sound like the games only get more obtuse and the story that's present gets worse. But the games have an interconnected story. The gameplay apparently doesn't transfer over to the next game. But that doesn't change my mind on this game's experience. The only thing that gets solved is that I murdered a bunch of people in this game who frankly didn't really seem to care all that much. And I did it in the most convoluted ways. If it's not for me, it's not for me. If I didn't enjoy the experience and I don't think that the game felt like a game that could stand on its own, then I didn't enjoy it. I don't usually play these types of games. This is something that this friend should have realized.

Puzzle games in general are inherently niche. Anything making you wrack your brain around something is only for those who want to stimulate their brain this way. They're a difficult genre to get into, because you're finding a balance between your understanding and the player's understanding. And you as the developer always have the answer. Making that "aha!" moment isn't easy. Puzzle games with moon logic are inherently unsatisfying because it inevitably turns into brute forcing a puzzle. Some of the game's logic also involves clicking more than once and hoping you you notice an animation change of significant value. But this particular game doesn't have pure moon logic. I explained how the lab portion of the game has pure logic. You can still brute force the water pouring puzzle, but that's easier to zone out to.

I still think the game has amazing art. I like its aesthetic. But the lack of a manual save option is terrible. The reward for fully completing the game is terrible and rewards you only if you play the next game (and fairly immediately so you can use that code as soon as possible). Half the menu UI literally wants you to see other games and explore their community. None of that feels like a stand-alone self-contained story.

My friend wanted to compare my issues with its story to a Rubik's Cube. And how I shouldn't expect a story from that. But I wasn't playing a Rubik's Cube. I wasn't playing Chess. I wasn't playing Life. Rusty Lake Hotel has its own setting and story and greater 'verse. It's not the same as changing up Rubik's Cubes or Chess boards. Although obtuse, the game has a narrative. And then it kept telling me to play more. My shitty comparison was to Kingdom Hearts. And I personally hate how much people use Kingdom Hearts as an example of a franchise that's confusing and convoluted. The first game they released is still fairly coherent. That's a game that has needless complication in its narrative, but the first game has beat after beat after beat that still work for its narrative. RLH was me murdering people as an excuse to play puzzles. *I understood that part. But you can't tell me a narrative wasn't being told or that I'm focusing on that aspect too much when that's part of the meta-appeal of the game. It's a surreal mystery that begs discussion. The same friend then went and compared it to The Room games. I haven't played them. I've seen others play them. But you know what was nice about what I'd seen from when people played The Room? For the most part, different puzzles were self-contained! Different puzzles were in their own zone. The narrative is in the background, and puzzles are the main focus. Those puzzles aren't asking you to figure out that the butterfly outside is a collectible, and that you need a jar to collect grounds from a grinder (not the canteen, not the bucket) to catch it so you can pin it, touch other insects to reveal a poisonous seed, grow a seed into a flower, and get those flowers' seeds to then put into a grinder to use the powder you receive to distillate it. There were several puzzles involved in that action. None of that was communicated with the player. I didn't know that I was looking at dirt in the lab area, and didn't understand why it was in a glass dome like in Beauty and the Beast. That information is intentionally not conveyed to the player, so you don't necessarily know what uses they could have. Sorry, why couldn't I even turn the original seed into a powder? Why did I have to grow a whole plant for this?

I wasn't heated about the game. I just thought it wasn't for me. But after being told "I'm detecting some salt", THAT is the fucking salt. I hate not being able to convey an opinion THAT WAS ASKED OF ME without being told I'm fucking experiencing it wrong. How the hell is this okay?

Gmers on here. You're allowed to have your own opinion. And your experiences are yours. I'm so tired, even jokingly, of people saying "Everyone has the right to their own opinion, even if it's wrong, har har" because NO YOU JUDGEMENTAL PRICK. If it's an opinion, it's an opinion. If it's how someone experiences something, that's how they experience something. Doubling down and then dismissing legitimate grievances and having the audacity to say someone is being salty is actually abhorrent. You don't get to act like everything is fine with a game with this many flaws despite their dev-intended designs. I hate how insular this hobby is. I hate how I'd rather connect with people, but people would rather be smug about their knowledge. I hate that this isn't a review, but a rant that's only tangentially related to the game. I may have streamed, but I only got people who played the game before. And in a puzzle game (I will not call horror a gameplay genre when that's atmospheric and thematic) that had its own story, I'm not interested in playing more. I'm even more uninterested when the fans of these types of games and genres think their experiences AND LITERAL FUTURE GAMES IN THE FRANCHISE can change my other gripe of the game. Of not being a stand-alone game. You know the game has a goose that makes you take her pictures, and eventually she asks you to take a picture of her shooting herself dead? I didn't even kill her that time. It was a convoluted series of puzzles for a suicide. WHY?? WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT ABOUT?? It's not a cliffhanger, but it sure feels like one. It's more like I landed into a cliffhanger of a "game". That's not a stand-alone if you're in the thick of it.

This review will have me looking things up, and will be influenced by both English releases, as well as my failing memories, aided by outside information. Skip the next two paragraphs, u won't. Skip the third one, too. Skip a lot of them. I gush towards the end. This isn't coherent and becomes decidedly less so as I go on. No drafts. Just a descent into madness as I go without sleep. I promise it's wordy, but very surface level. The third part is full of spoilers as I just list random stuff.

{I} Chapter 1: Chapter One
{II} Detailed gameplay
{III} Things I (dis)like. Yeah.
{IV} References

{I} Chapter 1: Chapter One (This is about the general synopsis and characters and story of Chapter 1)

Final Fantasy Tactics, written by Matsuno Yasumi (given name second), which has been officially localized into English twice. Michael Baskett was the Director of Localization[1] for the PlayStation script (though not necessarily the one to translate)[2]; and Joseph Reeder and Tom Slattery are credited as translators for the PlayStation Portable script. Although I credit these people, there is an assumption that there were a team of people, and getting different people to work together to get a project going takes some tact. The final results haphazardly put together are but the dreams of others we carry on. Yes, I'm shoving a "Final Fantasy Tactics" pun into this.

I was potentially a tween when I played Final Fantasy Tactics. For better or worse, my older sisters decided to get Final Fantasy VIII specifically for me prior to that, and Tekken 2 was our Tekken at home. I have never asked them why they thought I would like it. They had waned interest in video games by then, dedicated more to school life. I had also gotten my own translucent purple GameBoy Color, which came with Pokémon Red Version from Costco. You can tell by this backstory that this isn't merely a review on the game.

By the time I had played FFT, I had gotten used to the idea of role-playing games. But Final Fantasy Tactics? It happened to be played on a topographic grid made of squares. I had played other RPGs before, but this game didn't have walking—not in the traditional sense. Overworld movement includes a 4-directional input, but followed predetermined paths that grew as the map was filled; and battle movement, also determined in a 4-directional input, was limited by a unit's innate allotted movement (move), as well as allotted height (jump). This change in gameplay was new to me, and opened up how I saw RPGs. The closest I could connect this to were board games, but board games have standardized boards with equivalent pieces for both players—The ones I grew up with did, at least. This was a different way to play games. I had understood platformers well, and had been exposed to them, as well as shooters, thanks to arcade games. But this game? This game? You wouldn't find it in arcades.

This game starts you off with a snippet of a plot to kidnap a princess, with you playing as Ramza Beoulve. (Tangent: Kid me thought that that surname was influenced by Beowulf, except there is a character named "Beowulf" in the game. Their names are distinctly different in Japanese.) Ramza is the only controllable character in the tutorial, and as a tutorial, the equipment doesn't truly affect the outcome when you eventually reach to that point of the story again. It takes luck and effort to lose the tutorial[3], so the devs intended you to learn the basics as you went on. For many, one of the best lines in 90s video games comes after the end of that battle, and they both hold their weight in different ways. After said scene, we get a flashback, showing us how Ramza came to be.

Sadly, for many, the battle immediately after is where the game's difficulty spikes too high. I've come to agree that it is not beginner-friendly. You aren't taught about how characters act through water, nor do you realize that your limited pool of (curative) items is shared among the party. If you've never played a Final Fantasy game, you may not even know what they do. The water in the middle also almost acts as a trap for your players, and the foe you face has thieves on literal rooftops. If there's one thing tactics RPGs don't easily convey, it's strategy. They don't tell you how to capitalize on an opponent who you've pulled from the pack. They don't teach you the advantages of the very ground you walk on. They don't tell you about the heights you must climb, and how positioning can turn an ally into a literal obstacle. At least, Final Fantasy Tactics doesn't convey that well. And yet...

That first non-tutorial battle captures that feeling for Ramza as well. He's not even fresh out of the academy (Akademy in the newer script) when these brigands have come to your campus of learning to kill you and everything your name stands for. Ramza, the neophyte of war, is engaged in his first battle to determine whether he has what it takes to make it. The introduction had already informed us of the 50 Year's War prior, whose victors have received praise and notoriety. This new war Ramza is about to be thrust into? It's The War of the Lions, as two of the key political figures run a black lion, as well as a white lion, on their banner. But that first non-tutorial battle mentioned earlier? That was about the common folk-turned thieves who've resorted to ne'er-do-well activities after the land had been ravished by the previous war. Not everyone views the noble class as worthy. But Ramza isn't interested in the class he was born into. He's interested in not dying! That first skirmish tests his mettle. The very first chapter (of four chapters) is spent in this flashback to Ramza's cadet years as he slowly learns his place in the world, and how his relatively privileged life has both sheltered him from some truths, and given him insight in the world.

If we dive deeper, we can see Ramza's friends and family during this period, and how they shape him. Ramza's best friend, Delita, was born to commonfolk. Him and his sister lost their parents early to disease and were raised by the Beoulves. Ramza never treated them different for their class distinction, and this exposure was part of that impactful growth. His little sister, Alma, befriended Delita's little sister, Teta/Tita/Tietra. There's a significant enough age gap between Ramza and his older brothers, Dycedarg and Zalba(a)g. We later see Zalba(a)g's character unfold, but he does view Ramza as a true brother, despite being a half-sibling from a non-noblewoman. Zalba(a)g's conflict is a duty of his noble privilege and to that of his family. Ultimately, he is here to save face and uphold the status quo. On the other hand, Dycedarg, has no such emotional attachments and is here to uphold the status quo.

Chapter 1 being a flashback to warmer memories also leads to viewing the game in a somewhat warmer light. Sure, goblins, panther-sized cats, ostrich-sized birds, living fireballs, horned skeletons, etc. roam the land, but they're a bit of a nuisance. Or a huge threat if you're still getting used to tactics and the asymmetry of units. You'll have to learn the system enough, because it is still being lenient. But with that said, the third story battle introduces us to another noble-born.

Algus in the PS1 script, Argath in the PSP script, this seemingly hapless character negatively impacts the story for the greater. As an aside, my first experience with him did involve some of the worst RNG where he happened to die before I could even feasibly reach him. What a timeline that would have been to live in! To say his role in the arc of chapter 1 is gutwrenching wouldn't be seliing it properly. The worst part is that you can't even say he backstabbed you. He was always upfront in his role in the story. He was truly an ignoble-born through and through. But. His family had been disgraced two generations higher, and they were never able to live it down. Even Argus was caught within their faulty system. Algath, ever the pawn, but a well-written one to contrast another character whose noble heritage initial obscures their treatment in the world they live in. It still doesn't excuse アルガス.

The story grows from there. The class-based system is corrupt, and the religion pushes it to its extreme. Is this an RPG where you kill god? In a sense. Is this deity a giant space flea out of nowhere? No, that's a different Final Fantasy trope. But I wanted to get into that first chapter in more depth than it needed to say that I really enjoyed the story. It goes deeper in its plot, and I am in awe of the writing. Even with the first game's flaws and relatively rushed translation job, it hits important emotional beats that have stuck with me. And maybe its narrative has shaped me more than the gameplay itself. My bias in loving this old tactics RPG is for the writing, and the gameplay was a packaged deal.

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{II} Detailed gameplay

I enjoy tactics RPGs. I'm not amazing at them. I've played a decent amount. Consider it part of the console generation I grew up with, but comparisons to Final Fantasy Tactics is the shorthand I have to go with, no matter how wildly different games are. That said, this gameplay isn't without its flaws. The angle they present the isometric view is limited. You can rotate the camera, and you can even tilt the angle. It's not always the best.[4] Objectively speaking, the PS1 version has several bugs.[5]

That said, game feel is what is important. Final Fantasy Tactics uses a job system, which lets your characters become archetypal roles. Most of the early jobs correlate to the first classes in the first Final Fantasy game. Your squire, a base class, can be equated to a warrior; The knight class requires some squire knowledge, making it akin to the job leveling in that first game; Thief allows for higher movement and evasion at the cost of attack and defense, opting to steal a target's equipment or other various effects; Wizard is coded to be the series' black mage—a class that specializes in offense through the game's magic stats, including the "faith" modifier, at the cost of physical attack and physical defense; Priest is the white mage—a class specializing in curative abilities and defensive buffs, also at the cost of physical attack and physical defense; and Monk, equivalent to the FF1 monk class (sometimes localized as black belt) whose equipment is limited in lieu of beneficial all-rounder skills.

What some familiar with FFI may have noticed is my lack of inclusion of FFI's red mage. FFT allows characters to use another job as a secondary. Red mages in FFI were an amalgamation of warrior, black mage, and white mage, being decently equipped and having access to spells. There isn't a dedicated red mage job. That said, FFT allows for a character to access a second job with skills they know while using their primary job's stats and equipment. This leads to a higher degree of customization.

What FFT fans may notice is that I also didn't mention all of the early game classes. For instance, chemists in the game are the class to build into other magic classes. They allow for the use of items, which includes throwing them further than other units. They have abilities that can protect against thieves, as well as an ability to pick up hidden treasure. Finally, they have access to the gun weapon. Unfortunately, guns aren't readily available in early game, but they have the longest horizontal range in a straight line and do (relatively) fixed damage. In lieu of guns for early game, physical attackers have archers for range. They can wield crossbows, as well as bows. Crossbows have a significantly limited range and don't arc, meaning they don't necessarily shoot over obstacles. That said, they can be paired with shields, and some of them cause status effects.

Going off that, the status effects in FFT have viable uses for strategies throughout various playstyles. Statuses like silence can utterly debilitate a unit, enemy and foe alike, denying access to skills. There are statuses that stop you from moving, or acting, or decreasing your "faith", or even becoming a chicken. Equipment is a form of preventative measure, and others are from affecting someone else's stats. If you happen to use a monster unit, they can naturally avoid certain statuses.

Along with statuses, the game uses a rock-paper-scissors system attached to a character's zodiac. Different zodiacs behave differently to each other. The in-game date also affects a unit's stat bonuses. Although the mechanic isn't quite hidden, it's not one a casual player such as myself will delve into, adding more RNG to the system. This RNG is what adds to the thrills of moves that connect or not. The game displays these percentages, so you can make an informed decision on whether or not you want to use a move. That said, the percentage of landing a hit is a separate calculation from a shield blocking an attack, whose calculations aren't immediately revealed to the player.

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{III} Things I (dis)like. Yeah.

Things I like:

I want to mention less dry and guide-like mentions. Just things I like. You can ride chocobos! You can also get a boost from larger units to go up and down places! The game has really cute pigs. Casually, monks go BRRR! and you can go pretty far with them. I brought Mustadio to the final fight and he was vital to my victory at the time, you don't always need Cid. Also Cid is broken, please buff. Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII is in both versions. Balthier from Final Fantasy XII is in the PSP version! You can also get Luso Clemens from Final Fantasy Tactics: A2 in the PSP version~! The PS1 version is easy to cheese with the JP Scroll Glitch. The PSP version allows for a dark knight and onion knight class! The PSP version has multiplayer, in both versus and co-op missions! Worker 8 (Construct 8) has a BEEG laser, and is also a said BEEG unit you can use as a stepladder of sorts! Innocent status means Worker 8 is immune to magic, so you can trade blows from afar! The Calculator Job doing whatever it wants is great. Killing Algus is great on PS1. Killing Argath again on the PSP was cathartic. He's the absolutely most despised villain in the franchise. Dragon Reis. Also Reis hitting a monster so hard with a purse, they join our party! I actually enjoyed using geomancers, and having fun is just as important! I haven't ONCE mentioned the music, but that soundtrack is so catchy and emotional! I love the sound of bows being pulled, but repurposing it in cutscenes for pulling people feels so visceral for me. Having ridiculously high speed and just stripping an opponent of their valuables. Pushing someone down a cliff. Pushing someone down a cliff onto someone. Pushing someone down a cliff onto someone against a wall. Pushing someone down a cliff onto a pile of others as the game tries to figure out where to place everyone as they bounce around, taking damage. Agrias. :3

Things I don't like:

Algus. Argath. Percentages not matching with the perceived feel. After doing a bunch of convoluted sidequest requirements, you get Cloud at level 1. The original game allowed a total of 16 units, limiting monster farming a bit. Also, monsters constantly breeding. Rafa/Rapha and Malek having RNG tied to their job-specific classes, because I really think they're a cool story addition. As fun as riding chocobos is, bringing a chocobo in, filling a slot. I probably wouldn't be able to handle the speed of the game. I don't hate the camera angles as much as others, but when they're bad, they're bad. Choosing monster units to poach, only for RNG to summon the horde (The horde is not worth poaching).

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{IV} References:

[1]https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2154602/ (Michael Baskett)
[2]https://j-entranslations.com/translation-chat-16-stephen-meyerink-chats-about-final-fantasy-tactics-the-war-of-the-lions/ (Stephen Meyerink, hosted by Jennifer O'Donnell)
[3]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOewqwA1Wto (Evandro Anselmo)
[4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUKLkxQaQVE (Ulillillia)
[5]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urTo_43pK8U (Ulillillia)