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.