I’m in a difficult place with this game because on paper it’s checking a lot of my boxes, and compared to probably MOST other video games it is just flat better in most ways, but its pedigree is really weighing it down. Unfortunately for Final Fantasy Tactics, it’s the last Matsuno game I never played, and when it’s stacked up against what’s come before it AND what will come after, it finds itself unfortunately lacking in almost every department.

Narratively, I like what’s going on here, I like it a lot! You might say this story was specifically crafted to appeal directly to me, a horny little communist who thinks chocobos and demons are cool in equal measure. Unfortunately I have also played the SNES Tactics Ogre that this is kind of a sequel to, which hits a lot of these beats more thoroughly and with more freedom of expression. For supernatural twists, the idea that this is all playing into the machinations of greater supernatural powers who must be resisted and that this is going to become the primary story at the expense of discussing or resolving the actual political tensions at play, well, Final Fantasy XII may be this game’s stupider, goofier little cousin but it does THAT specific thing with a lot more elegance and heft than this game does, even if its ultimate conclusions are extremely dumb. Vagrant Story too offers much deeper character portraits and more interesting views into versions of the machinations of sinister churches and occult demonology than this game does. It’s not that anything here is bad by any means, far from it! I just couldn’t shake the feeling that there were three or four other games that I would rather be playing that this one was CONSTANTLY reminding me of.

The gameplay I have less to say about, it’s fine. I DO like playing this game better than Tactics Ogre. I think paring down the number of guys you have on the field and cutting the map sizes by like 60% is an extremely smart move, it’s just better to have 20 minute encounters given the grind of this game. Perhaps it is less tactical but with the breadth of options you have on display there is certainly no want for things to be mulling over, especially with how intentionally obfuscated many of the systems are. This is my big complaint I think. There are too many things to do? Too many classes, too many spells, too many stats. I don’t mind a complex game by any means but I don’t think a lot of the stuff here is particularly additive. I understand that this game has an ardent following of hardcore fans who have broken it over their collective knee and this shit is what they live for and I do respect that. But for me it was tedious. There are generally too many things to do, too many options, and too many encounters – and not enough are interesting or challenging enough to justify how many of them are here or how long it takes to accomplish anything. The grind was just keeping me from the next cutscene of a guy talking cool about wanting to kill a rich dude, or the next absolutely incredible bespoke animation of a squat little sprite grabbing another one by the collar.

But god, how good ARE those animations? How good ARE those sprites? This game is fuckin beautiful, dude. There’s a guy really early on, I think it’s the beginning of chapter 2, who realizes he’s about to die after he thought he was hot shit and he gets mad and throws his hat on the ground and there is so much EXPRESSION in that animation. There’s gorgeous little work like that that you’ll see only once in the whole game peppered throughout the entire thing and it’s always a treat. The music is uniformly incredible, as expected from the legendary Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata. The Final Fantasy-ness of it all is definitely just kind of an aesthetic hastily pasted over the story and world this team actually wanted to create and to me that’s just more charming. Ivalice as it was originally conceived is a very weird little place, it’s got a lot of charm to it.

So yeah I dunno. I feel weird about it. A game I like a lot in chunks but in the moment of actually playing it would really rather be doing almost anything else by a lot of these people.