A few weeks ago, I started playing Final Fantasy Tactics. I’d bought it for something to play during my 2-week break from Final Fantasy 14 and while it certainly kept me occupied, it didn’t really hook me. I don’t have the nostalgic tie to it that many other people do and have to admit that it left me feeling a little underwhelmed even after applying a correction to the expectations set by all those people for whom this game was a significant part of their youth. So many people spoke about the impressive story, about some of the subversive lines, and the way the game supposedly flips the bird to authority in a way that was supposedly unheard of in games at the time. I just don’t see it. The writing isn’t bad, of course, but it’s still pretty normal. It’s on the positive side of neutral for a video game, but I think my penchant for reading a lot has worked against the idea that this is excellent, unheard-of writing even for when it originally came out in the late 90s. I mean, there was a lot of subversive media in the 90s, depending on what you consider subversive, and the idea of fighting authority or turning against family in the name of justice is a classic trope in heroic storytelling. I know I was probably just oversold on it to the degree that it has warped even my ability to dial back my expectations, but I have to say that I’m just not hooked by the story in the way so many of my contemparies seem to be. The gameplay is pretty good, though, so it’s not like I’m having a bad time. I am just having trouble sticking to it.

Central to the gameplay is gearing, training, and leveling your team. You can recruit a relatively large number of allies, most of whom will be hired randos, but you can only ever bring a maximum of five people into battle with you unless there’s some plot-based NPCs working alongside you that you’re now responsible for keeping alive despite how many of them clearly want nothing more than to be ingloriously slain as a result of overextending themselves for absolutely no reason at all. Given the way that strength is actually accumulated in this game, a mix of character levels, job levels, and gear, it can be easy to bring a new character into the fold, but it can take a LONG time for them to actually become truly powerful. Most of the story-recruited characters make up for this by coming in with some kind of special abilities that give them utility beyond mere damage or skill variety, but I still find myself turning to the randos I’ve had since the very beginning of the game since they’ve had the most time to accumulate Job Points. Which are an entire huge system all on their own. All of your skills come from your jobs. You get a set built-in from the job you have equipped on the character, but then you can also import entire skill sets from another class, various passives, and even some reaction skills. The entire build of your character’s abilities is based on what jobs you have unlocked, what abilities you’ve unlocked in that job, and what unlocked skills you have equipped. Which means that changing jobs a bunch to try out different combinations can royally screw you over if you’re not careful and forget to reapply a skillset you were depending on (it has happened to me so many times).

Now, this job system isn’t necessarily bad or anything. It allows me to build some incredibly varied characters and even adapt them to whatever weird situation I find myself in for a battle. It also means that I have to do a HUGE amount of grinding in order to get the points required to unlock more skills. Sure, it helps that these points are shared at a reduced rate across all characters in the battle who have the job that earned any points in the battle, but it’s such a slow process that even building out the ability to use a wide variety of items has taken the entire time I’ve been playing the game. Plus, some jobs require so many skill points that it feels nearly impossible to actually unlock them all without dedicating my entire playthrough to that one job. In order to get the most use out of your job point accumulation, you really need to invest in figuring out the systems of the game, in keeping a large amount of gear around (especially because some enemies can just BREAK YOUR GEAR!!!), and in getting everyone the passive skill that boosts Job Point accumulation. That one’s crucial to having any kind of success without needing to do so much grinding that you lose track of what you’re supposed to actually be doing in the game. Which can be rather frustrating because the enemies you run into while wandering around the world scale to your level, but the ones attached to the plot do not and it turns all of the story missions into trivial non-challenges. It’s a little frustating that actual skill variety requires all that grinding but the game’s story seems to believe that you’re not actually training constantly in order to unlock the skills you need.

Honestly, overall, it feels like the kind of game I keep around to play when I’ve got nothing else going on. It’s a bit more accessible and easy to return to than stuff like Armored Core VI and less overall daunting than something like Dragon’s Dogma, so I think I stand a decent chance of actually beating this game eventually, I just have so much else that I’d rather be doing right now. Final Fantasy 14 chores to do, a new Pokémon game to play (more on that tomorrow), an apartment to clean, sleep to maybe get, and even the restarting of my book club with my friend. All stuff that holds much more mental space in my head than FF Tactics does. I mean, I’d rather play that than clean my apartment, but cleaning my apartment actually weighs on me and Tactics does not, so cleaning has won every time so far. Maybe once I’m out of other stuff to play and Tactics goes back to being the game sitting in my Switch 2 at any given time I’ll go back to playing it a bunch, but maybe not. I didn’t play it for quite a while when it was loaded in, so maybe I’ll never go back. As entertaining as it can be and as enjoyable an experience I can get from it, it just isn’t all that compelling. It gives me nothing to think about when I’m not playing and that’s kind of damning, in my opinion. I think about EVERYTHING way too much (I’ve literally spent the last couple days considering doing an all-plot-lines replay of Fire Emblem: Three Houses so I can talk about the interesting story structure that exists between all four potential paths), so something that doesn’t stick in my head at all is unlikely to hold my attention even when I’m trying to apply it. Which is too bad. A lot of people love that game and I’d really like to give it a chance for me to like it as well.