Final Fantasy Tactics

About Final Fantasy Tactics

Final Fantasy Tactics (1997) is Square's PlayStation tactical role-playing game, Yasumi Matsuno's tale of class conflict and suppressed history in the kingdom of Ivalice during the Lion War.

Final Fantasy Tactics in Depth

Battles play out on compact three-dimensional isometric maps made of square tiles, where terrain and weather affect the fight and the camera can be rotated and zoomed. Turns are not taken in strict rotation: each unit acts when its Charge Time reaches 100, and it fills at a rate set by the unit's speed. Every successful action earns experience and job points. Between battles the player moves along fixed paths on a world map, visiting towns to take side jobs at the bar, buy equipment and recruit soldiers, while random encounters wait on marked spots.

The job system borrows the series' classic roles, including Wizards, Priests, Monks, Lancers and Thieves. Recruits start as Squires or Chemists, and reaching a set level in one job unlocks others, for twenty in all. Job points buy abilities within each class, and a unit can equip a second job's skills and separate reaction, support and movement abilities on top of its current class.

The story is framed as a historian's account of a long-buried report. After the Fifty Years War, Ivalice is split between Duke Goltana's Black Lion and Duke Larg's White Lion over who will act as regent for an infant heir. Ramza Beoulve, a cadet from a noble family of knights, and his commoner friend Delita Hyral break with the nobility after Delita's sister is killed, and Ramza uncovers how the Glabados Church engineered the war using the Zodiac Stones.

Making Final Fantasy Tactics

Production began at the end of 1995 under Yasumi Matsuno, who had left Quest Corporation after Tactics Ogre and brought several of its staff to Square, including artists Hiroshi Minagawa and Akihiko Yoshida and composers Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata. Sakaguchi produced, Taku Murata led programming, and Hiroyuki Ito designed the battle system, aiming to make it fast and exciting because he found tactical RPGs of the time boring. Matsuno wanted an accessible game focused on individual characters rather than the army simulation of Tactics Ogre, and the small diorama-like maps let it run at 60 frames per second. He said the class-based themes came from watching the hierarchy inside game companies and from Japan's Lost Decades. Against Final Fantasy VII's polished CGI, the team chose a hand-drawn look.

It was released in Japan on 20 June 1997 and in North America on 28 January 1998 by Sony Computer Entertainment. It sold almost 1.24 million copies in Japan in 1997 and over 2.4 million worldwide by August 2011. Critics praised its strategic depth, visuals and story, though some wanted larger battles and RPGFan criticised the English translation. It created the world of Ivalice, later used in Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy XII, and was remade for the PSP as The War of the Lions in 2007.