03 November, 2002

Final Fantasy Tactics

I finished Final fantasy Tactics last night. 

It was very good... I enjoyed its storyline more than any other Final Fantasy game I've ever played. The downsides of the game were many, however -- it was far too short, and they screwed up two plot points that could have made the game twenty times better. 

An aside: Is it just my own opinion that changing it would have made the plot better, or would it really have been better if it had been changed? 

Anyway, the main character, Ramza, did not die in the final scene. That sucked. He should have died. How could the game have portrayed him as a hero for the entirety of the game and thennot killed him off in the end? It was even a dumb way of avoiding death. It reminded me of how Goku avoided death at the end of the Frieza saga in DragonBall Z. Talk about corniness. 

Furthermore, the whole premise of the narrator was pathetic. It made sense at first, when I started playing the game, but as time wore on, I came to realize the question: How exactly did the narrator get all this information? And how is it that this information was recovered hundreds of years in the future, as the game was supposedly telling me that it had? It felt inconsistent. The game had a great story, but why couldn't they have just told it from the perspective of the hero, Ramza? Or perhaps even an omnipotent perspective would have been better than what they used. 

But overall, the story was near-perfection. It said almost exactly what I felt it should have said when I felt that it should have said it. It referenced old stories well, though it followed some too faithfully (Beowulf comes to mind), and it gave a sense of 'heroism'. 

The portrayal of Delita in the game was flawless. I remember thinking before the final scene of Delita's two choices, and wondering which he would do. Either choice would have made a statement - but I was so tempted to believe that Squaresoft would never make a game that chose the second option... And yet, they did. Delita did what I would have done if I had been Delita, and I didn't want to admit it. I won't spoil the story for those of you who haven't played FFT... But I will make a huge reccommendation: if you ever get the chance to play it, then play it. Seriously. It really is a wonderful game. 

... 

I realize this entry doesn't seem finished -- that's because it isn't. But I'm too hungry to keep writing right now. I'll write more later.

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