The highest grossing video game of all time

Fun fact, Final Fantasy Tactics is actually the best Final Fantasy game. One of the defining games of the strategy-RPG genre, this game has one of the coolest combat systems you’ll find. It contains a job system not unlike one you’ll find in some other Final Fantasy games, but this is by far the job system at its deepest. There are 20+ really distinct classes which are all unlocked in pretty intuitive ways, as you have to develop certain jobs to specific levels in order to gain the ability to swap to a more advanced job; for example, if you want a character to be a samurai, you’re going to need to have that person reach a certain level as a knight, monk, and lancer, as the samurai class tends to draw traits from each of them. The best part about this system, though, is the level of customization inherent in each job. There’s a pretty impressive amount of skills, movement abilities, and reaction abilities that each class has access to, and you can only gain access to the skills by acquiring JP (job points) in battle. JP can be a reasonably scarce resource over the course of a normal playthrough, so this leads to a lot of meaningful choices in how you want to shape the role of each character. To add to this complexity, whenever a character switches jobs they can mix and match a certain amount of skills they’ve previously learned from other jobs, so there’s a pretty great amount of player agency present throughout. The combat system certainly isn’t perfectly balanced, but that’s kind of the beauty of it: the game seems tailor-made for the player to discover broken combinations and fulfill that satisfying power fantasy, as the game can be brutally difficult at times. It also manages to make the game infinitely replayable, as there all sorts of self-imposed challenges you can place on yourself, such a straight class challenge where you try and beat the game using only a single job.

The other main draw of Tactics is the story. I again want to avoid spoiling much of it because it’s a game that you owe it to yourself to play, but I can say that it features one of the most complex political plots I’ve seen in a video game. It does a great job of juggling an impressive cast of characters, each with their own political philosophies and motivations that (mostly) track really well throughout the course of the game. The strength of the plot and characterization in the original PS1 version of the game really shines through despite some pretty awkward localization work; however, the War of the Lions remake on the PSP totally fixes this problem and turns the script into a Shakespearean version of itself befitting the literary nature of the story. If you’re at all into the intense political maneuvering present in something like A Song of Ice and Fire, you’re a near-lock to love what Final Fantasy Tactics does with its narrative. It isn’t perfect and can veer off of its strengths a little, but it still executes it better than nearly every other game I’ve played which attempts to tell an epic political story. This is an all-time favorite of both of us, and an easy choice to grab in the 6th round.