Final Fantasy Tactics was rereleased about a week ago and I’ve been all about it. I played it through when it originally came out back in the late 90s and it was one of the more memorable gaming experiences I’ve ever had. To have it remastered, polished, and fully voice-acted after all these years has been a nice trip down Memory Lane.
What I looked forward to the most with this rerelease was not so much revisiting the famously confusing and convoluted story, but making up my own story for the random starting units assigned to the main character at the beginning of the game.
For those of you unfamiliar with Tactics, you control a squad of units with various in-game jobs, from Squire to Chemist to Knight and so on. Over the course of the game you recruit special units with unique powers central to the story, but in the beginning you’re assigned a handful of randomly-named Squires and Chemists to accompany the main character.
When I first played Tactics all those years ago, my mind gravitated towards the group dynamics of that initial party because I made them all up. The in-game story is complicated and requires a flow-chart to follow, so in response to that my brain invented a little mini-drama for these starting schmucks. There was the ambitious one who cared only for her personal advancement, a love triangle of competing affection for the party’s healer, and many other “storylines” I invented for my own amusement. I remember that more than anything else playing Tactics.
I am happy to report that I’ve been able to recapture that magic all these years later. Not only that, I’ve dragged my wife into this exercise and now she’s got a squad of her own starting schmucks who have their own little storyline going.
Nostalgia is great to revisit, but it’s even better when it lives up to the memories of the experiences you held so dear.