Final Fantasy Tactics

Final Fantasy Tactics centers around the war in Ivalice. It's a story with political intrigue and religious subtleties. You start off as Ramza, defending a town against a group of thieves with your own squad of soldiers. As it goes on, it gets deeper, and the story gets darker.

The battle system is really well done. You can take five people into battle (including Ramza). It's not like a typical turn based game. There are things to consider such as Brave and Faith. Higher Brave means the person will take off more damage physically and take less from enemies. Higher Faith means the person will do more magic damage and spells like cure will have a better effect.

There's also the Zodiac system. Just like horoscopes, everyone has a zodiac sign, certain signs will do better against certain other signs, and vice versa.

There's a lot of Job Classes you can have your people learn too. Such as Squire, Knight, Archer, Time Mage, Black Mage, White Mage, Summoner, Thief, Chemist, Mime, Calculator, Dancer, Oracle, Monk, Geomancer, Lancer, Samurai, Ninja, Bard and Mediator.

There's also an insane amount of secrets and sidequests and optional stuff. One is fur shops. If you have Secret Hunt, which a Thief learns, when he kills a monster, it'll be converted into fur, and you can take it to a fur shop and buy different weapons and armor then usual depending on how good the fur is.

You can also find hidden items in the battlefields if you have the Chemist's move find ability. If you don't, you'll hit a trap.

Also, if you manage to capture a monster, they'll begin breeding. With themselves if necessary. You'll start getting stronger and stronger types of monsters, and you can poach them yourself if you want, instead of waiting to find them.

There's also secret characters you can get. Not just from the game's story itself. You can get Cloud from FF7, and he has the same moves as his Limit Breaks in FF7.

Also, you can take jobs from bars around the world. The bartender gives you info about the job, you choose if you want to accept it, and if you do, you send three people on it for a certain amount of days. If you send the right types of people (job classes, high/ low faith and brave) you have a chance of getting treasures and unexplored lands. You can't actually battle in the unexplored lands though. All the treasures and lands are either from previous Final Fantasy games or other Square games. Like the Blue Materia, or Shrine of Chaos. If you don't get a treasure, you'll still get money and whoever you sent gets free JP.

Another thing I really like is if you kill a human enemy in battle. After their timer expires, they turn into a crystal, and you can get some of their abilities, even from your own people. There's a glitch to get every ability on the list when it's presented to you, so check that out.

Oh, and every random battle is not the same either. It's rare, but sometimes you'll find a human in battle that's not your enemy, if you win without them dying, they'll join you. It's a nice little change up from "Oh, now I gotta kill them again"

Oh, and if you're wondering about the enemy A.I. They're not stupid. They exploit everything they can do. Example: you cast cure on one of your soldiers, if it has to charge first, and there's an unused square next to the person, an enemy will purposely move into that square just so they'll get healed too. They know when to run and when to fight, and they know to move to higher ground or behind you to take the most damage off. They also know if they should try and break your weapon if you're beating them with it.

Get this game, you won't regret it.