Final Fantasy Tactics

Pardon the mess, we're reorganizing.

The Basics

- Play it on PSP, if you can. The story is better, there are neat bonuses, it looks nicer. It renamed some classes and most of the abilities, so if a tip's confusing you, that's probably why.

- Read the Tutorial for the basics, if you're playing PSP. Understanding how charge times and clock ticks work is a huge help. The PSX tutorial is a horribly-translated mess, and worthless for anything but comic relief.

- Lots of enemy bosses are Virgo. Make Ramza a Capricorn or Taurus (for good compatibility) and he'll be able to OHKO them with a strong magic attack.

- Make multiple saves. The game tends to suddenly spike in difficulty, and there are some places when after you finish a combat, either another one starts up immediately, or you are placed in an area of the map where no grinding is available. That can really screw a game over in some points if you are not set up for one or two of the fights.

- Early battles, much like Deus Ex, will be boring! This is because your characters just can't do much other than use items and hit stuff. Hold out! As your characters start advancing in other jobs, the strategic options will open up.

- The Guest/Special characters are powerful so use them. TG Cid is overpowered but even Agrias and Mustadio are very powerful if used correctly. The exception here is Cloud. He starts out at level one and his unique skills are rather average.

- Unless you want to drive yourself crazy, don't bother trying to get all of the rare/unique items. It takes forever and is not necessary for a normal play through. I think the best way to enjoy this game is to just follow the story, grinding where necessary.

- Triangle will bring up a turn listing-which will also show when spells will go of.

Mechanics

- Equipment and abilities tend to matter more than level unless there's a massive gap.

- Offense > Defense. Enemies typically can't heal/revive themselves worth crap so a bum rush strategy is usually the most effective.

- MA/PA/Speed > HP/MP. Raising your max HP doesn't make much of a difference and past chapter 1 fights should be over before your mages run out of MP. Ignore the Best Fit option and put on equipment that raise MA/PA/Speed.

- Males have better Physical Attack stats and growth, Females better Magic Attack stats and growth. Ramza has the strong points of both male and female. You WILL notice the difference between (for instance) a male Monk and a Female Monk.

- High Brave improves the attack power of unarmed strikes for the Monk and the basic attack of any monsters you might decide to take up. It also improves Knight Swords. Finally, high Brave improves the odds of Reaction Abilities. You can raise everyone's permanent Brave to 97 with no ill effects.

- High Faith improves all magic effects-damage dealt, healing dealt, healing taken damage taken, and the success rates of status magic(Both positive and negative). A caster is thus something of a glass cannon by default. Don't raise anyone's permanent Faith above 85 or so. Characters leave your party at 95.

- Line of sight attacks like guns, crossbows, books, harps, can hit those too close to be hit, so long as you target a square along the same path behind them.

- When a character earns JP, everyone else present earns a small amount of JP in that class as well. This can be very useful for teaching characters one ability from a class you otherwise don't want them to bother with.

- Don't neglect counter/support/movement abilities, and play around with secondary skills. Most of the classes with the best abilities don't have the stats to take advantage of them. And don't be afraid to mess around, there are lots of effective combinations.

- There is no benefit to mastering a job. If you ever feel you have all the worthwhile abilities for a job, move on to another one.

- Randomly created Crystals from dead humans (even your guys) could give you their learned abilities if your character doesn't know them. Kill your old guys off if you want to buff up late characters.

Jobs

- JP Boost should be the first ability you teach all your characters, and Move +1 provides a great early-game movement boost, but aside from that, they're not really useful. Ramza's Squire class is special. As you progress through the game he'll get more abilities and better equip options, making Squire his best all-around class by the last chapter. Don't be afraid to abuse his abilities during hard fights.

- At the start of the game (and arguably later on), Chemists are better healers than White Mages, as their healing is instant speed, consistent, and doesn't use MP, MA, or Faith. It's not uncommon to keep a Chemist around the whole game (Protip: They can equip guns). If you can't decide on a secondary skill to give someone, consider Items. Auto-Potion automatically uses the cheapest potion available. Don't bother with Find Items unless you're using a guide.

- Past Chapter 1, Knights tend to suffer from their lack of range and movement effects, and are mostly useful for what they offer other classes. Break is great on ranged classes, especially Break Speed. Weapon Guard is very useful for upping mages' early-game survivability, and the Equip Skills are all useful for certain builds.

- Archers are useful for three things: Access to better classes, Concentrate (ignore all evade), and Speed Save. Beyond that, they're worthless past Chapter 1.

- Black Mages will be your early damage dealers, and have the best MA in the game. Bolt 1 and Frog are the best early-game BM spells, and Arcane Strength raises MA by 33%. This is huge.

- White Mages are especially dependent on Faith, and, to a lesser extent, on Zodiac compatibility. Their healing is more potent than Items, but also requires a bit more micromanaging. Holy is the most powerful single-target spell in the game, but it eats MP like nobody's business. Healing also does damage to anything with the Zombie status, which can be a neat trick.

- How effective Monks are is directly proportional to how high the character's Brave is, as the damage raises exponentially. Chakra, Purification, and Revive do a lot to help Monks survive, and keep your party up and running. Among their secondary skills, Counter's good on front-line fighters, and giving other characters (hint: NINJAS) access to the Monk's potential damage output is just scary. Healthfont can be very useful, especially on Ramza.

- The success of the Thief's various Steal commands is based off Speed, except for Steal Heart, which uses MA. Poaching doesn't do anything until Chapter 3. If you're going to bother with it, use a guide. Move +2 is one of those great skills you give anyone who doesn't have something better.

- Oracles/Mystics can be disturbingly powerful. Drain and Osmose (HP and MP drain) are percentage-based, rather than a fixed sum. Their unique weapon, the Stick, is based off Magic Power, not Physical power, and it has a two-square range. Manafont is fucking amazing, full stop.

- Everything about Time Mages is good, but Haste and Teleport are absolutely the best. Teleport's guaranteed to succeed in the character's normal movement range, and gets less and less likely as you extend beyond that. 3 is always safe, and 4 or 5 will backfire only occasionally. It also completely ignores elevation and obstacles, and is very much in the running for the single best movement skill in the game. Don't bother with Stop, Slow usually does plenty.

- The following skills are awesome: Concentrate (from Archers, 100% hit chance), Blade Grasp (from Samurai, your Brave score becomes your evade chance against almost every weapon), Teleport (from Time Mages, move to any square that you could normally based on your move, but ignore height and obstacles like enemy units)

Monsters

- Don't use monsters for combat.

Specific Builds

- Build Ramza to be a decent melee fighter, he has two solo duels, one of which is notoriously hard.

- Monks with Attack Up make the best item stealers, due to slightly-wonky coding.

- A Monk with Dual Wield or a Ninja with Martial Arts will destroy anything that so much as looks at him funny. The latter is preferred, as it has higher speed.

Other/Unsorted

- White Magic is better than Item, but Item is more user-friendly for a first time player.

- Black Magic and Item rule the first chapter. Summon Magic rules the entire game. Math Skill rules the entire game even more.

- Summons only effect one team. Attack summons can only effect your guys if your summoner is confused. But you can target one of your guys who will move before the casting. The summon will be based on his final position.

- Never jump on a target that has more than 50 CT.

- Spam Accumulate/buffs to build 10 experience.

- The more advanced classes gain more stats per level and the Mime has the best growth.

- Press the right direction over your attacks. It should show character turns and display if your spell will hit in time. The higher speed of weak spells is much faster and reliable.

- Despite Males being better with physical classes and females being better with magical classes, Bard is a male only magic class opened from magic jobs, and Dancer is a female only physical class, opened by physical jobs.

- Speaking of Dancers, they're most effective earlier in the game.If only because of the speed difference between dances and your enemies. A pack of dancers can cripple an enemy team, giving you free reign to loot all their stuff.

- Summons will only target enemies or allies, never both. So you can target an ally who will move before the summon goes off and march them up into a group of enemies for some nice damage.

- Never use flails or axes, their damage is too random.

- Try and invite a uribo any time you see one. You can raise and poach them and their offspring (Porky/Wildbow) for some useful and otherwise unavailable items.

- Calculators will break the game in your favor if you figure out how they work.

- Be careful with Mimes. As they will mimic every attack and ability your generics have access to using their current facing.

- Buy a holy robe as soon as they're available, it will give you an edge in a particular solo battle. (There are only two, and one happens before you can buy them.)

- The effect of Elemental depends on which tile your geomancer is standing on if you don't have the associated ability, it doesn't work. However Counter Flood works regardless of whether you have the ability or not, also hits the surrounding tiles.

- Move find-item is best on people with low brave. Don't bother with it unless you're at Nelveska Temple or the Deep Dungeon.

- Rubber shoes trivialize the part of the Lionel Castle battle that doesn't involve Ramza.

- Some spells/summons can be learned by being hit and surviving it. Your unit must be in the class that learns the spell. All the big damage summons can be learned this way (Bahamut and lower on the list) As well a the top tier spell of each element/effect Fire/Ice/Bolt/Cure 4.

- For an amusing time, try playing FFT using the auto-battle. You want to set your guys on "Save fading life" if you're playing PS1 or "Healer" if you're playing PSP. Generally this will give your guys AI with the same rough priorities as the computer players. The only other useful auto battle option is the first one ("fight for life" or "berserker"), which will let you mark a specific unit to kill, but keep in mind this will in most cases cause your units to not give a shit about dead/dying friendlies. Still it can be an easy way to get through "kill Whatsisname" type missions.

- The AI also knows how to abuse Calculators, so if for some reason you feel you're not cheating enough, just look up what jobs you need to train one and enjoy watching the computer blow up the entire field in two seconds. Then restart and play it properly. Calculators have awful speed, though, so you may want to Haste and Yell at them while you grind their JP, and you'll probably feel like you earned it when you finally start obliterating things.

- On a related note, for fans of poaching, the AI is also very good at calculating the Mediator/Orator passive "Train" which converts anyone who gets hit down to critical by that unit. Also it never misses a lancer/dragoon Jump due to the enemy moving, though it will often stupidly kill its target with another of your units first.

- The AI's also pretty good at judging Charge (the Archer skill) and you can use it on just about anything except a gun. Play around with it on some melee attackers, though you may want a secondary with more utility to it. It also knows how to float arrows over long ranges from up hill or arc them over obstacles, though bows generally do shit damage and the AI will still generally prefer even piddling damage to a crippling Knight skill.

- Geomancers are horrible. Unless you're cheating, get Attack UP from them and then pretend they don't exist. Even though they use both magical and physical attack, their Elemental powers often hit for about as much as Counter Tackle.