How To Dominate FF Tactics

[OutlawTorn]

I'm not going into the whole game. This is a short guide on how to make a 5-man party that will dominate ANY battle from EARLY on. There are still some challenges, but using this guide, you can complete this long, potentially challenging game with ease, seeing your character's maximum and desired potential.

First off is your Zodiac, determined by your main character Ramza's birthday. This is the most important part of your party's growth throughout the entire game, believe it or not. We'll get to that in one short moment.

Next you'll have to go through some storyline, a reverse jump into time, and another battle. But soon you'll be taken to a map screen where you can enter town.

•Go to your menu.
• Formation
•Menu again
•Item
•Now leave Ramza's gear alone, but unequip ALL of the Squire's and Chemists in your group.
•Now disband them all.
• Return to the Map
• Enter town and Sell this Extra Gear
• Save your File

• Return to town and go to the Soldier Office. Here you will recruit male or female soldiers. Females cost a tiny bit less than males (savagely sexist in an innocent way). With the money you have, you can afford about 3. You've deleted your loyal followers because you don't want to waste ANY JP on these sub-par randoms, who may or may not be compatible with Ramza.

When you have enough money from battles, recruit your 4th.

What you're looking for are 3 things. Their Zodiac, Brave & Faith. But let's break down the Zodiac.

Each Zodiac sign has other ones it's either Best, worst, good, or bad with. Others are neutral. The Best is Always of the opposite sex, whether Ramza is the character(s) in question or not. You can check the compatibility of any sign by calling up the help menu, navigating to the Zodiac sign, and clicking accept.

You want 4 characters that are compatible with Ramza, and each other. Luckily I'm using my party as an example to demonstrate one way to do that very well.

Ramza (Edge) - Male/Aries/70/70
Talla - Female/Libra/70/70
Sol - Male/*Leo/70/65
Flint Male/*Aries/69/70
Victor Male/Sagittarius/70/54

Sol is only compatible with Ramza and Flint, but he is a lot like Ramza is functionality. They are my Regulators, so his JP bonus from Ramza is all he needs, the bonus from Flint just makes him more versatile and gives him Teleport after a short while of a Flint being a Time Mage. Ramza gets it through Talla because I still master it with her.

Victor is the defensive meat shield to protect Flint & Talla if and when need. His focus is Knight/Lancer/Monk.

Flint is compatible with everyone (except Ramza), including a Best with Talla, and they focus in opposite magic classics. Flint is Black/Time, Talla is White/Summons.

Flint and Ramza are Worst, but it does 't hinder anyone in the party, they are both compatible with 3 people, and the rest are with 2. It's a beautiful, near-perfect system for my aggressive, dominant style of play.

As an example of the power the Zodiac system has, Flint mastered Ninja without ever being one from getting a bit of JP from Sol & Victor every time they got JP as a Ninja.

• Try to get everyone with at least one 70 in the area of focus (magic or melée) you want them to specialize in.

• Once you have 4 of your own characters you named, maybe associated some sort of identity and character with, you'll grow far more invested in their growth outside of the plot (which they don't impact at all).

• Now it's training time
• Leave everyone as Squires
• Check everyone Abilities, and if you have JP to spend, buy Throw Stone. (this let's you Attack and earn JP from a range. Early on with limited movement, it earns JP quicker, so you get JP Up and everything after quicker)
• Battle it out.
• In your first battle, kill everything ASAP.
• Go back to Town, buy Potions
• Learn JP Up on whoever you can (everyone is learning Stone, JP Up, Counter Tackle & Accumulate/Focus)

• Now comes the real training. Everyone might not have JP up, so this round we grind.
• In battle (at the Mandalia Plain) leave 1 chocobo at the end of the battle.
• Corner and surround him while keeping him alive.
• Get everyone to Stone him, using Potions on him him if his health gets too low. Of on yourself if someone gets low, you're the priority.

• Rack up JP til you run out of Potions, then kill him.
• Everyone learns JP Up, Counter Tackle & Accumulate. Don't have to master Squire, I do but you don't.

• Asap though, you're gonna wanna Master Monk on EVERYONE. I mean everyone. I keep Monk as the second ability for 3-4 of my party members at all times, as it's the best Job in the game, hands down.

Skills you wan to Learn from the Monk Job:
•Chakra
• Revive
•Counter
•Wave Fist
•Earth Slash
•Stigma Magic

You're ready to dominate.

While training Monk to start, have Squire as your secondary. Accumulate which you should have before leaving Squire increases your attack, making the Monk a 1-hitter quitter sometimes.

Later in the game, you'll be able to buy something called an Angel Ring. This revives you whenever you die. Put one on everyone when you feel or know a boss/greasy fight is coming.

You'll glide through the game enjoyably setting up your party well and grinding for hours on trapped prey using chakra to heal it and yourself at no cost. Grinding like this isn't cheap if you do it for 5-7 turns, rather than 20-30 like I've heard of my buddies doing, mastering Jobs in 1 Battle. It let's you make quicker progress in your desired specialities early on.

Thanks for reading. Hope that helped some people.

[loaf]

tl;dr version

Master the Monk job.

[Alpha]

I only found this game difficult in the beginning. Very quickly, even without any idea what you're doing, you get a few characters who can start killing things in one or two turns. Every battle is a numbers game. Once you've killed half of the enemy team and your fighters are all standing, you have to actively try in order to lose.

I love this game, but I didn't try and dominate. It just happens. I actually tried to not grind and to actively make my team less powerful, in order to make the battles more challenging.

[loaf]

The game has difficult parts that can really screw you over.

There is one part that can make you restart your whole game if you aren't strong enough and you don't have a save file before the event

[OutlawTorn]

I too picked it up very quickly, but Tactics is a difficult, "tricky*" game. By it's nature (strategic warfare), it lends itself to having to use your brain, and the various types of units made available.

If you can pick this game up, start a new file, and drift through it without focusing on your character's growth and abilities a reasonable amount of the time, I would really love to see a thread from you about it.

If I want to be challenged I play chess, or a fighting game with a human being. When I play a strategy game, I'm aiming to execute the best possible strategy, every single time. I wouldn't step into a boxing match thinking, "I'm going to go easy on him, give him a chance to mess me up; really challenge me tonight." Strategy games are my forte, and there's no quarter given in war.

I have a winner's mentality. It's not enough for me to defeat your entire army, I'm doing it with minimum casualties and burnig your base to the ground.

I made this thread for people who suck at Tactics and didn't get to beat it, so they understand how the Zodiac works, that it gives Bonus JP to other characters, and that Monk = God Job. All this was so THEY can beat it.

If you've beaten Tactics, why do you need a guide from some random guy online?

[HUNK]

Hmm, here's a question I pose: If they didn't have the drive to look into the in game tutorials or at least look it up online, do they really deserve to beat it?

I would like to think that if whoever it is in this world that is struggling to play and progress in Final Fantasy Tactics is doing so because they simply haven't paid any attention to how to play the game. The way that tactics is set up is still in the older fashion of making the player learn how to play the game themselves. It doesn't force you to sit down and learn what zodiac compatibility does or what bravery and faith are, it lets you wander into battles on your own and when your whole team has 70 faith and you constantly die to every black mage who looks at you funny, it becomes your responsibility to find out why that's happening.

Tactics is my favorite of the entire Final Fantasy series and I've studied the game to the point I could teach classes on it, but you know why I did all that studying in the first place? Cause I got my a$$ handed to me several times by certain bosses and parts of the game. It made me that much more interested in the game and more invested in my team because I eventually realized that I couldn't just use the same characters to beat everything. (Til you got Orlandu anyway)

These days I'm much like others in the sense that I still play tactics and try to dumb down my team or limit their potential to try and make the game more challenging. I really wish that Square would've expanded more on the original Tactics cause it was a great game and had a few things in it's combat that made it unique. There really does need to be a harder version. The thing I like about tactics is that you can have the best gear and all the jobs mastered but can still loose if you don't know which abilities and equipment to use. Those two extra speed points from that Thief Hat could be the difference in a good character and a great character!

I've really gotten off track here though in my little nostalgic trip... (My bad) My point is that I don't think we should reward a gamers ability to look up a strategy on how to beat a game. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with needing help and looking for it online, I'm just saying there shouldn't be a guide saying "Use this job, with this equipment" I think it takes the fun out of the customization in that game.