Revier's Chronicles of Ivalice - Final Fantasy Tactics, Interlude 1 - The Class System

 Since I am halfway through Final Fantasy Tactics, I feel compelled to write about its class system, and compare it to how its predecessor, Tactics Ogre, handled the mechanic. Obviously, I should clarify that I've clearly not reached the "end" of the former's class tree, and my opinion could change in light of new revelations. But, having seen a fair share of this game's classes, and how they work in practice. I feel qualified enough to write this piece.

Final Fantasy Tactics Classes, In A Nutshell

The basic mechanics behind the class system are deeply layered, yet simultaneously oddly simple. Each character, barring certain special characters, starts out either in a basic fighter class (Squire) or a basic healer class (Chemist). Progression from these starting points is obtained in one of two ways:

In the first, the player expends skillpoints to unlock skills from the class' skillset. Skills, broadly speaking, come in four types:

a. Active skills, skills that are tied to the class' innate command, and must be activated in battle to be used.
b. Counter skills, skills that trigger when the character is attacked.
c. Passive skills, which take effect passively, so long as they're equipped.
d. Movement skills, which alter the character's movement allowance.

As I briefly hinted at above, skills do need to be equipped to take effect. Equipping skills works like this:

A character can have one of each skilltype equipped at any point of time. The exception is class commands, where the character is forced to have their current class' command equipped, but can equip a command of a different class once they unlock it.

Which brings us to our second means of progression:

Characters unlock new classes by leveling up in the preceding class. Class levels progress by gaining enough skillpoints to hit certain thresholds, and skillpoints are gained by taking actions as the class. Naturally, the whole "xp by actions" system is prone to abuse, and encourages some rather unnatural gameplay patterns, but I'm going to assume honest play here. After all, most RPGs do have grinding as an option, albeit as a last ditch one.

To get back to the topic: new classes are styled roughly around three progression paths:

a. The mighty path: A series of classes focused on bulk and physical damage.
b. The swift path: A series of classes focused on evasion and skillful attacks.
c. The magical path: A series of classes focused on spellcasting.

Each class modifies the character in certain ways:

a. It determines what gear they can use.
b. It alters their stats, including HP and MP, to match their class' role.
c. It alters their main class command.

Each class has its own pool of skillpoints, and gaining skillpoints as a class only adds them specifically to that class' skillpoint pool. A minor, yet important quirk is that class skillpoints earned by a character get carried over to other characters, even if they're in different classes. The carried amount is a fairly small proportion of the total, but it's still pretty helpful for the purposes of unlocking cheap(ish) skills without spending time in the class itself.

Analysis

We've comprehensively covered the nuts and bolts of the class system. But, how does it play?

Pretty well, all things considered! It provides a huge tinkerbox that allows creating some crazy combinations, like a white mage who can use shields to get humongous amounts of evade, or a thief who can use swords to be a great skirmishing fighter. There's a lot of genuine possibilities here, and it is a great delight, and arguably the biggest pull of this game.

But there are certainly flaws, and these are easily noticeable even without diving deep into the system.

1. The skillpoint costs are too high.

This is pretty obvious even in the first few hours of the game - skills cost hundreds upon hundreds of points to unlock, and the good skills can easily cost around 500 points if not more. Meanwhile, each action gives only 10, maybe 20 or 30 skillpoints at best. Yeah, uhh, it takes forever to buy anything (or at least, anything good) with those prices!

Further deepening this problem is the way the game handles new classes - the character doesn't start with any of the class' skills learnt! They do start with some skillpoints, but they're too paltry, and don't make up for giving up the active command of a former job.

2. The class progression makes no sense

So you might remember me mentioning about how this game has three progression paths styled around specializing in might, agility or magic? Well, that's how it works in theory. In practice, there's quite a few class progressions that just make no sense, like the lithe, lightly armored thief "upgrading" into a...heavily armored spearman that jumps on their foes. Or the white mage, the party cleric, transforming into some sort of status based gimmick wizard at their next tier. This not only looks nonsensical, it also frustrates attempts at planning progression through the classes. To quote from my own LP:

"Doing so however revealed a rather silly trait of the class system - many of the class unlocks made no damn sense! To demonstrate, here's what the paths for all the classes so far looked like.

Squire →Knight→Monk→Geomancer (!)

Squire→Archer→Thief→Lancer (??)

Chemist→White Mage→Oracle (???)

Chemist→Black Mage→Time Mage (?!?!)

Yeah, uhhh...I can't make head or tail out of those progression paths at all! It seems like they tried to mesh the class system of Final Fantasy 5 with the linear class progression of Tactics Ogre, except Tactics Ogre had linear progression because the later classes were meant to be upgrades (or, at the very least, considerable sidegrades)!"

3. Many active skills are boring, and/or don't feel thematic

Remember the picture showing off the Knight's active skills? Notice how most of them are equipment breaks or stat debuffs, which make no sense for a knight? Or what about the Archer's active skills, which are just increasingly longer charges, to the point of absurdity? Yeahhh...quite a few of the active skills are like that. That's one place where I strongly feel the designers fumbled most of the execution, giving bloated lists of largely pointless skills instead of genuinely interesting stuff. They really deserved better.

Tactics Ogre's Class System

This article has gone on for pretty long already, but I shall give a summary of Tactics Ogre's system, to give an idea of what the designers based this system on, and highlight just how far they diverged from it while taking its ideas.

Tactics Ogre the original mainly segregated classes based on both the character's gender and their alignment. Classes didn't restrict equipment, but had a huge influence on stats, as they influenced stat growth in very noticeable ways. Further, classes controlled how much the characters resisted each element, whether they could use spells, and what sorts of spells they could use (all spells were bought from shops, and not tied directly to the character). The game obviously didn't have any skills nor skillpoints to purchase them, most of the distinction came from the stats, the spells they could use, and their resistances. It handled class progression pretty linearly, with new classes being unlocked upon gaining enough stats to hit their thresholds, and while some branches did have their fair share of oddness (a Lawful Knight can only upgrade into a Swordmaster? What??) it wasn't very hard to figure out who needed to be upgraded to what.

Actually, it is remarkable how entertaining TO's class system is, considering how basic it sounds in description. I think that's down to the presentation, the spells being interesting in their own right, and the alignment/gender restrictions forcing some significant choices in party composition. Further, while the game may not have any fancy skills, it has more than enough stat crunching to make even the seemingly basic classes matter more.

Ultimately, the difference in the two comes down to their purpose. FFT's class system is built mainly to provide an entertaining tinker box to create whatever characters you can fancy of. TO's class system, by contrast, is built to manage the long term growth of the player squad, with the player constantly having to work with the limitations of their units. It is utilitarian by comparison, but that's not really a bad thing, and is frankly reasonable considering how much larger the player squad is in that game.

TO having FFT's system would, far from making things enjoyable, likely only make the experience a huge drag - FFT's tweakbox, while certainly very entertaining in its own right, is quite time consuming too, even with the party being limited to five whole units (including the protagonist). Similarly, give FFT TO's class system and you'd have a rather bland and frustratingly constrained experience. Both are tailored for very different experiences, and shine the brightest in their most appropriate contexts. 

I further suspect that the above is why both the PSP remake, and Reborn, which is based heavily on that remake, ended up flubbing most of the charm outside of the story. But that's a story for another time, ofc.