Wintermind said:
FFT is pretty much the only Final Fantasy game worth a damn. Even if the story is essentially totally linear, it's basis (the War of the Roses) is actually interesting and the characters are quite nice. Which version are you playing? The original PSX version or the PSP update/relrease, FFT: The War Of the Lions?
And if you're not actually playing on a console/handheld, you might want to look into some mods that patch it up/balance things a bit more properly.
I was playing the PSX version on the PS3, I lost my disk, so I downloaded the one from the PSN store. I heard the PSP version updated a few things, so that might be interesting to look at, but I don't have one, although I'm sort of interested in seeing if I can get one cheap to play Persona 2: Innocent Sin (although it sounds like they have censored it some). I still like FF3/6 also (although that has a lot of nostalgia going for it), and I think FF2/4 and original FF where good games for when they came out, even if they aren't great now.
I prefer 2-D PSX games though (or combo 2D-3D things like Persona and Tactics), as 3-D from that area mostly looked like crap.
After finishing FFT, I decided to play Tactics Ogre for the first time in a while as well. So far it does some things better and some things worse. Pure 2-D means no rotatable camera, which can be rough sometimes and the job system in FFT is cool, but the battles in TO are more tactical because your characters aren't overpowered, you have 10 man teams instead of 5, the enemy squads are also larger and you have permanent death. Also the localization seems much better and you're given some real choices to make. Also if I remember correctly TO retains its difficult late in the game, FFT was kind of the joke in chapter 4, including the end boss, especially after the horrible fight against Wiegraf/Velius at the end of Chapter 3.
FFT is very linear, as are a lot of games in the genre. One thing I really liked about Alpha Protocol was the flexibility of the order you could do the missions and how the various choices and objectives you met on the missions affected later missions, I think this sort of structure would work really well in SPRG type game, as they are also largely objective and mission based.
One really notices that Sawyer put a bit more thought into the encounter design, everything is challenging but never unfair. It's much better than to create artificial difficulty by HP bloat and spawning wave after wave of the same trashmobs.
