It goes on and on my friends

Day 395

I am attempting to be as ridiculously thorough as possible in this runthrough of Final Fantasy Tactics because it's unlikely I'll play it again for a very long time. I want to unlock all of the abilities I've never seen before and experience any optional content I may not have done in previous playthroughs. Although I have unlocked Cloud once or twice before, I've never bothered to use him--primarily because his skillset requires a gargantuan amount of JP to master and he starts at level 1. To top that all off, he must wield a specific hidden weapon to use a single one of his Limit abilities, none of which are extremely powerful--so far. I can only imagine with significant Magic Attack investment the kind of damage these attacks would dead, but even then they require a pretty significant charging period.

Still, even though I've spent the better part of the last 20-25 hours of game time mindlessly grinding, I find that I'm enjoying myself. Like the Disgaea series, Final Fantasy Tactics boasts a pretty large variety of different skills and setups to unlock. In Disgaea, you have tons of different monsters, weapon abilities, magichange fusions, evilities, and all other kinds of cool stuff. The classes themselves differed very little as far as active abilities went. Final Fantasy Tactics instead has a huge amount of active abilities all of which are unique to specific classes. Every class has at least ten unique abilities as well as a handful of support abilities that can be used regardless of class after they've been learned.

What War of the Lions does lack is any kind of sandbox environment in which to experiment. Disgaea features endless worlds full of randomly generated levels and enemies in addition to the main story missions. Final Fantasy Tactics instead features random encounters on predetermined maps. Granted, there are a number of sidequests available at the tail end of the game, but I would personally much appreciate more ways to explore the rich world of Ivalice. Final Fantasy XII was great about this. Although I have mixed feelings about that game, I felt the worldbuilding and sense of exploration was very fully realized. There aren't a lot of games that really enthrall me when it comes to exploration and especially not when it comes to the Final Fantasy series, but I could definitely count XII among them. Of course, Square Enix decided to go in the exact opposite direction for the next FInal Fantasy but that's a tale for another day.

I can only compare what I'm trying to do here to what I did over a year ago with Baldur's Gate II. I'm revisiting one of my favorite games (although in this case it is a remake/enhanced port) and doing as thorough a run as I reasonably can. For Baldur's Gate II, I completed every single character sidequest and tried to collect all of the items and experience all of the plot the game had to offer. I really enjoyed it! Unfortunately, it did result in me stalling out when trying to play through the Throne of Bhaal expansion--which I regret to say I still haven't finished. In this case, I'm so near the end of War of the Lions (and my party is so strong) that it seems very unlikely I won't finish it. I'd like to complete the rest of the optional content as well--and I have no real reason to suspect I won't.

Of course, spending so much time on this game means I'm getting a little behind schedule on my Backlog Eradication Marathon, but that's okay. Even if I don't hit that magical 30 mark this year, that'll be fine. I'm making progress and I still feel like I have things to write about.