Final Fantasy Tactics (Video Game)

"O Father, grant unto us, your children of Ivalice, salvation."

— Princess Ovelia Atkascha

Final Fantasy Tactics is a Gaiden Game entry in the pants-twistingly popular Final Fantasy series, first released on the PlayStation in 1997 in Japan and early 1998 in America. It combines Turn-Based Strategy with a Role-Playing Game, and is the first game in the series to take place in the world of Ivalice. Due to the immense resemblance and many developers shared between the two series, particularly Yasumi Matsuno, the game can be seen as a Creator-Driven Successor to Tactics Ogre.

Set in the fantasy world of Ivalice, the game's Framing Device is a report from a present-day historian who has uncovered a secret set of documents called the "Durai Report". These records purportedly reveal the truth behind the "War Of The Lions": a Succession Crisis from centuries ago when two competing lords waged a war of intrigue and blood to place their desired puppet ruler (Princess Ovelia, or her younger brother Orinas) upon the throne. The story is widely known and retold as the Rags to Riches tale of commoner and folk-hero Delita Hieral, who put an end to the conflict and corruption and became the king of Ivalice himself.

But according to the Durai Report, the true hero in this tale is Ramza Beoulve: the second-youngest member of the noble Beoulve family, Delita's childhood friend, and a traitor and heretic whose name has been stricken from all historical record. As Ramza grew up from a naïve military cadet to a hardened mercenary, he became deeply embedded in not only the shadow war for the throne and the risk of all-out rebellion by the commoner classes against the tyrannical nobles, but an Ancient Conspiracy by the Glabados Church to Take Over the World. Contrasting the actions of Ramza are those of Delita, who sought to manipulate the various sides of the war to achieve his own ends.

While not the traditional Final Fantasy fare, it was embraced by Turn-Based Strategy fans for its challenging, satisfactory gameplay and the sheer depth of its Job System — which took the similar mechanics from Final Fantasy III and Final Fantasy V and cranked it up, resulting in a level of army customization reminiscent of tabletop wargames. It was also infamous for the text of its "Blind Idiot" Translation, often called "Daravonese" after the tutorial character who spouted most of it. The PSP remake was re-localized by long-time Square Enix collaborator Joseph Reeder, and featured many bugfixes as well as motion video cutscenes and additional dialogue.

Followed by a Non-Linear Sequel, Vagrant Story. Years later, the atmosphere of Ivalice was re-imagined in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which took place in a dream world centuries in the past. The actual era that this dream world was based on was then first seen in Final Fantasy XII, and again in Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, with another prequel in the form of Final Fantasy Tactics A2. Most recently, the events of Tactics were used as the basis for the Return to Ivalice series of raids in the MMO Final Fantasy XIV, set several hundred years later.

It has been re-released a number of times.

It became a part of the PlayStation's "Greatest Hits" line, though it still remains hard to find for that console.
A PlayStation Portable Video Game Remake, named Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, added FMV cutscenes, a few new secret characters, and (in the new translation) more elevated language to capitalize on the game's tonal resemblance to the book series by George R.R. Martin A Song of Ice and Fire (the two share not only an emphasis on politics and motivation, but an inspiration in the real-life Wars of the Roses).
WotL was re-released for iOS and Android.
An Up-Updated Re-Rerelease, Final Fantasy Tactics - The Ivalice Chronicles, was released on September 29, 2025 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC via Steam. Developed in Unreal Engine 5 by Creative Studio III (the team behind Final Fantasy XIV and Final Fantasy XVI) with the involvement of members of the original game's development team, this release features both "Classic" and "Enhanced" versions, with Classic preserving the original gameplay from the PSX release merged with the War of the Lions translation and additional quality-of-life features, while Enhanced features more thorough UI and quality-of-life changes, updated graphics, and full voice acting in both English and Japanese, as well as a newly-revised script with new story scenes and scenarios, penned by a returning Yasumi Masuno. It also includes difficulty levels, the Sound Novel minigames in all regions, and full translations in French and German.

This game provides examples of:

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Tropes #-E

11th-Hour Superpower: The reward for the penultimate battle in the game (part of a sequence that leads right to the end with no pause) is the Ragnarok knight sword.
Abnormal Ammo: Guns that shoot magic; curiously, the Blaze Gun shoots ice and the Glacier Gun shoots fire in the original, but this is corrected in War Of The Lions.
Achievement System: The Ivalice Chronicles has the Akademic Report, which serves as an in-game achievement system.
Adaptational Badass: In most Final Fantasy games, chocobos are portrayed as comical birds that don't pose much of a threat and are more likely to run away from danger than fight back. In Tactics, however, they're an aggressive species that are more than happy to fight whatever they regard as a threat, with the black and red subspecies capable of unleashing quasi-magical attacks.
Aerith and Bob: Most of the in-universe names sound fairly fantastical except the suspiciously appropriate "Ovelia/Ophelia," but your generics have a much wider range of possible names.
- The Beoulve siblings: Dycedarg, Zalba(a)g, Ramza, and Alma.
After-Combat Recovery: Any team member who wasn't turned into a crystal or chest at the end of the battle returns to the squad at full HP/MP and without any status ailments.
A Glass of Chianti: Notably there's only one scene this happens in. Dycedarg pours himself a glass as he discusses the failed kidnapping of Ovelia with Gaffgarion.
A.I. Breaker:
- Wiegraf's Holy Sword skill, thanks to a bug, doesn't actually do Holy damage, but the original PS game still considers it as Holy elemental. Therefore you can stop him from using any of it by equipping a Chameleon Robe, which absorbs Holy. (In the PSP remake, you can only stop his Lightning Stab by equipping Rubber Shoes.)
- The AI is set to ignore Confused characters, as any kind of damage will knock them out of that status (which otherwise doesn't expire). This is crucial for surviving a Solo Character Challenge.
- The AI is similarly set to ignore characters who have Death Sentence, since they'll die in 3 turns anyway. However, you can wear equipment or accessories that block the Death status that is applied to your unit at the end of that third turn. So give yourself Death Sentence and enjoy three turns worth of free hits.
The All-Seeing A.I.:
- The computer knows exactly how many turns a Jump will take. Players do not unless they check the AT list after the command has executed - unlike comparable moves (which let you see when it will occur by hitting right when scheduling it), you're unable to see when a jump will land until after you've irrevocably confirmed it, and therefore have to guess whether the enemy you're targeting will get a chance to walk out of the way first or not or run some quick calculations.
- The AI also has the ability to know if a certain position is capable of affecting another position. Players can only know for sure if they move to the spot, then check by targeting another unit and hoping it will not show a 0%.
- The trajectories of spells deflected by the Reflect status are rather counterintuitive to a typical player, but the AI understands how to exploit the Reflect status perfectly.
- Averted in one regard, however: the computer CAN'T see Reaction Abilities. The computer generally takes what it sees as the most efficient action without planning for reactions at all, which means they'll often walk straight into abilities like Counter and Hamedo and get themselves killed, when they could've avoided the counter by attacking from farther away. This is only if the Reaction Ability doesn't cause their hit rate to be 0%, however; they can still see success chances and will go for another move if, say, you have Blade Grasp and 100 Brave.
All There in the Manual: A whole side story involving the royal family plays out through their in-game character profiles and bar rumours. Events such as King Ondoria's death, and Queen Louveria's power grab, and questions over Prince Orinus' legitimacy have ripple effects through the plot but are only referenced in passing and are completely miss-able if you're not constantly checking the Brave Story and every other bar you visit.
Almighty Janitor: Ramza saves the world from an Eldritch Abomination and alters the course of history, yet technically (in-story) never rose above the rank of squire. His particular version of Squire also has some extra abilities not available to characters.
Ambidextrous Sprite: Most obvious with generic female Archers, who wear a shoulder guard that magically flips sides depending on which way they're facing and where the camera is.
Ambiguous Ending: Sort of. While the events of the game's story are rather clear-cut, the same can't be said about the Durai Papers themselves. While the game makes it clear Delita's reputation and the church won't survive the reveal of the papers, we actually never see the fallout of the reveal, nor if Ramza's place in history gets reassessed in Ivalice or not.
Ambiguous Gender:
- The game can't decide whether Ajora is a man or a woman. There's also lingering questions over whether or not Ajora and Ultima are separate entities or are the same being. History records Ajora as being a man, yet he Body Surfs into Alma's body then transforms into the visibly female Ultima.
- Gameplay-wise, Ramza and Cloud get the male HP/PA multiplier bonus and the female MP/MA multiplier bonus. Cloud can also equip the otherwise female-exclusive Ribbon accessory, possibly as a Shout-Out to the cross-dressing subquest in Final Fantasy VII (or that ribbons can be worn by all party members in that game).
- Monster-type creatures are also considered to be gender neutral for the purposes of Charm and Zodiac compatibility.
Ambiguous Situation: The extent to which the stone bearers remain themselves is an open question, explicitly discussed in The Ivalice Chronicles. They may have full control over their thoughts and actions, they may be subtly guided by the Lucavi that possess them, or they may fully be puppets under complete control of the stones.
Ancient Conspiracy: The titular War of the Lions is meticulously manipulated by the Lucavi in order to ensure maximum bloodshed, brutality, and carnage in order to pave the way for Ultima's resurrection.
Anti-Grinding:
- While story battles remain the same no matter how strong you get, the random encounters scale up to the highest leveled character in your party (even if you don't bring them into battle). This at first doesn't sound like a big deal, even sounding beneficial as it means the rate at which you gain EXP will remain constant as you're always fighting against enemies around your level, but monsters gain far more stats from their levels than human units do, as humans are supposed to depend a lot on equipment to buff their stats. If you grind excessively without advancing the plot you won't be able to obtain better equipment, putting you at an increasing disadvantage against the random encounters as you grind your level up without progressing. Additionally, any enemy humans you find in random encounters will have appropriate equipment for their level, also putting them beyond your party if you grinded up to levels beyond appropriate for the point of the game you're at (however you can steal their equipment to fix this issue and get yourself some really good equipment before it's normally available, but doing that is harder and more time-consuming than just advancing the plot).
Anti-Frustration Features: The Ivalice Chronicles adds a large number of things to smooth out the experience.
- One that was present in the original- "Spillover JP" makes grinding a lot more manageable. Any time a character gains JP, every allied human unit gains 1/4th of the JP that unit earned for that Job. This means that units in the same party as other units will gain enough JP through basic play to buy some useful skills. Or you can just put every unit in your party into that job and powerfarm your entire party through three or four battles.
- You now have the option of restarting any battle, either from the Formation screen or from the start of battle. You can also leave any battle and go straight back to Point-and-Click Map, with the game acting like the battle in question never happened. These same options are available if you Game Over.
- Players can even escape back-to-back missions this way — most notably Riovanes Castle, which in vanilla FFT and War of the Lions was a Guide Dang It! Point of No Return which, at its worst, required players to restart the campaign from scratch to escape. The game also warns you whenever you're about to step into these particular areas.
- The pre-battle formation screen no longer shows non-descript tiles, but the battlefield's actual terrain, so you can prepare better and avoid nasty surprises out of the gate, such accidentally placing a low-movement unit in an inconvenient spot.
- You can alter characters from the Formation screen: you can change a character's Job, Skills and Equipment, and even learn any abilities you had sufficient JP for. The only thing you can't do is Save new loadouts.
- Each character has slots for up to three Loadouts, consisting of a Job, Skills and Equipment, for if you want to switch them to something quickly. You can still change them the old-fashioned, one-thing-at-a-time way.
- Random encounters can be declined, so you don't need to fight through potentially long battles when just trying to get to a specific location. They can also be deliberately summoned on any map node which supports them, making Level Grinding and item-hunting (such as the hunt for Cloud's Materia Blade+) much quicker.
- The Visual Initiative Queue is displayed graphically down the side of the screen at all times, as opposed to the original game where was in a separate menu that had to be specifically accessed. It's also displayed, in slightly different form, by putting a number next to each character's health meter, showing who's going next: in other words, the active character will always be #1. Entries can be dynamically added or removed from the queue: for instance, if someone's using a Charged Attack, there will be a new entry for when the attack fires. Oh, and, every character has a little health meter above them at all times; it doesn't have bar lines, so you don't know how much health each one represents, but you do know who's taken damage.
- Cloud doesn't join the party at level 1 anymore, but instead at your party's average level. He also comes directly equipped with the Materia Blade, meaning he can use his unique skills from the moment you recruit him; the volcano now holds a stronger "Materia Blade+", which also improves magick attack. Lastly, his Limits have a much faster cast speed: Cherry Blossom, for example, goes from 5 in the original to 10.
- The game gives you an "Reset Move" option in the majority of cases, allowing you to experiment with positioning. While certain events prevent you from cancelling movement, the game will warn you ahead of time: If you pick up a chest or a crystal, the game will let you know that this is a Point of No Return; and if you have mobility skills like "Move and Gain HP," their descriptions include the fact that it disables the Undo Move.
- Players can fast-forward through both battles and cutscenes by holding down a shoulder button.
- The maximum size of your party has been bumped from 16 to 50. To help manage them further, a toggleable option in the settings allows you to skip the confirmation prompt when dismissing monsters and eggs, speeding things along when clearing out your roster. The more important sidequest monsters, such as Construct 8 and Reis' dragon form, are not affected by this setting so you don't risk dismissing them by accident.
- A location list is available on the world map, from which you can see what types of items are sold in which stores, as well as the status of errands; in this last case, the list will tell you both when there's no more errands at current, and when you've completed all errands in a place.
- The two tutorial battles at Orbonne Monastery and Gariland at the start of the game are not consecutive anymore, with the game putting you on the World Map in between. This gives players the ability to get their bearings, not to mention to save.
- Generic human units can be renamed at any time in the Warriors' Guild, as opposed to only monsters.
- Notifications on the world map warn you directly whenever new gear or info is available in stores and at the tavern.
- Forget to learn Zodiark at Midlight's Deep? Sometimes there's a very small chance enemy Summoners will appear at the same area that have the spell already learned, meaning all you have to do is hope one of them hits you with it.
- Ultima Demons sometimes have a small chance appearing at Midlight's Deep after completing it, meaning that if Ramza forgot to learn Ultima during some very limited opportunities in Chapter 4, he is able to learn it there.
- Whenever a town has an associated plot battle, that battle will take place in a node slightly off the town, allowing players to prepare, buy new weapons, grind, and take the battle when they themselves are ready.
- Auto-saves are implemented not only on the world map, but also mid-battle on a per-turn basis, so you can easily retry stealing desired items or cancel mishaps.
- You don't have to read the Scriptures of Germonique or play through the Sound Novels in one long go; you can interrupt reading at almost any time to create a bookmark, from which you can resume reading later.
- A Bowgun, Escutcheon, Rod, Oak Staff, Leather Helm and Leather Armor are given to the party after the battle at Gariland so that the party can use the Tier 2 jobs (Knight, Archer, Black Mage, White Mage) immediately for the next battle. While Rods and Oak Staves are available for sale in Gariland, the equipment for Knights and Archers are first available only at Eagrose, which is only accessible after the battle at Mandalia Plain.
- After you start the long sidequest in chapter 4 to recruit the optional characters (Beowulf, Reis, Construct 8 and Cloud), the next step is clearly indicated by blue markers on the world map.
- A number of characters have abilities that can only be used if wielding swords (Agrias, Meliadoul, Orlandeau, Beowulf) or even a specific sword (Cloud). If you attempt to field those characters with the ability equipped but the necessary weapon(s) missing, the game will let you know this.
Anti-Hero: Or Anti-Villain. Which is Delita? Depends on your point of view.
Anti-Villain: The Corpse Brigade during Act One. All they want is to get the pay owed to them for their service during the war, but they're a terrorist group acting in an already taxed and vulnerable country in the process.
Anyone Can Die: Certainly notable for this game with a large cast.
- In gameplay, anyone who joins your party permanently can also die permanently, excluding Ramza himself.
- This applies equally to the story and to named characters who don't join your party. Excluding everyone who joins Ramza's party, by the end of The Stinger, you can count the remaining still living major characters on one hand.
Arbitrary Head Count Limit: You can only take five members (including Ramza) to form a party, sometimes four in certain story mode battles. Your squad overall has a limit as well, though its number depends on the version of the game you're playing: 16 characters on PS1, 24 in War of the Lions, 50 in Ivalice Chronicles. (And yes, Ramza counts as one of them.)
Arbitrary Weapon Range: Bowguns, crossbows, and guns have an arbitrary minimum range, but you can get around this restriction by aiming and then firing in the same direction as the target.
Artificial Brilliance: The game's AI can be scarily good at times. Best of all, you can exploit it by setting your units in auto-battle mode. No more spending a whole minute scanning the field to figuring out what to input for your calculator — the computer does it for you in a few seconds!
- If you target an AI enemy with an AOE spell (causing it to lock-on to them and follow them as they move), they'll not only move to avoid endangering their allies, they'll move close to your units to make you hit yourself.
- Ranged weapons can't be used to target anyone adjacent to you... but if you target your attack in a way that will pass through someone to hit its target (including by aiming at an empty space), you have a chance of hitting them instead, even if they're closer than you can aim at normally. The AI is fully willing to exploit this just like the player can.
Artificial Stupidity: The AI can also be incredibly stupid at other times.
- The AI can't "see" reaction abilities, so it will try to physically attack a character with 96 Brave and Hamedo equipped. Generally speaking, the AI is great at calculating and reaction to what's happening now. However, it's horrible at planning for future turns.
- In the first battle with Zalma (the Holy Priest), he will frequently cast Cures, not caring that doing so is also healing your party members (he will often heal 2-3 of your party members just to heal one of his), and sometimes his party members will move outside of the healing AoE, and the monks on his side will frequently hit each other with their Earth Fist moves. For a game that has an AI that is so intelligent, it is odd that this one single fight has the computer acting so dumb at times.
Aristocrats Are Evil: Most story enemies are nobles; some are also transformed into hellspawn (some willingly, some not).
Ascended Extra: Minor example, but Beowulf and Reis' Chronicle entries in the original version mention that a man named "Buremonda" was responsible for Reis' transformation into a dragon. In the PSP remake, he appears in person (re-translated as "Bremondt") as a Super Boss.
Attack Failure Chance: a major mechanic in this game, much more than it is in other Final Fantasy games where characters just have an Evasion percentage, and it's often fairly low. First off, classes in this game affect that percentage. Second, every character has three dodge-chance values: for an attack that's coming in from in front of them, for one from the side, and for one In the Back. Third, instead of providing Damage Reduction, armor pieces in this game provide Body Armor as Hit Points and increased evasion rates; some, like Capes, will provide a 25% dodge chance in all directions. As a consequence, the game simplifies everything by simply telling you the aggregate Attack Failure Chance of any given attack or ability before you confirm that you are going to use it. (If it seems high, consider either repositioning to attack from a different angle or trying a different attack.)
Auto-Pilot Tutorial: Professor Daravon narrates the tutorial mode of the game while the player just watches. It's lampshaded, as Mediators' "Mimic Daravon" skill inflicts Sleep.
Awesome, but Impractical:
- By making use of the reaction ability Critical Quick and toying with the Brave and Faith values of the playable characters, one can set up a "Quickening Loop" wherein the party can have infinite turns, without the enemy getting a single one in between. While this makes the party nigh-invulnerable, finishing a battle using this trick could take ages, as opposed to just smacking the enemy outright and winning in a matter of minutes.
- Also, the Iaido or Draw Out ability of the Samurai has some of the most potent damage in the game, especially from the rare katanas such as Masamune or Chirijiraden. However, the skill can also easily break these insanely powerful weapons... some of which cannot be replaced in the course of normal play (absent absurd amounts of Level Grinding and complicated exploits) and are therefore gone for good if they break.
- Summons can be absurdly powerful, as always. However, the really powerful ones (Bahamut, etc.) also take a long time to charge, meaning your target might not even be in the area of effect when it goes off. Zodiark gets special mention for not only being the strongest summon, but being the hardest to get.
- The remake adds the Dark Knight Class. While its stats and abilities are extremely powerful the prerequisites are so ridiculously huge by the time you unlock the class for one unit you could have already beat more than half the game with much more practical and easy to access classes. The Onion Knight from the remake could also count as it potentially has the highest stats in the game and its exclusive onion equipment makes them practically invincible. But the Onion Knight's base stats and stat growths are abysmal until you mastered nearly every other class in the game (where then you unlock the mastered Onion Knight with incredible stats), and you must go through lots of multiplayer battles with no guarantee you will see the Onion equipment. Without these the Onion Knight is pretty much a Joke Character. The Onion Knight also cannot equip any abilities nor learn any skills of its own so it's limited to only using the basic physical attack with all the downsides of that.
- Meteor is the most damaging spell you have access to in the course of normal play (exceeded only by Zodiark, an Infinity +1 Sword equivalent obtained only by fighting the game's Superboss), and hits an absolutely massive area. Unfortunately, in addition to its sky-high MP cost, it has the slowest possible charge time, and unlike summons, it doesn't distinguish between friends and foes. This makes it almost impossible to use effectively - if you target the ground, the enemy will be able to get out of the way before it lands. If you target an enemy, it'll lock on to them... but the AI is smart enough to move the targeted enemy next to your troops, meaning you'll still probably do more damage to yourself than the enemy.
- Yes you can abuse degenerator traps to grind your units' stats up infinitely and thus never have to deal with the Level Scaling random encounters getting stronger than you, while you get access to one as soon as you reach Zeklous Desert, which is accessible after only five story battles in Chapter 1. However grinding this way takes a really long time, far longer than conventional grinding would, and heavy use of the JP Gain Up/JP Boost ability in conjunction with smart JP investment will do a lot to keep you ahead of random encounters anyway. Plus the game is easy enough as is, getting severely inflated stats through this grinding method is more a Bragging Rights Reward. Alternatively, you can use an allied Mindflayer who has the Level Down ability as long you have a unit with the Beastmaster support ability nearby.
- Monsters are playable, but require an Orator to convince to join, a Beastmaster to access their full moveset, a valuable recruitment slot in your party, and potentially abusing egg RNG to generate the strongest breed of said monster. This is all for a recruit with no ability to spec into jobs or wear equipment, few skills, no ability to use items or spells, and varying degrees of mediocre mobility. Given how many monsters more rely on strength in numbers than strength alone, the thrill of having a monster ally may simply pale compared to normal human recruits. This is somewhat averted by the relative ease in preparing a monster for battle (eggs can hatch monsters the same level as your strongest character, require vastly less grinding than other recruits, and are arguably safely expendable due to eggs) and how a select few monsters like Behemoth or Tiamat are so obscenely strong that they actually become the adverse effect of Boring, but Practical in practice.
- Cloud has some absolutely devastating potential with the right set up, as with Short Charge for his Limits or Dual Wield to increase his power more so, Time Mage sub class, and Tailwind support, Cloud can become quite a beast, especially with Finishing Touch. The problem? Aside from set ups that specifically counteract his flaws, Cloud starts at the abysmal level 1. For reference, it can take an entire playthrough's worth of time to get Ramza to level 45. By the point of the game you get him, Cloud will also be far too weak to grind levels in encounters, and also requires finding his secret Materia Blade equipment which requires Treasue Hunt in one very specific level. Even his strongest limit breaks, Omnislash and Cherry Blossom, are nigh-unusable since their speed is so abysmal and the enemy can easily move out of their way before they land. Overall, Cloud's full potential is an absolute nightmare to attain, and the title of Game-Breaker is one many already share anyway.
Back from the Dead:
- In the War of the Lions remake, Argath. Just so you get the pleasure of killing him again.
- Marach is immediately revived by a Zodiac Stone.
- Same with Elmdore, but with him it's definitely a bad thing. Possibly also Celia and Lettie, if they were ever human to begin with.
Back Stab: Characters are usually easier to hit from the sides or behind. It doesn't deal any more damage though. The side your character is attacked on determines which of his dodge bonuses apply: Class dodge rate applies only to frontal attacks, shield applies to the front and sides, capes and reaction abilities apply everywhere. This only applies for physical attacks, magic can be defended against equally well in all directions.
Bait-and-Switch Boss: Barrington threatens Rapha and kills Marach. Then Elmdor's goons toss him off the roof.
Bare-Fisted Monk: Monks fight unarmed and their damage formula involves squaring their strength score (Most classes use weapon attack to determine damage). This means that every extra point of PA is worth quadratically more. As it's possible to get up to +7 PA (a base score of 13 is standard for high level fighters), the Monk can be capable of one -hitting most common enemies and maybe even a few bosses. And that's before you give them Dual Wield, which lets them wield two punches (or better yet, just give a Ninja Martial Arts).
Bare-Handed Blade Block:
- The Samurai's reaction skill "Blade Grasp" / "Shirihadori"; a bug interprets the reaction skill to be applicable to all physical attacks, so a character equipped with this can also Arrow Catch and Bullet Catch. The chances of an attack hitting are equal to 100-target's Brave, and Brave can max out at a base of 97.
- Thieves can also catch anything thrown at them for damage, which (since this is Final Fantasy) includes shuriken, swords, bombs and more esoteric weapons like handbags and bolts of cloth. However, this is an intentional skill.
Batman Gambit: While playing everyone else around him coldly and unflinchingly, Delita specifically counted on Ramza's unimpeachable character so he would get rid of the nastier elements threatening Ivalice.
Belated Happy Ending: Various item descriptions in Vagrant Story mention the Zodiac Brave Story, naming Agrias, Orlandu and several others as well-known heroes. That means the Durai report from Tactics, containing a true account of what happened during the war, was eventually accepted as historical canon.
Big Bad: Because there are so many groups working to manipulate each other, it is difficult to tell who the primary villain is until near the end of the game. Folmarv, the leader of the Knights Templar, is revealed to be at the heart of the conspiracy. He is actually possessed by the demon Hashmal, who is working to revive Ultima, the leader of the Lucavi. Although Ultima is the final boss, she does nothing during the game, and thus would not be the main villain.
Big Damn Heroes:
- Barring a few exceptions, Ramza pretty much either stumbles into rescue missions by accident or arrives too late to do anything.
- The one time Ramza tries to invoke the trope by storming the castle he thinks Princess Ovelia is held in, he instead runs into Agrias, who managed to escape by herself; a subsequent rescue attempt turns out to be a trap.
- Ramza's own allies show up to support him after the Duel Boss battle against Wiegraf, so Belias summons his own team of demons to even things up.
Bittersweet Ending: Delita ushers in a new golden age, but everybody he cared about is either dead or has abandoned him. Ramza, meanwhile, succeeds in saving Alma and both get out of the mess that is Ivalice alive, but he's branded as a heretic in his homeland and is unable to return. Ovelia, having never had any freedom or happiness in life, is wounded by Delita in self defense due to her becoming paranoid that he'd discard her just like he discarded everyone else in his life who was no longer useful to him leading her to stab him; tragically, this is despite the fact that we see he genuinely did care for her. And finally, Oran is burned at the stake after an ill-conceived attempt to reform the Corrupt Church by presenting his papers to them. 400 years later, his recordings are recovered by a descendant, and the truth is finally revealed to the public.
Black and White Magic: The "White Mage" and "Black Mage". Since, you know, it's Final Fantasy.
"Blind Idiot" Translation:
- In the PS1 version, while the translation is workable for Chapter 1 to Chapter 3 (beyond a few bits in item/ability descriptions), it falls completely apart in chapter 4. The tutorial given by Professor Daravon is also notoriously poor in its translation, which make no sense whatsoever, and largely fails to teach you much of anything about the game.
- The first two tracks of the soundtrack are called "Title Back (Bland Logo)" and "Backborn Story". "Opening Title" and "Background Story" would make a lot more sense. Interestingly, these are all among the tracks that don't have names in Japanese characters, just (bad) English. Other tracks show Japanese and English names. Possibly the weirdest one is Bloody Excrement.
- Although often considered mistranslation, the term Zodiac Brave is likely an example of this. Yuusha, literally "brave person," but more along the lines of "Hero" or the descriptive title "The Brave" is frequently mistranslated as "Brave," particularly when a native Japanese speaker is trying to translate it to English. However, since "brave" can also be a noun in English (often used to refer to a Native American warrior), it isn't entirely inaccurate.
- Plenty of poor transliterations of names appear throughout the PS version. Some examples are Cocatoris ^noteCockatrice, Mindflare ^noteMind Flayer, and Wiznaibus Dance ^noteDance With Knives.
- A sentence in Gustav's profile was reversed so that instead of leaving in disgust over a knightly order's tendency to Rape, Pillage, and Burn, he was thrown out for being a participant.
- One presumable instance was in the character Wiegraf. Considering that his original sprite is almost exactly the same as Beowulf (a party member you recruit later), Wiegraf's name was presumably supposed to be Wiglaf, which is the name of a major character in Beowulf. However, he became so infamous in his own right, that even if it was an error, they kept it for the War of the Lions translation.
- In the PSX version, every breath attack is called a bracelet. This is the result of mistranslating ブレス^*buresu as "brace" instead of "breath."
- The "Veil of Wiyu" is meant to be "Oeilvert", a book named after its heroine. This caused the reference to be lost on many players when a dungeon in Final Fantasy IX was also named Oeilvert.
Body Armor as Hit Points: Along with MP depending on the armor.
Bonus Dungeon: The Deep Dungeon, ten excruciating levels of high-level enemies who you have to fight in almost complete darkness. And the kicker? You can't progress to the next level unless you step on a certain randomly (chosen from only five squares, fortunately) placed square on the current level before you end the battle.
Bookends: Even though the first battle of the game at Orbonne Monastery isn't the first chronological event, it forms a bookend with the end of the game where Ramza goes there to rescue his sister and punch out a few demons.
Boring, but Practical:
- Probably one of the most mundane examples of any video game entry, but the Select button, which brings up information on whatever the cursor is currently targeting — be it an empty tile, a unit's class, an ability, an item, anything at all. The reason this is so practical is that an enormous amount of info is readily available at your fingertips, and the patient and strategic player can take full advantage of this in a game where knowledge is power. Want to know what a skill does? Saw an enemy of a class you haven't acquired yet and want to know the job levels it will require? Curious about what Geomancy spells come out of the current terrain you're standing on? In a game where a lot isn't explained, this effectively equates to having a Player's Handbook at hand for a tabletop game, and it can make or break battles more often than you think.
- Gained JP Up/JP Boost is a support skill that boosts the amount of JP you gain from all actions by 50%. It has no direct benefit in battle, and using it will cost you your sole support skill slot so you can't use the other much more interesting and battle-useful support skills, but using this skill will allow you to get your job levels up, access the more advanced jobs, and learn high cost skills so much faster. This is especially vital for no grinding/random encounters runs, and even if you have no problem grinding a ton this skill will make the grinding a lot easier, when getting powerful classes and useful skills at much lower levels will make the Level Scaling random encounters easier to manage. You'll eventually reach a point where you got most-to-all you wanted with your jobs and skills, a point where it's better to replace JP Up with a support skill that directly helps you in battle, but from the early to mid game there's no reason to not have all your human units running this as their support skill unless you're explicitly handicapping yourself.
- The skills which increase a character's Move score — Move +1 from the Squire, Move +2 from the Thief, Move +3 from the Bard — aren't exactly exciting... but in a game where maps are often 12 x 12, just one more Move point makes a big difference. Besides, characters only gain Experience Points and Tech Points when they alter someone's stats, increasing the importance of being able to get them into a position where they can do anything at all.
- You may spend a lot of time in the first few areas level grinding. Why? Because the amount of exp and skill points you get don't depend on where and what monsters you fight, but on the level of the targets (while random encounters everywhere fully scale with you) and the actions you perform. Might as well stick with goblins, instead of trying to grind in later areas where Demonic Spiders run amok.
- The Squire skills aren't particularly flashy, but they are great for gaining XP when a character is unable to properly attack an enemy. The Accumulate skill in particular is very handy. It slightly increases the user's attack strength for the duration of the battle and is free to use. So whenever a character is unable to do anything meaningful during their turn, they can just Accumulate for a slight power boost and free exp and JP when they'd otherwise just sit there doing nothing. Rock Throw can also be used if the character is near an opponent but not close enough to hit them with a melee attack. It's damage is paltry, but it's at least something and will give the attacker exp and JP.
- Ramza's Squire class has much better stat growths (and pretty balanced growths between physical and magical power) than the generic one, and has unique skills that are useful for supporting the party without being particularly flashy. On top of all this, Squire allows Ramza to equip most gear, so he can fit multiple roles depending on what his other abilities are.
- The Duel Boss against Gaffgarion is quite difficult. Sure, you could open the gate and reunite with your team, but since they have their own problem to deal with, why not just break or steal Gaffgarion's sword, rendering him completely impotent?
- The Item skillset, without which you can't use the series' staple restorative items. Instantaneous effect (in a game where almost everything is a Charged Attack, and enemies can dodge those attacks by simply taking their turn and walking away), 4 tile range if you're a Chemist or have the Throw Item support skill equipped, invariable 100% chance of success as long as there's a clear line of sight, useful until the endgame, and doesn't vary in effectiveness based on the target's Faith. It's not flashy (at least until Chemists get to wield guns), but it's darn reliable.
- Mustadio is the first new character you recruit, and the first character who can use Guns, giving him enormous reach. (Since Chemists also wield Guns, a sidestep into their class is fairly intuitive.) Additionally, he has three basic abilities, all of which have the same range as his equipped weapon: one inflicts Don't Move, one inflicts Don't Act, and the third is an almost-guaranteed-to-hit Petrify ability that only works on Undead enemies. The first lets you stop an enemy from getting away; the second can be used as a Counter Spell on someone who's charging something; and the third... Well, not to spoil, but let's just say that the villains do a lot of work with undead. The comparative weakness of guns limits Mustadio's overall power, but it's very, very difficult to find yourself in a position where he can't do something productive.
- Although the game's Job System provides lots of complex ways to gain overwhelming power, you can easily beat the last part of the game simply by relying on Orlandeau, whose unique Sword Saint class has everyone else's (already extremely powerful) sword skills combined. You don't need to change his job or even his equipment - he comes fully-outfitted with every skill and item needed to carry you through the rest of the game, often single-handedly. There's a reason he's one of the most notorious Game Breakers.
- While the process itself of attaining a monster is rather convoluted, their usage in actual combat is very much this. Unlike human recruits, monsters lack jobs, equippable abilities, genders or equipment in general. They can't even use items! In fact, only the Chocobo monsters really have synergy with other party members, and none really have impressive movesets and almost none can match the mobility potential of Teleport. But should you get one of the high tier monsters and monster breeds like the Behemoth, Hydra or Red Chocobo? They become simple and very powerful recruits who can spawn copies of themselves while on the map and require virtually no preparation to start taking names, and can typically rival even Orleandu in damage once fully prepared. They may not have many advanced, weird techniques or playstyles and don't utilize the mechanics of the game much, but in a strategic game with permadeath, the monster's functionality as a simple bulky nuke with little risk of suffering many of the game's losses is surprisingly valuable.
- The Monk class comes with a number of very flexible skills, but two of them stand out where this trope is concerned. Wave Fist / Aurablast is a three-range single-square damage ability with high accuracy; it also counts as a magical attack, meaning that your characters can continue to use their physical defensive skills (IE Blade Grasp) but you can still hit them with it. The other is Chakra, which does a small amount of healing near the user and restores Mana Points. These two skills together are all you need to conduct Final Fantasy II style level-grinding — where your characters stand there hitting and healing each other, ignoring whatever impotent Mook you've left alive — which is one of the easiest ways of getting EXP and JP.
Boss Banter: Most of the boss battles will consist of the enemy taunting you every few turns until you defeat them. If you let the dialogue keep running, though, sooner or later Ramza may pull a Shut Up, Hannibal!, or get subjected to Shut Up, Kirk! because his enemies find his idealism so irritating. In the Ivalice Chronicles version, some of your named allies will even join in depending on if they're on the map or not. Even optional characters like Cloud and Beowulf have them as well.
Breakable Weapons:
- The Samurai job command Iaido can break the katanas it uses.
- Knights and Divine Knights (Meliadoul's base class) have the ability to break enemy equipment as well. So does Orlandu, but, well, he is Orlandu.
Breaking the Fourth Wall: Ramza may break the Framing Device if you attempt to dismiss him from your party, but avoids breaking the "main" fourth wall.
- Played straight in the original's last chapter:
Ramza: Remove me? No way. I'm you and you are me.
Brown Note: Harps and Books do damage by being played/read from.
Calling Your Attacks: Though you only actually see the incantations on-screen 10% of the time or so, every spell in the game and many other abilities have incantations that end in the spell's or move's name. Only the original PlayStation version has this, though, possibly because of the Engrish. ^note
The Cameo:
- Cloud and Aeris/th appear in both versions of the game. In the Ivalice Chronicles version, Final Fantasy VII Remake voice actors Cody Christian and Brianna White return to voice them.
- Luso and Balthier both show up in the remake, and it's lampshaded by the latter, who still thinks of himself as the "leading man" but concedes this adventure has more the feel of a cameo role.
Can't Catch Up: "Guest" characters in your party don't participate in Random Encounters. If you run into enough random battles, they get outclassed very quickly.
- Occasionally, Guest characters are vital in a particular battle, and get leveled up as minor gods to help the player complete it.
- Also applies to the playable characters, due to battles restricting you to 4+Ramza or less. Fortunately, leveling is quite easy and small level differences are usually negligible.
Can't Drop the Hero: Ramza cannot be left out of story battles; he only gets to relax on the bench for random battles.
Captain Ersatz:
- Elmdor looks eerily like Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII. He even wields the Masamune.
- Cid/Orlandu, meanwhile, channels Obi-Wan Kenobi of Star Wars.
Cassandra Truth: In dialogue added in The Ivalice Chronicles, when Agrias calls out Gaffgarion on his betrayal, he considers taking Ovelia's life to be a Mercy Kill, correctly predicting she would just become another pawn in the fight for the throne.
Cast from Hit Points:
- Ramza's "Wish" skill.
- All of Worker 8's abilities.
- Byblos' "Energize" skill.
- All of the Dark Knight's abilities.
- Inverted with the Time Mage's MP Switch/Mana Shield Reaction Ability, in which any damage gets shunted to MP loss instead.
- Reis's "Dragon Care" skill.
Cast Herd: Ramza's group, the two opposing sides of the War of the Lions, and the Corrupt Church are the four major players. The Corpse Brigade plays a major role in Chapter One and then pretty much loses all relevance. (The dialogue at the end of Chapter 1 implies the Beoulves and Army of the Northern Sky wiped them out.)
Casting Gag: The English voice of Wiegraf in Ivalice Chronicles is Dario Coates, who has some experience playing an idealistic sword user who eventually turns to evil after one too many setbacks.
Central Theme:
- What it means to strive to do good without personal gain in mind, even if it isn't rewarded positively. As Arazlam states at the beginning of the game, Ramza Beolve went down in history as a forgotten heretic during the War of the Lions; yet the game shows it was as a result of fighting the real villains to protect the world from demons. Conversely, Delita Heiral went down in history as the hero of the War, but the rest of the game shows what that took for him to accomplish, including the murder of a body double.
- The consequences of seeking power and using people as tools.
Changing Gameplay Priorities: Early in the game, Wizards and Summoners will absolutely wreck entire armies. Later in the game, they fall by the wayside, chiefly because special units like Agrias and Orlandu can do everything they can do, but for free and with no charge time.
Charged Attack:
- Some high level skills, spells, and the Charge ability are useless because your target will simply move out of the way. You can directly target the enemy instead of the area but they might move next to the caster and hit/KO them with their own attack.
- Time magic can speed up charging and slow down enemies. Also, many quick/instant skills can immobilize a target.
- "Always check the AT list! It's the shortcut to victory!"
Chekhov's Gun: (And a hearty dose of Irony) In the PSP version, a short intermission between Ovelia and Agrias near the endgame has the latter give the former a knife to defend herself with, should the need arise.
The Chessmaster: Apart from Ramza, every major power active during the game is running their own con or part of someone else's con. Sometimes both. The resulting Gambit Pileup ironically means that these plans run into each other, and several parties lose to the others as the game rolls on.
Church Militant: The Glabados Church has a standing army of its own, in addition to the Knights Templar.
Clap Your Hands If You Believe: The Faith stat works as both your magical attack and inversely as magic defense. So a character with high faith is a great spellcaster but also very vulnerable to magic while someone with very low faith can no sell magic but is useless as a caster class. It's double-edged though, as you can't not believe in attack magic without not believing in healing magic.
Color-Coded Armies: Player Mooks and Mooks will usually be Palette Swaps of each other, with player-controlled units usually having blue accessories and enemy units having red. Specifically, the Southern Sky has a dark color scheme, the church has a red scheme, the Northern Sky has a blue/white scheme (Ramza officially came from the Northern Sky so that's why your units have a similar scheme), and neutral/"brigand" enemies (and the Corpse Brigade) have green schemes.
Combatant Cooldown System: The Charge Time Battle system leans toward turn-based combat instead of real time (as ATB of the main series does). Each unit has a Charge Time meter, which is reset to zero after it acts (unless it uses the Wait command, in which case it is reset to 20), and it may only act again after it goes back to 100. CT points are gained at different rates, so a unit with a high Speed stat will act more often than one with low Speed, which effectively acts as the cooldown duration modifier.
Combat Medic: Chemists aren't the greatest fighters, but they can equip guns so they can deal some decent damage from a distance. Of course, any combat-centered class can become a Combat Medic by having Item, White Magic, Punch Arts, or Summoner as a sub-ability.
The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
- Enemies have unique Jobs, abilities, and occasionally equipment that the player can't get their hands on.
- Success percentages are calculated (or displayed) improperly in the 90+% range, so a player can get a run of what seems like extraordinarily good or bad luck.
- Generics in the story battles of The Ivalice Chronicles are given huge HP pools in later chapters. Level 40 or 50 enemy casters have as much hp as a player-controlled knight or lancer at level 99.
Computers Are Fast: Waste about an hour figuring out the best way to use your calculator to destroy most of the map, or set them to auto-battle and have it done after a small bit of lag.
Continuity Cavalcade: Artefacts and Wonders are often a Shout-Out or Mythology Gag to other Final Fantasy games (specifically the first seven that existed when Tactics originally released), mentioning famous characters, locations, terminology, items, etc. A mere handful of such references include a rat tail, the Crystal Tower, the Phantom Train, and Materia orbs. Errands also homage these other titles on occasion, including namedropping Edward from IV as an excuse to homage the "spoony bard" meme.
Cool Old Guy: Cidolfus Orlandeau (Thunder God Cid) is 58 years old. Not that a silly thing like age will keep him from totally destroying anyone who gets in his way.
Corrupt Church: The Church of Glabados is probably one of the most developed examples in gaming, being far more complex in motivation and method than just "control the world". The only non-corrupt clergy you meet are naturally killed by corrupt clergy.
Crystal Dragon Jesus: The church's vibe is heavily based on a kind of theme-park Christianity, chiefly in organization, appearance and backstory (a wandering prophet figure betrayed by a follower for money and executed). For the details given 'Jesus' could be replaced with 'St. Ajora' and 'Judas' with 'Geromonka' and you're done. Which would be effectively true were the whole thing not a massive ploy by a cabal of demons to set the world ablaze with war for their own ends by building a religion around rebranding a professional spy as a martyr.
Cthulhumanoid: The Mindflayer class of monsters are humanoid creatures with the heads of squids. The lower-level ones can't do much more than what a regular squid can do, like slap enemies with their tentacles and spray ink to blind them. The higher-level ones though, can inflict status ailments like Berserk and Confuse, and can also drain levels, making them similar to their namesakes from Dungeons & Dragons.
Culture Chop Suey: Monks, ninjas, Oracles (which are based off of Onmyoji) and samurai in a purely medieval European setting with no Asian-themed town anywhere, though there are mentions of the existence of eastern nations beyond the borders of Ivalice. Of course, this is par for the course in Final Fantasy.
- A small justification exists in that you can only purchase the eastern-themed equipment that the above classes use in trade/merchant cities, suggesting that it is imported rather than locally produced.
Curb-Stomp Battle: In the War of the Lions version near the end of chapter 2 and before the fight against Cúchulainn, you take control of Delita who has to protect Ovelia against the Northern Sky scouts that ambushes them. The three scouts are only level 8 while Delita and Ovelia are at least level 30 and can easily kick their ass with almost no effort.
Cutscene Incompetence: It amusingly bleeds into gameplay. The remake has a cutscene before the battle to recruit Balthier where a Monk attacks Ramza with a sword. Monks are far better with fisticuffs than any other weapon. When the battle begins, it averts Gameplay and Story Segregation by leaving the Monk equipped with a sword.
Cutscene Power to the Max: Beyond the involvement of the Zodiac Braves in the storyline, the superhuman abilities thrown about with reckless abandon in battle are absent from the scripted story sections, however...
- In the battle with Dycedarg, after he transforms into his zodiac form, he instantly disintegrates Zalbaag and his (Dycedarg's) knights. He doesn't use any such skill against you, though he does have plenty of high damages spells that can cause a total party wipe.
- Additionally, every antagonist can teleport in cutscenes, even if they never display that ability in battle and especially if it makes no sense for them to have that ability.
Cynicism Catalyst:
- Wiegraf has Milleuda's death.
- Delita has Zaalbag's willing sacrifice of Tietra.
Damsel in Distress: Delita's sister in the first chapter. Ramza's sister Alma, for the majority of the game. Princess Ovelia in Chapter Two. Subverted in that the player never rescues Ovelia, but Delita manipulates his way into her captors' ranks and subtly removes her from harm's way. Also, in a new mission for the PSP version, Reis is kidnapped and has to be rescued.
The Dark Side Will Make You Forget:
- Wiegraf started out as a Hero Antagonist, who fought against the nobility to get recognition for the Corpse Brigade's services in the war (and their back pay), and later to avenge his dead little sister. By his third encounter, he's undergone Demonic Possession, and when Ramza calls him out, he states that he doesn't give a damn about Miluda anymore, he just wants to hear the screams of humans.
- In Delita's case, it's more "Ambition Will Make You Forget", until he is left Lonely at the Top.
Darker and Edgier: There is much more on-screen blood and death in this game than most in the series, with only Type-0 being able to top it. The game also features a lot more grey morality than the rest of the series due to the highly political nature of the plot and is the only one to have a character suffer the effects of sexual assault.
Dark Messiah: Delita, whether he was evil or not.
Dark Reprise: "Cry of Pain" of the Recurring Riff found in "Apoplexy" and "Commander in Training," hints of Dycedarg's Leitmotif in Night Attack, and "And I Ran Away" of Ramza's Theme.
David Versus Goliath: It's impossible for Ramza to obtain any of the powerful special Knight classes, yet he must face them several times in battle, including a one on one duel. In fact, Ramza doesn't have access to anything special, save a few exclusive skills for his Squire class.
- Mildly less so in War of the Lions, where Dark Knight becomes a generic class that Ramza has access to. Its skill set mirrors Gaffgarion's skills, so it makes narrative sense for Ramza to be able to learn them after spending a year or more as Gaffgarion's protégé.
Dead Character Walking: If a confused Heaven or Hell knight kills themselves with a spell before finishing to cast it, they will stand up from their KO animation to cast the remaining charges and drop down again afterwards.
Deadly Book: Books cause damage by the user reading from it (or you could Throw it via the Ninja class.)
Deal with the Devil: The game seems to imply that a person must agree to merge with (or be possessed by; the game isn't too clear) a Lucavi. Of course, the Lucavi seem to wait until that person is near death and/or in a desperate situation.
Deconstruction: Of many Final Fantasy elements in general.
- A young hero that travels the land with his ragtag companions to save it from warfare and evil? He's forced to leave the land and his noble name behind because despite stopping their plans, the Corrupt Church still has great political sway and a target on his back. And he's perfectly okay with that, though others such as Orran Durai are not so lucky, ending up a Doomed Moral Victor by being burned at the stake for so-called heresy against said church's plans.
- Political powerplays trying to seize control between numerous factions? All a front of manipulated conflict to weaken everybody involved because the Greater-Scope Villain is making a big move for both their resurrection and takeover, and unlike most other cases in the series, their actions are not publicly known for centuries while the heroes take the heat for it all as "heretics".
- The mysterious and powerful, ancient artifacts of crystals that can grant their users power? The Zodiac Stones are used by the villains for demonic power beyond mortal limits, and don't get much use in the hands of the heroes at all except for one exceptional case that proves they aren't inherently evil gems.
- Even the land of Ivalice peels back the usual RPG layer of a bunch of kingdoms that unify because their individual problems are resolved, because they not only don't ever get much for personal resolutions in a conflict where all of its primary instigators die, but solely unify when forced to under Delita taking the throne alongside Ovelia and suppressing any major remaining threats; without this, the whole continent's leading powers want each other dead or beneath their heel as part of aforementioned powerplays, and it takes great or outside circumstances to bring even some of the nobles to justice for causing this when they aren't getting eachother killed.
Decoy Protagonist: The animated intro features a squad of soldiers riding across the land on Chocobo-back. They travel across a wide variety of terrain while dramatic music plays, which gives the impression that they're the heroes of the story embarking on a long journey. Then it turns out they're just the mooks you fight against in the game's opening battle, where you control the real protagonist, Ramza.
Department of Redundancy Department: Thanks to the PS version's translation errors, we have "rebels plotting rebellion," Zalmo ordering Ramza to "appear at a heresy hearing on accusations of murder and heresy!" and Rapha's "Heaven Heaven Thunder!".
Destroyable Items: Knights get several equipment breaking moves, as do some bosses. Thankfully preventable by a support ability.
Deus ex Machina: In stark contrast to every previous encounter with a Zodiac Stone, which all ended in disaster, the one Rapha was carrying begins to glow while she mourns the death of her brother, and the player braces for a Zodiac Monster battle... except then a bright light comes from above and resurrects Marach. Ramza is forced to reevaluate his opinion of Zodiac Stones yet again. This is right after a Zodiac Monster AND a hellish Escort Mission.
Developer's Foresight: Most obviously in Chapter One, your choices as a player will have long-lasting consequences and be commented on by the other characters, but there's also a meta-foresight - Tietra, who dies at the end of Chapter One and kicks off the rest of the plot, is saddled with a purposefully terrible class that comes with a very difficult to remove Innate: Dead restriction so even modder's have great difficulty averting this event.
Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Ramza and his team murder their way up the demon hierarchy until they reach Bloody Angel Ultima and kick her ass, too. Alma, supposedly the vessel for Ultima, manages to undo the Grand Theft Me and reject Ultima from her body because of the Power of Love.
Dirty Coward: A character whose Bravery drops below 10 turns into a literal chicken and runs for the corner of the battlefield. If their permanent Bravery dips below 6, they no longer have the stomach for war and will leave the army permanently.
Disc-One Nuke: Monsters in general. They can be obtained early as Chapter 1, provided you can train an Orator to invite them, and they breed higher-tier members of their families that normally don't spawn at that stage in the game and often have abilities that are incredibly powerful during the early stages of Tactics. Of note is Boco the Chocobo, who you automatically get early on in Chapter 2, who quickly produces Black Chocobos, which are flying Glass Cannons, and Red Chocobos, which are mobile Lightning Bruisers.
Does This Remind You of Anything?:
- The entire plot is, essentially, the Pharisee theory regarding Jesus lying at the center of the Dark Secret guarded by the Corrupt Church.
- The War of the Lions can also be seen as a parallel to the War of the Roses.
- Similarly, The Fifty Years' War that was the precursor to the War of the Lions has obvious parallels with the Hundred Years' War. This war started under a similar pretext as its fictional counterpart, namely, England laying claim to the French throne. It also ended much the same way as the fictional version, with a disastrous defeat for England that left the kingdom bankrupt and facing a succession crisis that eventually led to the Wars of the Roses.
The Dog Bites Back: Ramza spends about half the game being fooled into aiding the antagonists and then being forgotten as an ignorable pawn. Most said antagonists spend the other half of the story being stabbed in the face by Ramza. As the pile of dead soldiers and Eldritch Abominations left in his wake kept rising, Folmarv should have figured out Ramza was a tad more dangerous than the average schmuck.
The Dreaded: The boss fight against Belias is considered to be infamously difficult for novice players unprepared for it. This is compounded by the fact that the boss fight is part of a multi-stage sequence and if the player needed to grind levels/jp and they had a single save file, they couldn't, and the only thing they could do was start the game over. Additionally, Belias is a giant humanoid-ram demon with four massive arms, calls himself "The Devil", and tells Ramza how much he wants to hear "screaming humans". None of that sounds good.
Dual Wielding: An innate ability of the Ninja class, purchasable as a support ability. (Giving a Bare-Fisted Monk the ability to punch twice? Yes, please and thank you!)
Dub Name Change: A lot. This site gives an extensive list.
Duel Boss: Ramza gets the privilege of not one, but two duels. (Versus Gafgarion, though you can open the gate and have your party help you, and later against Wiegraf, who can easily become That One Boss.
Dynamic Difficulty: Random encounters scale with Ramza's level. This causes issues, as the equipment and items in stores are based on story progression, not your level, and monsters get far more stats from their levels because human units are supposed to mostly rely on equipment to boost their stats, putting you increasingly behind statistically as you level up without getting better equipment. Enemy humans in random encounters also get equipment based on their level, making them stronger than your units if you've overleveled significantly. One of the most infamous examples of how overleveling can backfire is leveling too high in Chapter 1 will make random encounters in Chapter 2, when Red Chocobos start appearing, absolutely brutal (Red Chocobos, appearing once high enough level, can repeatedly use Chocobo Meteor with no cost nor charge time). That said, if the random encounters get too tough you can avoid them easily through Save Scumming until you catch back up with better equipment, jobs, and skills.
- In the PSP remake it is not Ramza, but ANY party member's level, even those not dispatched to the field. This can complicate using the Level/Delevel trick to Min Max your characters. In addition, the Rendezvous multiplayer system has the opposing party usually be "your party's highest level plus 1 or 2 levels."
Early-Installment Weirdness:
- Being the first product involving Ivalice, you won't be seeing any of the setting's exotic beast people here, such as bangaa, viera or nu mou. Especially jarring because Final Fantasy XII takes place before it in the official timeline. To a lesser extent, Ivalice itself is referred to as just a "kingdom", rather than the entire world setting with its own continents. All of this was eventually explained as being a result of Tactics being significantly farther in the timeline than XII.
- Beneficial spells like Raise and Protect can potentially miss if the target's Faith stat is too low. Future Tactics games would ditch it to keep everything more in line with the main games. Likewise, Faith and Bravery could determine the outcomes of a lot of abilities as well as the strength of them, but their appearance in later games were changed to be a status buff that boosted physical and magical strength instead.
- The maximum amount of units the player could have in the party was 16. The sequels would increase this to 24 characters and the PSP version of the first game would also use the 24 unit limit. The Ivalice Chronicles remaster would up the party limit to 50 units.
- It was possible to recruit monsters to your side and control them like any other unit. In the sequels, you can't recruit monsters as allies, but the Beastmaster job can let you control them for that unit's current turn.
- Every character and enemy had zodiac signs, which could affect how well some abilities could perform. Genders were also thrown into the mix to make things even more complicated. This mechanic would not be used in the sequels.
- Certain characters would have unique jobs with unique abilities that matched their character in the story and these can't be obtained by the player. Later games would heavily cut down on this and opted to have most enemies and/or special characters use the same classes the player can, but may also use ability set combos that the player can't normally use.
- The story is very dark and has a lot of political and religious themes while many characters are killed left and right. The sequels would go for the more Lighter and Softer route by having the stories focus on kids being thrown into another world and trying to find a way home. While the sequels don't use the same dark themes as the first game did, there are still some pretty bleak moments.
- The game uses movement abilities that would grant units bonuses upon moving such as boosts to Move and Jump or recovering HP after moving. The sequels would remove the movement abilities slot and put some of the abilities into other places and gear.
- Evasion is determined by several pieces of gear and the unit's class. The sequels would simplify it to be based on class and only specific gear.
- Units who fall in battle can be Killed Off for Real if they are not revived within three turns. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance would keep the permadeath mechanic only in Jagds and only after the battle ends. Final Fantasy Tactics A2 removes the mechanic entirely by replacing it with a jail system that removes lawbreaking units for only the rest of the battle.
Easy Level Trick: In the third storyline battle of Chapter 2, it's traditional to strip Gafgarion of his gear and assign him a helpless support job, rendering him easy pickings when he betrays you.
Elite Tweak: Heavily, heavily encouraged. The game offers a very robust customization system through Jobs, allowing players to equip multiple abilities from multiple Jobs at the same time. The combinations are practically endless, especially since pretty much every Job barring Squire is very useful. Not only can you equip Job moves, you can also equip Support abilities, Reaction abilities, and Movement abilities, all of which can be combined and swapped out at will. The player is heavily rewarded for exploring the Job system and concocting whatever combination of abilities they want to muster, especially since units are rarely complete on their own. For example:
- The basic Black Mage has the useful Magick Boost that increases all outgoing damage and healing by 33%. While you can swap this onto a Time Mage or Mathematician to boos their numbers, you can also pull useful skills from later classes and add them back to the Black Mage, allowing them to hit incredibly hard throughout the game.
- White Mages can be completely reworked from regular healer/buffers into Holy-spamming nukers with the right setup, like MP Halve and the aformentioned Magick Boost.
- Squire is a very poor class if used primarily, but becomes incredibly valuable if used as a secondary. Focus grants an immediate attack up, making it brutal on Monk or Knight, and Stone Toss is actually fairly powerful on units with Brawler. The biggest benefit is JP Boost, which dramatically cuts grinding and allows for even further tweaking.
Emergency Impersonation: In a cutscene, it's revealed that Ovelia's an unaware version of this; the real Ovelia either died a long time ago or just plain didn't exist.
Empire with a Dark Secret: The entire kingdom of Ivalice was built upon the myth of St. Ajora Glabados and the Zodiac Braves, perpetuated by the Church of Glabados. In truth, the myth is a cover story. Ajora was really a spy and a Manipulative Bastard who was the first human in recorded history to be possessed by a Lucavi (Ultima). After his death, a group of opportunists capitalized on the faith that Ajora had built, forming the backbone of what would later become the Church of Glabados. The truth of St. Ajora and the Lucavi's existence became secrets known only to a few members of the Church, for if these secrets ever became publicly known, the Church's power would collapse. Those who knew said truth (e.g. Germonique, Ramza, Orran) are condemned by the Church as heretics with all evidence of their existence destroyed.
Even Evil Has Standards: Even Punch-Clock Villain Gafgarion expresses disdain for Larg's machinations (though not enough to stop working for him).
Everything's Better with Samurai: The game is set in a Medieval England setting, but there are still Samurai (and ninjas). The game explains they came from a foreign land.
Everything but the Girl: Delita. By the time the story ends, he's married Ovelia and become a king, but she's become paranoid enough to stab him in fear, leading him to stab her back. Neither of them dies, according to Yasumi Masuno, but they remain distrustful of each other for the rest of their lives, and Delita finds himself Lonely at the Top.
Evil All Along: In Chapter 2, Cardinal Delacroix. He promised to protect Ovelia, only to spirit her away to Zeltennia and send men to eliminate Agrias; and it turns out he and Baert were working together to get the Zodiac Stone that Mustadio was keeping away from them.
Evil Costume Switch: Ramza's appearance between chapters becomes steadily more intimidating, culminating in a pitch-black suit of armor with spikes fitted on the shoulders. Thing is, he always remains firmly on the side of good, he's just honing his ideals and growing increasingly focused.
Exact Eavesdropping: Ovelia pretends to go to her room, but remains just barely out of sight to eavesdrop on Delita the one time he's discussing something pertinent to his nefarious plans; similarly, Zaalbag eavesdrops on Dycedarg through a crack in the door while he's meeting with one of his co-conspirators. (Vaguely justified in that both were shown to have doubts earlier.)
Expository Hairstyle Change: In the time between Chapter One and Chapter Two, Ramza loses the ponytail marking him as a Cadet, also symbolizing a significant loss of innocence.

Tropes F-M

Face–Heel Turn: And plenty of them. There's a few Heel Face Turns to balance them out, though.
Faking the Dead: A stand-in is executed in Orlandu's place so that he can safely join Ramza's party without fear of being hunted down.
- There's also questions regarding whether or not Ramza and Alma survived the final battle and somehow returned to Ivalice. The simple answer is to write it off as Orran hallucinating them being alive, yet the entire ending cinematic is comprised of them riding around the now-peaceful countryside. The Ivalice Chronicles adds some narrative text and voiceover on black screens that makes it explicit that they survived and went on to live out the rest of their lives incognito.
Fallen Hero: Wiegraf.
False Flag Operation: The group attacking Orbonne in the prologue turns out to be Larg's soldiers in disguise, planning to eliminate Ovelia and frame Goltana for it.
Fartillery: One of the attacks in the arsenal of the Pig creatures is "Toot," where they fart on the enemy and inflict the Confuse and Sleep status ailments.
Festering Fungus: Zig-Zagged - Mossfungus inflicts the poison status (when used in one map), but it ultimately can be recovered from. However, if one dies of Mossfungus poisoning, mushrooms grow either on the grave or even on the body.
Final Dungeon Preview: Played with a bit, despite the fact that there's only battles and not dungeons to explore. However, a number of significant battles occur at Orbonne Monastery, such as the opening tutorial, a few sequential battles midway through the game, and then returning there at the end of the game, where you're taken to the Necrohol of Mullonde, the true final area of the game.
Fisticuff-Provoking Comment: When Tietra is kidnapped, Argath smugly declares that he wouldn't waste his time rescuing her and neither would Dycedarg. Delita responds by slugging him.
Fixed Damage Attack: The damage output of physical Guns work this way, where its damage formula simply multiplies its weapon power twice and ignores the unit's physical attack stat, with damage variance after that depending on zodiac compatibility with the target. Magical Guns work differently, where the unit's and target's Faith influences the damage on top of Zodiac compatibility, but still ignores the unit's magical attack stat by using the Gun's weapon power in the damage formula instead and thus, with equal Faith values, will deal the same damage in the hands of a level 1 Chemist as it would in the hands of a level 100 Black Mage.
Flashback: The first chapter is a flashback (the tutorial battle at the beginning of the game takes place at least a year after those events, and chapter 2, taking place in the "present," takes place mere moments after Princess Ovelia is abducted); moreover, the entire story is told from a couple hundred years after the fact.
Flunky Boss: Any boss that isn't a Duel Boss, except for Queklain.
For Great Justice: The quote occasionally used before using the Monk's Repeating Fist technique:
"Fight for justice... fists of fury! Repeating Fist!"
Forced Level-Grinding: Those that are experienced and understand the game well can reasonably beat the game without any real grinding, but for the more average player there will be various points in the first half where they will need to have grinded some to get past. The biggest offender is as soon as the fourth story battle, the infamous Dorter City Slums, where the enemy quality takes a big spike and starts with significant positional advantage, while a player that didn't make a beeline to getting the JP Gain Up/JP Boost ability and a few good early-obtainable skills on everyone will be left with weak Squires/Chemists and Knights/Archers/Wizards/Priests with little usable skills if they didn't do any random battles nor intentionally stall out the prior story battles to get more EXP/JP.
Foreshadowing:
- Dycedarg: "Our little mockingbird is taken wing, Gaffgarion, and it leaves me wroth." Wroth is, of course, the subtitle of Adrammelech, the Lucavi that Dycedarg eventually transforms into.
- In that same conversation, Dycedarg is unsettlingly dismissive of Ramza and goes so far as to tell Gaffgarion to kill him if he stands in the way. Even the amoral mercenary balks at this. Dycedarg is so blasé about kinslaying because this wouldn't be the first time.
- One scene added to the War of the Lions version details Agrias giving Ovelia a dagger to protect herself, since Agrias won't be there for her. Sure enough, Ovelia uses it.
Foil: Ramza and Delita. At the beginning of the game, the two characters are practically identical, being Squires with near identical skillsets who care for their younger sisters, Alma and Tietra. But when Tietra is killed by Argath, their paths separate. Ramza, an acknowledged bastard, sticks to his ethics and ideals but suffers horrendously for it, becoming a mercenary and later a heretic in the eyes of the public because he refused to budge on what was right, ultimately dying forgotten. Delita, the lowborn commoner, compromises his ideals and burns friend and foe alike in his quest for power, becoming the new King of Ivalice and saving the land from civil war, but ultimately feels empty in the end despite his accomplishments.
Forced Transformation:
- The Oracle spell Foxfire and Beowulf's sword skill "Chicken" can cause enemies to turn into Chickens if their Brave drops low enough.
- The Frog spell and the Nagarock sword can cause a target to be turned into a frog.
- The Moldball Virus ability permanently turns a unit into a Morbol. Fortunately this is an ability with no range that can only be used by a certain class of Morbol and it can only be used when it's immediately adjacenet to a friendly unit with the Monster Skill support ability attached, so you'll never realistically actually run into an enemy Morbol that can use it, and even if it can be used, it has a very low success rate at that.
- Reis was none too happy about being changed into a dragon either.
Four Is Death: A fallen character is lost permanently if they aren't revived by their fourth turn.
Free Rotating Camera: Well, free-ish anyway, as only 90-degree turns (relative to the map) are possible, but you see all of the other angles as the camera is turning. You can also tilt and zoom out/in.
Freeze-Frame Bonus: In Riovanes Castle, Folmarv and Wiegraf decide to massacre everyone because they know too much... but seconds before disaster, can see Barrington literally stand up and run out of the room.
Friendly Fireproof: Zig-Zagged Trope, as most spells are area-effect, meaning they will affect anyone standing within their influence, and shame on you if you accidentally kill an NPC in an Escort Mission by flinging spells on top of them. However, summons and samurai blade Draw Out effects have Damage Discrimination, preventing them from hitting the "wrong" targets. One very convenient side effect of this is that it allows you to level up more easily: neutralize the final remaining enemy on the field without killing it, then simply have your party hit and heal each other to gain experience and job points.
Friendship Moment:
- Ramza trying to comfort Delita after Tietra's kidnapping, sharing a common memory about making whistles with blades of grass.
- In Golgorand, Agrias putting her trust in Ramza after finding out his real identity:
  Agrias: Ramza, are you really a Beoulve?
  Goffard: Didn't you know, Agrias? His name is Ramza Beoulve. One of the Beoulve family.
  Ramza: It's true. I'm a Beoulve! But I'm not like my brothers! I never knew about kidnapping the Princess! I swear it!
  Agrias: No doubt in my mind! I believe you!
- Orran declaring allegiance to Ramza when they meet again in Grog Hill.
Gambit Pileup: Every major party in the game has their own grand schemes, and everybody's trying to use everyone else as their pawns. Some of the specific players include:
- Duke Larg: Plans on executing or otherwise "disappearing" Princess Ovelia, allowing him to rule through his sister, the Queen, as the regent of his infant nephew.
- Duke Goltana: Plans on arresting the Queen for having the King killed (which is as likely as not to be true) and executing her, and disinheriting the prince as a bastard child (also as likely as not). Will then rule through Princess Ovelia, a cousin of the dead king who was adopted as a daughter when he wasn't producing healthy children. She's not the real Ovelia at all, to her own surprise. Goltana is aware and unconcerned.
- Dycedarg Beoulve: Ramza's eldest brother, supports Larg. Intends to kill him and take his place in the "rule as regent" plan. Eventually possessed by a Lucavi.
- The Glabados Church: Subtly pushes the war and unhappiness amongst the peasantry. Hopes both sides of the War of the Lions will bleed each other dry so the Church can step in as peacemakers. Has assassins in place to kill both Larg and Goltana, along with their closest supporters, in case neither side is willing to bleed themselves white. Also hopes to use the Knights Templar as new Zodiac Braves, using the old tale to gain popular support.
- The Knights Templar: Function as The Church's legbreakers, mostly gathering Zodiac Stones and destroying small-time interlopers into the War of the Lions. Most of the leaders are possessed by or allied with the Lucavi. Also part of the "assassinate Larg and Goltana" plot.
- The Lucavi: See also the Knights Templar. The Lucavi want to use the terrible bloodshed of the War of the Lions to resurrect their leader, which must be prevented lest even worse chaos reigns.
- Delita: Seeks to remind everyone that only pawns can be promoted. Supposed operative of the Church, who intend to use him to attack Goltana. He outsmarts them, and everyone else. One of the few that know about the Zodiac Brave plan and the Lucavi, and basically steers Ramza in to removing them for him, destroying both the demon problem and undermining the Church's plans. Marries Oveila, becomes new King of Ivalice, ends the War of the Lions.
Gamebooks: The Sound Novels are an in-game version, being minigames played in the style of a gamebook, complete with Multiple Endings. They were left out of the overseas versions of the original and PSP port, but The Ivalice Chronicles features them in all languages.
Game Face: Many of the demons drop the Masquerade and attack you in their inhuman forms.
Game-Favored Gender:
- There's female-exclusive equipment that grant various neat effects and stat buffs, but there's no such equivalent gender-exclusive equipment for male units. (In Ivalice Alliance these items are no longer gender-specific.)
- In a subtle advantage, males have access to Move+3 through the male-exclusive Bard job, while females get the vastly inferior Jump+3 in the female-exclusive Dancer job that is outclassed in its purpose by multiple other movement skills, so with thorough job exploring female units won't be able to match the movement range of male units without getting lucky with Teleport (which has an additional 10% chance of failure for each additional space a unit tries moving outside their movement range). The PSP port sorta corrected this with the new Dark Knight job, where males get access to Jump+3 in it while females get Move+3, but considering how ridiculous the grinding required to unlock the Dark Knight job is, female units still won't get access to it in an average or efficient playthrough.
Game Mod: Fan-made mods generally come in the following flavors:
- "Rebalanced": Attempts to nerf the more powerful job classes and/or buff the ones that lose relevance later on in the game.
- "Hard Mode": The AI is given more tools against the player, sometimes to the point of outright cheating.
- "Another Story": Instead of keeping with the original story, the plot is now either a continuation or a semi-related side story.
- Or some or all of the above.
- One particularly noteworthy mod is The Lion War, which adds most of the PSP port's new content to the PlayStation version for those that prefer the original localization and/or the original job and skill JP requirements but want to experience the new content. It even includes the video cutscenes if one is willing to go through a more complicated patching process to add them to the PlayStation ISO. The only things missing are the multiplayer, the expanded party limit (though the developers are trying to figure out a way to add party slots without causing glitches), and the Onion Knight job.
- Then there's "Battleground", a version created for Twitch to make random teams for "virtual gambling" a la SaltyBet.
Gameplay and Story Integration:
- When Argath joins the party as a guest, his Squire job learns skills from the Knight job such as some of the Rend skills. In the story, Argath is a squire, but is noted to be closer to being knighted than Ramza and Delita are
- Delita will actually go right for Argath at the end of Chapter 1. Reason being? The latter just shot Delita's sister. He is, in fact, so full of rage that he will come back from the dead at 1 HP just to snap at Ramza.
- Ramza is the only unique party member after chapter 1 whose default class is Squire. In story, he never rises higher than the rank of squire; he abandons the military after becoming disillusioned by his family's actions towards Delita's sister, and is branded a heretic, so neither of the two institutions that would ever knight him are like to do so. Meanwhile, Delita, who does remain in the mainstream of Ivalician society, gains a new class beyond Squire (and new sets of clothes befitting his increasing pile of titles) when you meet him again.
- In the Zirekile Falls story battle, Agrias (who is Ovelia's bodyguard) has her AI set to protect Ovelia at the exclusion of doing everything else, whereas Delita is much more aggressive.
- Rapha also runs right at Elmdore and his assassins at the end of Chapter 3. Again, for what reason? Elmdore just murdered the man who murdered her brother. Robbed of her chance at revenge, she instead decides to commit Suicide by Cop. Since the goal of the mission is explicitly, "Don't let Rapha commit Suicide by Cop," this is that unusual example where Gameplay and Story Segregation might actually have been a better choice.
- In the pre-battle cutscene in Bedsa Desert, Barich poisons the party. Since this is an in-engine cutscene, the status persists when the battle begins.
- Mid-battle scripted dialogue will also (temporarily) interrupt any actively charged ability, including the Jump attack. Things get very silly if you send Ramza leaping into the air before he has anything to say, because he'll land to deliver his lines, and then rocket back upwards.
- Orlandeau, who is described in the backstory as jaw-droppingly powerful and skilled enough to defeat entire armies... and, well, when you get him on your side, he is—and unlike the other characters who join your party at a set level, he is always at the party level the game uses to calculate random encounters (so if your 4 + Ramza is maxed out at 99...)
- Ramza's unique skills perfectly tie into his character development in-story. Both Chant and Tailwind are available at the start, showing how he has faith in, and encourages others to do better even during his more naive time as an Akademy student (and, in the case of chant, to the detriment of himself). His Brave enhancement skill is available right when he gets the courage to acknowledge his own flaws and challenge the generally-accepted views of society and the different factions. Finally, he gets Shout right when he has fully solidified his personal beliefs and views on the world which lets him gain the confidence (in the form of bravery) and strength (in the form of attribute increases) needed to push on through all the difficulties he's facing at that point. What's more is that all his skills look unimpressive - showing how he's not supposed to be one of the major leaders or players in the accepted history of the game - but are actually the most powerful support skills in the game; unlike all other unique skills which either give temporary buffs/debuffs or do damage, Ramza's skills notably increase stats for the entire battle and to which enemies in battle rarely have a way to counter (namely break skills, which very few enemies will carry and use). This shows both that Ramza has a long-lasting impact on everyone he meets and that he will always push on through with what he believes in regardless of how much people try to break him.
- When fighting Elmdore before he turns into a Lucavi, he shows himself as one of the few characters who uses the teleport skill in a cutscene to have it as a skill in combat, using it to teleport around the area as you fight him.
Gameplay and Story Segregation:
- No matter how over-leveled you are, cutscenes will still play out exactly as scripted, and no amount of curative magic or items will save Tietra or Marach. (Presumably, they passed the time limit beyond which such things would work, as in another cutscene, Ramza wisely yells for a Phoenix Down when Mustadio is incapacitated, and in battle you have three turns before units are lost forever.)
- Ramza will sometimes have dialogue at the end of a battle, but none of it will acknowledge how the battle played out. Depending on how you played, cue Ramza demanding that a field of corpses surrender, that a battle he finished in one turn took longer than he thought, that he doesn't understand why anybody would want to hurt Mustadio (even if Mustadio was knocked out by Ramza's own hand), and so on.
- The reason that nobody appears alongside Ramza and Alma in the ending, is because besides those two, you may not even have the others in your party and memory limitations meant the programmers didn't want to add the extra code logic necessary to check for the presence of any other characters.
- Player characters with mid-battle dialogue will get up to speak even if they're dead or asleep, then lie back down and die or go to sleep again after the dialogue ends. (Non-player characters get a free resurrection/awakening out of this.)
  - This also holds true if they're still airborne from having executed a Jump—they will land to deliver their lines and then yeet themselves back into the stratosphere.
- If you happen to have Ramza fight Belias all by himself (i.e. no backup party in the battle setup), Belias will still summon his demons anyway after the Duel Boss portion with Wiegraf.
- Barich starts the fight against him at the Bedsa Desert by poisoning your party, even though you can go into the fight with gear that prevents characters from being poisoned.
Gender-Restricted Gear: Handbags, hair adornments and perfumes are only usable by female characters in the PS and War of the Lions versions. Ivalice Chronicles did away with this restriction, allowing hair adornments and perfumes to be usable by everyone while handbags are now only usable by Bards and Dancers.
Geo Effects: How the Geomancers' abilities work. Ice spells also work better in snow-based fields, Lightning spells are more effective in rainy conditions (especially thunderstorms), and fire spells may be better in volcanoes and deserts.
Get Out!: After Argath gravely insults both Delita and Tietra after the latter is kidnapped, Ramza expresses his utter disgust in Argath's classism by ejecting him from the party. (In the original translation, he literally orders Algus to "get out".)
Ramza: Begone from my sight! And do not think to return!
Argath: Your words cut deep, Ramza. Are we not friends?
Ramza: Remove yourself! I'll not ask again!
Argath: The Brigade makes its base at Ziekden. Your lord brother told me himself. You've no hope of breaching the fortress from the fore. Their defenses are too strong. A rear assault is your only chance. Best of luck, my soft-hearted friend. You'll need it.
Ramza: Begone!
Glass Cannon:
- Ninjas, Calculators, Black Mages and Summoners, at least in their default configuration. The game's flexibility is such that you can modify just about any class to strengthen its shortcomings.
- Mages with exceptionally high Faith exemplify this in general; their spells will do a ton of damage, but in turn that Faith is making them take just as much extra damage from spells, and if they end up in the splash radius of their own super Faith-powered spell, they're probably as good as dead.
God Save Us from the Queen!: Plays out entirely through the games "Chronicle" and "Rumour" sections: Queen Louveria poisons King Ondoria and instigates a hostile takeover of Ivalice, then starts exiling and/or executing people who piss her off (including the Queen Mother). She's eventually overthrown and tossed in the dungeon at Fort Besselat, and Duke Larg's attempt to storm the fortress and rescue her ignites the War of the Lions.
Going Through the Motions: Zig-Zagged Trope. The cutscenes are very well animated, with the tradeoff that generic battle actions are extremely limited: attacking with any melee weapon uses the same set of default motions for each weapon type (stabbing for knives, downward swings for swords, two handed thrusts for spears, etc.), casting is "both hands raised and mouth opening and closing," etc.
Gotta Catch Them All: The Corrupt Church is trying to collect the Holy Stones, but they keep falling into Ramza's hands.
Good Costume Switch: Any generic that gets invited into Ramza's party by a mediator will swap from red clothes to blue clothes.
Good Old Fisticuffs: The Monk class. Other classes can also fight barehanded better than they would otherwise be able to with the Martial Arts support ability equipped.
The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: The three main factions play this trope straight. The protagonists (Ramza and Delita) as the Good, the Church of Glabados as the Bad, and the Lucavi as the Evil.
Grand Theft Me: Bloody Angel Ultima attempts to pull one on Alma. It doesn't work.
Gratuitous Japanese: The two main armies are called Hokuten and Nanten. Fixed in the PSP version.
The Greatest Story Never Told: The Framing Device is that the game's events were covered up and unknown until someone found a recording of these events centuries later.
Guide Dang It!:
- Good luck trying to find some of the optional characters and subquests without a walkthrough. Ditto some of the rarer items. And if you're especially unfortunate or frustrated, some of the character job classes—though at least the game provides the prerequisites for a job class once you've unlocked it on at least one character.
- Ramza can learn Ultima on his base class, which makes it far more powerful. The only way to do so, though, is to get it cast on him by an enemy who casts the specific version of it he can learn; you only encounter them in a few battles, and they often won't cast it at all. There is no indication, anywhere in the game, that he can learn it, and depending on the AI you may never even discover it exists.
- The real purpose of the Super Boss is to teach you an ultimate summon, which can only be learned by having him cast it on your summoners. There is no indication anywhere in the game that this is how it works - and you can only fight him once, so if you miss the chance then you're out of luck.
- All of the -ja level spells and a few other high-level Summons^* can be learned the same way as Ultima and Zodiark, in which the character needs to be hit by the spell (and survive it if it's an attack) while they're using the respective job (e.g. a Time Mage may learn Hasteja after getting hit by it). It's only a chance to learn it like it is for Zodiark, and this is more easily overlooked because unlike Ultima and Zodiark, it's an alternate way to learn them, as the player can just spend the JP to learn them normally.
- While the game does tell you different dialogue options effect the mission objectives, the game never hints that these have other consequences. For example, while a player can see that the game has different dialogue options sometimes, some options can cause Ramza to gain or lose Brave or Faith, such as not prioritizing saving Argath causing Ramza to lose Brave in the final fight of Act 1 if the battle takes too long.
Guys Smash, Girls Shoot:
- Male units have an extra 7% boost to their HP and 25% boost to their physical attack, whereas female units have an extra 7% boost to their MP and 25% boost to their magical attack. As such if you want to get the most out of your units, it's best to play this trope straight and have your male units stick to physical jobs while having your female units stick to magical jobs. Even among the special units only Ramza, Cloud, and Orlandou are exceptions, with the first two having the female MP/MA bonus in addition to their male HP/PA bonus, and the latter having one of the few classes that increases your magical power growth when leveling up, which makes them the only ones naturally good at fulfilling a physical/magical hydrid role.
- Played with, however, with the unique gender-specific classes of Bard and Dancer; Bard, the male-exclusive class, is a magic-based support class gained by leveling magical classes, while Dancer is a physical-based offensive class gained by leveling physical classes, so you can only unlock them and utilize them effectively by training someone "against type" for their gender.
Half-Human Hybrid: Reis, as described in her job class's description, is human, but descended from dragons. This probably explains why she keeps her awesome dragon-breath abilities when she is turned back into a human.
Healing Shiv: The Cure Staff. Dragons of the same element as your weapon get healed instead of taking damage, and you can equip shields or armor that grant you similar benefits. You can also turn elemental weapons and attacks into healing shivs if you wear equipment that absorbs those elements.
Heel–Face Door-Slam:
- Isilud was a true believer in the Knights Templar's cause who genuinely believed they were fighting to help the world and was ignorant to the Lucavi plot, but when at Riovanes Castle he learns of his father's true intentions when he sees him transform into Hashmal/Hashmalum, at which point he tries to stop him but is swiftly killed. As he is found dying by Alma he gives her his Pisces stone, and in his last breaths begs for Ramza to stop the Lucavi.
- Zalbaag also comes around when he realizes that Dycedarg killed their father and Ramza was right all along, where he then helps you defeat Dycedarg. But unlike with Meliadoul, after Dycedarg transforms into Adrammelech, Zalbaag is immediately killed before he can join your party. He does get brought back by Folmarv/Volmav a few battles later, but as a vampire that Ramza is forced to put down.
Heel–Face Turn:
- Marach starts out as an enemy before he joins your side.
- Meliadoul changes sides when she realizes that 1) your party didn't murder her brother, her father did; and 2) said father, Folmarv, has been taken over by a Demon.
- You can also recruit enemies with the Mediator's "Invite" ability or temporarily woo enemies to your side via the Thief's "Steal Heart" ability.
Hero Antagonist: Wiegraf is a rare example of one turned evil. Meliadoul is a type 2. Also Isilud.
Heroes Prefer Swords: Averted for Ramza (who has no particular weapon preferences), but played straight with the rest of your team - you get no less than five characters whose unique class has skills that require the use of a sword, and most of them are holy knights or paladins in one form or another. No skillsets specifically require any other type of weapon, although Mustadio's skills are much less useful without the range granted by a gun.
Heroic Bastard: Ramza, as his mother was his father's mistress or second wife (in an era where remarriage, even after the death of the first spouse, was frowned upon); the PSP translation explicitly names Ramza as the result of Balbanes' infidelity.
He Who Fights Monsters: Wiegraf, who hates the Church at first, and then you kill his sister. Then he's helping the Church so that he'll have the power necessary to kill you.
Horse of a Different Color: Chocobos of any kind can be ridden by human units. This helps with mobility quite a bit as they have 6 movement points and a jump of 5. Black Chocobos are especially good, seeing as they can fly.
Hot as Hell: Ultima.
Humans Are the Real Monsters: Played with. While the War of the Lions is revealed partway through the game as a plot orchestrated behind the scenes by a cabal of immortal demons from beyond time and space, most of the major players in it are still just ordinary humans who are neither possessed nor being controlled (at least not directly) and are just acting on their own desires and ambitions. It doesn't exactly help that, because most of the political skulduggery happens behind closed doors, both Ramza and the player never have a complete understanding of how long the war has been building and over what, and the Church's hagiographic depiction of King Delita as the one who saved everything complicates matters even further.
Humble Trade Class: One of the two basic classes is the Chemist, which has terrible stat growth and whose only combat utility is using items. However, this is actually pretty important, as characters don't inherently know how to use different items and can only learn through the Chemist class. Leveling this class is also required to unlock the entire mage branch of the job tree.
Hyperactive Sprite: When not attacking, everyone not dead, dying or suffering from one or more status ailment(s) is always walking in place unless they are using an ability that takes charge time, in which case they either squat or keep their arms raised in the air (or in the case of Dancers and Bards, dance or sing). The hyperactivity goes up when hasted and down when slowed, only stopping if the Stop status is applied.
I Cannot Self-Terminate: Zalbaag begs you to kill him before he hurts you, as he can't control his own body. And you have to do it in order to win that battle.
An Ice Gun: The Glacier Gun, incorrectly called Blaze Gun in the PS version due to a bug.
Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The Ivalice Chronicles has Squire (easy), Knight (normal) and Tactician (hard) difficulties.
Idiot Hair: Ramza, who never quite loses that cowlick even by the end of the game, though it's most obvious before his Expository Hairstyle Change.
I'm Cold... So Cold...: Gaffgarion's final words.
Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Rapha and Marach, who have area-of-effect spells that randomly hit up to six times, though you can improve the odds of striking an enemy by careful placement. Reis (as a human) also has something similar, except it fires only up to four times over an area of 13 tiles max, which means that it'll be a miracle if it actually hits ANYTHING at all. The Tiamat monster class also has abilities that work this way, which are much better because it's much easier to limit the area of effect of those spells.
Impoverished Patrician: Argath comes from a noble family with its reputation and holdings in ruin after his grandfather was accused of treason during the last war. He says he's not well treated by the other noble children, as his family's honor is in tatters. A short time later, his deeply bigoted attitude toward commoners rears its head and we no longer care.
Improbable Weapon User: Characters can use Instruments, Dictionaries, Handbags, and Bolts of Cloth to attack (and the Ninja class can use the Throw command for any equippable weapon).
In a Single Bound: This game averts the usual issue of Gameplay and Story Segregation regarding dragoons' ability to only jump ridiculous levels for attacks by giving them the movement ability "Ignore Height". Equip it on any character, and they can suddenly leap any amount without a problem. This can result in some challenges being greatly reduced, like Ramza simply climbing over the castle walls to just walk away from Gaffgarion.
Inconsistent Dub: White Mage and Black Mage are known as "Priest" and "Wizard" in the PS1 version, but are called White Mage and Black Mage in attract mode. More famously, Ultima and Altima both getting used in the same scene for the same character.
Inconsistent Spelling: Several names are spelled incorrectly in the original script. In the original, names are sometimes spelled differently in the same conversation. The remake confuses things even further, with some names correcting obvious translation errors and others seemingly changed just for the sake of changing them.
Interface Spoiler: The Chronicle updates its info as the story goes along by, among other things, removing characters' ages when they die. So when the entry for Marquis Elmdore doesn't remove their age even though it states that person fell in battle, you can guess something is amiss.
In the Hood: The White Mage class (though the males don't wear theirs), Orlandu, Meliadoul, Rapha, Gafgarian (while pretending to be an executioner), Zalmo (but he doesn't wear his, either), Cardinal Draclau, and Rofel.
Instant-Win Condition: The "Defeat [Insert Name Here]" missions; the "Protect [Insert Name Here]" missions have an instant lose condition—your protectorate must not die.
Irony:
- In a dialogue, Ramza and Delita discuss the sincerity of the latter's affection for Ovelia, at which point Delita claims that he would give his life for her. Guess what happens in the epilogue...
  - In War of the Lions, Delita's first line of dialogue in battle has this in spades, too: "The well aimed thrust pierces the mail!"
- Early on (second battle in the game) Ramza demands the gang of tortured^notepathetic thieves to either surrender or die in obscurity. The thieves choose to die in obscurity rather than surrender. Guess which path Ramza takes later in life when facing a grand conspiracy...
Jerkass: Argath. SERIOUSLY. He is so reviled that he was placed in a second battle in War of the Lions, just so you could kill him again, and then in a Bonus Mission where you kill ten of him. Also usually named are Dycedarg, Delita, and Gaffgarion. Barrington is possibly even worse, but most don't bother to remember him.
Jerkass Has a Point: Argath is an arrogant jackass who doesn't try to hide his contempt for commoners, but he's right in pointing out that the elder Beoulve brothers, as well as a good chunk of the nobility, care just as little about commoners as he does, and Dycedarg's claims that he will ensure a kidnapped Tietra's safety are just lies. He's proven right when Zalbaag orders him to shoot through Tietra to kill Gragoroth, to Delita and Ramza's horror.
Job System: One of the reasons the game has so much depth is that it gives you 20 classes and the ability to mix-and-match skills from them. Every class has at least one useful skill, even mage classes when paired with high MA.
Joke Character: Pigs. They look silly and almost don't fit into the setting, their attacks are just as ridiculous, and they pose no threat to anyone. While they have a few surprisingly good status effect skills, it's extremely risky to pull off due to their very short range, even with their high physical evasion. Their main purpose is to be poached for incredibly rare and powerful items, preferably while in your team's captivity. In fact, the Wild Boar variant can only be found via breeding, and its secret ability, "Bequeath Bacon" has it give a unit a free level by killing itself permanently, emphasizing how they're more useful to you dead than alive.
Joke Item: The Nagrarock sword.
- Lethal Joke Item: While not strong in raw power, the Nagrarock's ability to turn enemies into frogs, which take more damage, barely deal any themselves, and can only attack, is very powerful.
- There's also the "Stone Gun," which is the most powerful gun in the game but petrifies the character wielding it at the beginning of a battle. Though they can be cured, starting a battle with five characters wielding it is an auto-game-over.
Justice Will Prevail: A very surprising example. In a world that leans very, very heavily on the side of cynicism, Ramza's character seems positively suicidal. After getting over his initial naivety he trades his foolishly good nature for... knowingly suicidal good nature. Any enemy who gets within spitting distance, and even some of his allies, feels the need to point out the world doesn't work like that and that his course of action will just get him ignobly and uselessly killed. While the fate of your party is left up to interpretation, by the end of the game, he's pretty much the one major character who's definitely both alive and not utterly alone and miserable, and his story will eventually be revealed centuries after.
Kamaitachi: One of the Geomancer skills is a wind attack called Kamaitachi that can trigger the Paralyze (i.e. Don't Act) Status Ailment.
Kick the Dog: Argath first shows his virulent classism when he repeatedly kicks a bound prisoner to the floor and drags him by the hair.
Klingon Promotion: Both Dycedarg and Delita advance their careers in this fashion in Chapter 4 - next time we see them they've taken over the positions of Larg and Goltanna, respectively.
Knight in Sour Armor: A number of characters, particularly Wiegraf, share this trait. And when you fight Gaffgarion in the Golgonda Gallows with Agrias on your team:
Agrias: What is to be done with Lady Ovelia?
Gaffgarion: I will return her to Gallione, as per my contract. What Duke Larg does with her after that is not my concern.
Agrias: Lord Dycedarg and the duke would use her as a pawn in their game of thrones! Just as the two of them now use you! Is a man like you not ashamed to be no more than a pawn in their game? Have you no pride—no honor?
Gaffgarion: Such flights of fancy are long since flown from me, my lady.
Lady of War: Several, not counting the player's ability to make female Generics into this: Agrias Oaks, Holy Knight and commander of the Lionsguard (personal bodyguards of the Royal Family.) Meliadoul Tengille, Divine Knight and daughter of Folmarv.
Late Character Syndrome: Pretty much all the special characters you get besides Orlandu and Agrias suffer from this. Of them, you only get Agrias and Mustadio before Part 4 (plus Luso in the PSP version), and by the time you get all the other special characters in Part 4, the generics you've been using should have most to all their desired skills learned and already be easily breaking the game. Additionally, all those special characters will just have a few job levels in their default job with a few skills learned and nothing else, so you not only have to put in a lot of work this late into the game to get all their skills in their special job but also put in a ton of grinding if you want to get them a really good secondary skillset and good reaction/support/movement skills (or in the case of Worker 8 and Byblos, they're monsters so they can never match a well-trained human unit). Plus, you can't do propositions with special characters either, so you can't take advantage of propositions to get extra quick JP for them. Orlandu only averts it because his special job is so broken even with few of its skills learned, and he doesn't really need any other skills outside of what his job offers to snap the game in half (while he additionally gets level scaled to your party's high level so he'll be ready no matter how much you grinded), and Agrias averts it by coming early enough that she won't be too behind your generics in a typical playthrough while having enough unique advantages with her really good Holy Sword skills to be worth using over a generic. However, even Agrias can suffer from this if you grinded really heavily in Part 1/early Part 2, or immediately gunned for Gained JP Up/Boost and were really efficient with your job progression and skill learning.
- Cloud gets the worst of this, as not only does he come with little skills learned, but he also comes at level 1, whereas you get him after all the other special characters besides potentially Byblos, and at this point of the game your units' levels should be in the 40s or higher. Even ignoring the questionable potential of his special job, there's no unit that could be remotely worth training up from level 1 this far into the game.
Lazy Backup: If Ramza is crystallized or all five members of your party are down (via K.O. or being Taken for Granite), it's Game Over regardless of how many other people you didn't take with you into battle.
Laser-Guided Karma: Partially. Being good doesn't necessarily mean you'll get a good ending, but if you're evil, some way or another, you will pay. Holy shit, you will pay.
Leeroy Jenkins:
- In Gariland Magic City, the very first battle of the game where you're fielding your own squad, your AI buddy Delita warns against reckless charges, then promptly ignores his own advice. (Guests tend to have this sort of behavior. In particular, Rapha on the Riovanne Rooftop castle where you're supposed to protect her. Stories abound of people having their Rapha charge in and promptly get killed before the player even gets a single turn in.)
- Unless they're about to die (and there are other enemies not in dire peril) or suffering from a status ailment preventing them from doing so, enemies are always aggressively charging towards the party, making them easy prey.
- You can also give your own party members this sort of behavior by doing so yourself or setting their Auto-battle command to "Fight for life".
Let Me at Him!: After Argath provokes Delita by insinuating that Tietra isn't worth rescuing, Delita slugs him and has to be physically restrained by Ramza from beating the shit out of him right then and there.
Level Grinding: Taken to absolutely obscene extremes with the Degenerator floor panels found in a handful of stages, which take you DOWN a level. The goal is to "make a profit" with your levels, so you trigger the Degenerator trap only while in Jobs that have bad growths, and then level back up in Jobs with good ones (usually Mime). Only for the hardest hardcore, because characters are already pretty powerful, especially unique units.
Level Scaling: The game bases non-story battles on your party's levels, which can be a problem, because while monsters gain almost all of their stats from leveling up, humans, especially melee fighters, gain most of their stats from equipment.
Lighter and Softer: Though it contains strong elements of political intrigue and its cast is a veritable Morality Kitchen Sink compared to most Final Fantasy titles, Final Fantasy Tactics still isn't as heavy with its subject matter when compared to its spiritual predecessor, Tactics Ogre. For one thing, Ramza is a far more straightforward hero than the ruthless, calculating person Denam becomes, with Delita being the one to inherit Denam's more unscrupulous and manipulative traits. Secondly, Final Fantasy Tactics culminates in a straightforward good vs evil "Save the World" Climax, while Tactics Ogre's villains remain morally complex to the very end. And lastly, while both Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre can end with relatively upbeat Bittersweet Endings, Tactics Ogre can also play out like a straight-up tragedy, with Denam losing everyone he cares about and even his life, unlike Delita who at the very least survives to usher Ivalice into a new golden age.
Limited Move Arsenal: Of the first type.
Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards:
- The relationship between warriors and mages isn't so straightforward. In the early game, it's actually the mages that are better, as even the weakest spells are relatively powerful for this point in the game (especially if you made sure the generics you turned into mages have high Faith) and their charge times aren't yet an issue, whereas the early-accessible physical jobs are slow, immobile, and/or can't really do much but bonk enemies one at a time for mediocre damage. Then around mid-game, weaker spells aren't doing so much damage anymore, stronger spells' longer charge times make their use a lot more tricky against faster enemies, and mages are straggling behind with their skill learning as they need so much more JP to learn everything, while physical units have access to their better jobs, much better equipment, and a variety of useful skills, so they can hit harder, tank much better, and perform a variety of useful utilities. In late game, mages can become really good again, particularly if they got all the Calculator's Math Skills and set it as the secondary skillset for a mage that learned most of the spells in the game (being capable of even killing every enemy in 1 turn if the conditions are right), but physical units are by no means obsolete, as Ninjas are far faster and mobile than any other human unit in the game while having the best 1-on-1 damage output of any job (being even able to break the damage cap with the Martial Arts ability), while physical units can also run Blade Grasp and minimum Faith to be near-untouchable to both physical and magic attacks (whereas mages need high Faith to be effective, in turn leaving them very vulnerable to magic themselves). Then there's the special characters with unique physical-based jobs that can utilize sword skills with instant ranged and powerful AOE damage that can't be dodged, particularly with the infamous Orlandeau. So overall, both warriors and mages will have a point in the game where one outshines the other but can end up game-breaking anyway in their own right.
- When it comes to just their damage output, it's actually the warriors who are quadratric and the wizards who are linear. Physical damage works by multiplying the unit's physical attack with their weapon's strength, so as their PA naturally increases as they level up and get access to increasingly stronger weapons, their damage output increases at a quadratic rate (or in the case of Monks and units with the Martial Arts support skill, their damage output works by squaring their PA, again leading to a quadratic rate in improvement). With spells on the other hand, they all have their own inherent multiplier that never changes to get multiplied with a unit's magical attack, so the damage output of a unit's spells increases linearly throughout the game. Additionally, physical jobs will increase their PA at a faster rate through leveling up than magical jobs will increase their MA, as the only non-special job that has an above-average MA growth is the unconventional Mime which can't be used as a traditional magic unit, whereas most of the non-special physical jobs have a higher growth rate in PA.
- For this game, this trope could be called "Linear Monsters, Quadratic Humans". Monsters gain a lot more stats from their level-ups than humans do, and thus will statistically outpace them with pure leveling and tend to have greater movement and Counter ability, among other abilities inherently, which makes them more powerful at base, but monsters never get any new moves (with their move sets being determined by what species they are) and can't use any equipment, overall severely limiting their potential compared to humans who learn a wide selection of useful skills and have very powerful equipment at their disposal. Additionally, if one wants to get really crazy with grinding, they can abuse degenerator traps to essentially grind their human units' stats up infinitely, whereas monsters don't have that potential when they can't switch jobs like human units can in order to alter their stat growths. Some tier 3 monsters are such powerhouses or have such useful abilities that they can still be useful by end of the game (for example Red Chocobos with incredible movement, high stats, and access to Chocobo Meteor, a very powerful far-ranged attack with no cost and no charge time), but most monsters will end up with no real use other than breeding a coveted tier 3 monster in their species line, or easy poaching of rare items/equipment.
Loads and Loads of Sidequests: The subseries is centred around a large number of sidequests. In the first two games, most of the sidequests were "Dispatch" missions where the player takes the right unit for the job, and then sends them off to take care of business while they went about on their own. Final Fantasy Tactics A2, on the other hand, made things get nutty by making nearly all of the several-hundred-strong sidequests directly playable.
Lonely at the Top: Delita destroys everything and everyone close to him in his bid to become king and finishes the game kneeling near the corpse of his wife (who he just killed in self-defense) wounded and wondering aloud who got the better end, he or his supposedly dead, ex-best friend Ramza.
Luck-Based Mission:
- The Roof Of Riovanes Castle battle, where if the dice land wrong, you can get a "game over" before you even get a turn. High speed characters can help, and you can also use "luck" to your advantage by using a low health character as a decoy.
- Any "Protect X" mission that ends if that character dies. Said character can start in the middle of a pack of enemies and you just have to pray the CPU is smart enough to have the character run from danger before they're killed.
Magic Dance: The aptly-named "Dance" ability owned by the aptly-named Dancer class. Ironically, the Dancer class uses the Physical Attack stat in their damage formulas.
Magic Knight: Half the hero characters, and you can even make your own generic ones.
Magic Music: The Bards' "Sing" ability.
Magikarp Power:
- Dancers and Bards equipped with the Ninja ability to go invisible as soon as they take damage (causing the enemy AI to ignore them for the rest of the battle, as singing/dancing don't count as actions that break invisibility). When paired with Mimes, who will automatically mimic all ally actions (Dancers have an all-enemy HP-damaging ability, Bards can buff stats), these songs and dances tend to go off about twice per active turn, and every battle starts with the enemy on the other side of the field.
- Calculators, who are very slow and weak, but their Math Skill ability lets them cast spells from other casting classes for free, with no charge time, under certain parameters. After purchasing all of these, as well as all of the usable spells, they can be switched into any other caster job and use Math Skill as their secondary ability.
Meaningful Echo:
- When Argath is about to get killed by the Corpse Brigade, they tell him, "Don't blame us, blame fate." Delita, who was present when this happened, says something similar to Ovelia when he kidnaps her, but the (PlayStation) English version turns it into, "Blame yourself or God," making it sound like he's taunting her bodyguard Agrias instead.
- Later, when Delita goes from being Ovelia's kidnapper to her protector, she asks him who he is, and he answers, "Human, just like you," a nod to Miluda's earlier line, "We're not animals! We're human, just like you! There's no difference among us other than our families!"
Mechanically Unusual Class:
- Calculators/Arithmetician are very slow and weak, but their ability lets them cast spells from other casting classes for free, with no charge time, under certain (numerical, hence the name) parameters. After purchasing all of these, as well as all of the usable spells, they are very good characters, but this is very time consuming.
- And then there's all of the unique job classes such as Holy Swordsman, Assassin, Engineer, etc.
Memento MacGuffin: The grass whistle/reed flute, which binds Ramza and Delita to their younger, happier days (and to each other), and which Ramza tries to teach to Ovelia. Eventually, Delita does teach her to do it in the PSP version.
Metal Slime: Monsters in the Pig class. They're mostly harmless and appear very, very, very rarely, but they can provide you with some very rare and very powerful items if you poach them. The Wild Boar in particular can only be obtained by turning a pig enemy to your side and breeding it.
Military Mage: Black Mages are ranged units whose attacks can take advantage of Elemental Rock–Paper–Scissors and don't benefit from altitude, unlike archers. White Mages act as The Medic, and Summoners are most akin to artillery, with powerful Area of Effect attacks as well as healing and buffs, although these tend to be less efficient than those of the White Mage.
Minimalistic Cover Art: As was tradition with several Final Fantasy games at the time, the original game's PSX release features only the logo on a white background in its box art. The European version of the PSP port does the same.
Money for Nothing: Since you get money rewards based on the strength of encounters (and you could give yourself stuff for free via stealing, catching thrown items, or poaching monsters, and then there are things like the item duplication glitch), enough grinding means you can have more money than the entire GDP of Ivalice as early as Chapter One if you really care to be that ridiculously wealthy. Otherwise, depending on the Job(s) you favor, you'll be on a very tight budget until somewhere between Chapters Three and Four.
Money Sink: Early game, it's armor and gear, then it's restorative items, and finally things thrown by Ninjas.
Morale Mechanic: The game has "Bravery" as a morale mechanic in combat; if dropped to single digits, the unit will literally turn into a chicken and avoid battle; a player character whose out-of-battle Bravery is dropped too low will leave the party forever (except Ramza).
Musicalis Interruptus: A dark version, as the tense background music during the hostage situation at Ziekden cuts out abruptly when Argath shoots Tietra.
My Name Is Inigo Montoya:
I'm Meliadoul! I'm coming here to avenge my brother!
My Name Is Question Mark: Unlike every other enemy in the game, all Zodiac monsters have their stats hidden behind question marks, though if you target them with Life Drain or Demi (which takes off 25% of max HP) or Demi 2 (which takes off 50% of max HP) you can get a pretty accurate estimate of their total HP.

Tropes N-Y

Narrator All Along: A variation. We know the narrator's identity from the beginning, but his relation to the cast is only revealed at the end when he signs his full name.
Nemean Skinning: Played with. Thieves can learn the support ability Poach, but you can't do a strict Nemean skinning and immediately use the item you just poached; however, the body of the monster/animal does disappear from the field immediately instead of counting down to death like every other combatant. That said, if a curative item made from the body of a monster appears in a treasure chest left by a dead animal, you can use that immediately (if you have the Item ability and learned how to apply the corresponding potion). It depends on whether you think chocobos naturally grow one ready-to-use phoenix down or not.
New Game Plus: A downplayed example in the mobile version. After beating the game once you can buy all the special items exclusive to the multiplayer missions in the PSP version in the poachers den, whether in a previous save or in a new game starting from Chapter 3.
Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: Ramza is conned quite a few times into making things worse for himself. Example: Handing Ovelia over to a duplicitous member of the Corrupt Church, who then hands her over to the Manipulative Bastard, who puts her on the throne and starts the very war Ramza was trying to avoid in her name.
No "Arc" in "Archery": Only true of bowguns (crossbows), which can only shoot in a straight line. Regular bows can fire over obstacles and gain more range the higher up in altitude a unit is.
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: One of the major themes in this game as Ramza learns the hard way. He eventually gets vindicated centuries after his death.
No Historical Figures Were Harmed: Given that the story is a fantasy version of The Wars of the Roses, this comes into play with several characters:
- Delita: King Henry VII, founding monarch of the House of Tudor
- Ovelia: Elizabeth of York
- King Ondoria: King Henry VI
- Queen Louveria: Margaret of Anjou
- Prince Orinus: Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales
- Order of the Northern Sky: The House of Lancaster
- Order of the Southern Sky: The House of York
Non-Indicative Name: The Wild Boar creature is never encountered as an enemy in wild. You'll only ever see it by breeding it from a Pig creature in your roster, meaning every Wild Boar is actually captive-bred and domesticated.
Non-Lethal K.O.: Your guest party members can never die and will just remain knocked out unless the battle conditions state otherwise.
Non-Linear Sequel: Has one in Vagrant Story and, later, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.
- Prequel in the Lost Age: Final Fantasy XII.
Non-Standard Game Over: It is technically possible to fail the first battle by going after Gafgarion and breaking his sword in the process. It is very difficult and requires a lot of luck to pull off (as the odds are overwhelmingly against you), but the designers of the game did not plan for this. It causes a game lock up that cannot be recovered. You can also simply lose the first battle to a lucky string of bad rolls, and since none of the characters except yours are controllable, the AI can shaft you (very rarely, but it is technically possible).
Non-Standard Skill Learning: Ramza's Squire skillset gets larger over the course of the game. There's also the Ultima spell (learnable only by Ramza and Alma, as well as Luso in the remake, and only during two storyline fights) and the Zodiac summon (learnable only by summoners, during one optional fight), which are taught by being hit with (and surviving) the skill in combat, as opposed to most skills which are purchased with JP.
Noodle Incident: Numerous Artefacts and Wonders mentioned "the Cataclysm", an apocalyptic event sometime far back in Ivalice history. Certain locations or historical events are timestamped as happening before or after the Cataclysm because it was such an important marker in the timeline, and it's often used to Hand Wave the existence of Lost Technology. However, the game never gives any concrete information on what the Cataclysm actually was, because it is only ever mentioned in passing reference when discussing other topics, so all that is known is that it caused a lot of destruction and chaos.
The Noseless: A facet of Akihiko Yoshida's Ivalice characters is that they lack visible noses. This carries over into the CG sequences in The War of the Lions, which were done in Yoshida's style. The character models technically do have noses, but they're impossible to notice unless a character is viewed from about ninety degrees. Also of note, the character portraits in Final Fantasy XII (also done by Yoshida) also lack noses.
The Not-Love Interest: Alma. Really, if you weren't told that she and Ramza were brother and sister, you'd never know.
Not the Intended Use:
- Using Throw Stone and similar mostly (or completely) harmless abilities, especially against your party's own allies, to gain job points.
- The thieves' Sticky Fingers Arrow Catch ability is meant to be used to get a few shuriken and similar cheap things easily. However, the weapons thrown by enemy ninjas are based on level... and, at extremely high level, can include unique legendary weapons that are only supposed to be available in limited numbers or which are meant to be Permanently Missable Content. Grinding to absurdly high level and using Sticky Fingers therefore allows you to gain multiple copies of powerful "unique" weapons like Save the Queen.
Nothing Personal:
- The infamous "Blame yourself or God" line was supposed to be this, but most players interpret it as taunting either Ovelia or Agrias. In the War of the Lions remake, this line is rewritten as, "Forgive me. Tis your birth and faith that wrong you, not I." As such, Delita comes off much more like an Apologetic Attacker, as was intended.
- The Death Corpse/Corpse Brigade Mooks say something similar ("don't blame us, blame fate" in the PSX version) to Algus, but given that they're also kicking the shit out of him, it's likely it's a lot more personal than they'd like to admit.
Offscreen Moment of Awesome: This is pretty much Errands in a nutshell. You choose three characters to respond to some request for aid or posting about a job, they spend a week or two away from the party completing it, and upon their return they give a brief summary of the adventure they had, along with spoils of the trip and some job experience.
Offstage Villainy: Queen Louveria's rise and fall can be completely missed if you're not paying attention to the Brave Story.
One-Winged Angel:
- All of the Lucavi are this to their human hosts.
- Ultima also does this, in classic Final Fantasy fashion, albeit her second form is not the angelic one.
Optional Party Member:
- You can refuse to let any story member join your party; furthermore, you gain Worker/Construct 8, Beowulf, Reis, and Cloud via optional sidequests. In the PSP version, Balthier and Luso are also available to be recruited. While you need to go looking for Balthier, the game practically hands you Luso.
- You can also kick out any member of the party (except Ramza and Guest Star Party Members) at any point and for any reason.
Out of Focus: Because even story-related party members can be rejected, kicked out, or die permanently, any character who joins your party permanently immediately falls into this. A few of them have an optional scene or sidequest or the like, but outside of those, anyone who joins permanently will never say another line of dialog again, nor will their presence ever be noted by anyone else.
Overflow Error: There's an infinite Job Point glitch that can be invoked by selecting a skill to learn, pressing Page Down, then confirming. If the skill under the cursor after the Page Down cost more Job Points than were available, the number was subtracted from the current number of Job Points, rolling it over negative and giving the player thousands of free job points instead.
Overrated and Underleveled: Most of the unique characters that join after Chapter 3 end up being this, especially if you engaged in a buttload of Level Grinding, except for good old T.G. Cid.
Palette Swap:
- The numerous examples of Color-Coded Armies throughout the game where human units share general jobs with one another, but their on-field sprites have different color palettes to showcase their affiliations. The Player Mooks of these general jobs sport the default colors since they're shared with their official illustrations drawn by Akihiko Yoshida.
- Excluding the Lucavi and the two Constructs, every non-human unit shares on-field sprites with at least one other unit, but sport different colors. The usual case of this are families of monster trios which all share the same sprites, but their differing palettes can help indicate their power rank from a glance. For example, there's the lowest rank Chocobo (which is yellow), the second rank Black Chocobo, and the highest rank Red Chocobo.
- While their special jobs are that of Assassins, Celia and Lettie's on-field sprites are shared with the one used for Dancers. The difference is that while the default color of a Dancer's attire is brown, Celia and Lettie wear navy blue and magenta respectively.
Permadeath: If not resurrected within 3 turns, dead characters are gone for good. (Or, if Ramza, Game Over.)
Permanently Missable Content:
- Characters who stay dead too long turn into crystals. Also, if your allies Brave levels are too low or Faith is too high, they'll leave the party.
- If Mustadio isn't in your party in the last chapter, say goodbye to all of those optional party members
  - Even with Mustadio around, Cloud can be missed if you accidentally pick the wrong conversation option with Aeris (say, if you're hammering through the dialogue in a hurry), and he takes Worker 8 with him.
- That awesome custom equipment the enemy is carrying? If you can't steal them from them (or invite them to your own party) before the battle ends, kiss them goodbye. You have a chance of getting that equipment, but only if they turn into a chest (they can turn into a crystal instead) and only if the item picked to go into the chest is the thing you want.
- Some equipment, such as the Nagrarock sword, can only be picked up on certain maps which you're only allowed to fight on once.
Petal Power: One of Cloud's limit breaks, albeit in name only. Some of the Treant monster family and Geomancer's abilities also have petal/leaf-like visual effects.
Pillar of Light: Holy Explosion.
Point of No Return: Aside from a few temporary ones here and there that lock you into a series of battles without giving you a chance to escape or level grind, there's also a true point of no return: the Orbonne Monastery at the end of Chapter 4. Ivalice Chronicles averts this by letting you leave any map you're stuck in, including the aforementioned true point of no return, with only your progress being reset if you do so. The only exception to this is the whole sequence starting from the battle at Goug Lowtown, where until you defeat Cúchulainn, you can't leave the southern part of the world map even after the battle at Golgollada Gallows; the battle at Lionel Castle will begin automatically as soon as Ramza reaches the node.
Portent of Doom: According to the Chemist that Zaalbag brings to Barbanath's grave, mosfungus mushrooms growing out of graves are "major bad luck," as it supposedly signals the end of the family line. More seriously, it's fairly damning evidence that Barbanath was poisoned with mosfungus, and the most likely suspect is Dycedarg.
- And sure enough, in short order Zaalbag and Dycedarg both end up dead, and after the final battle in the Airship Graveyard, Ramza and Alma are both believed to be dead by the rest of the world. And with no indication that either had any children of their own, House Beoulve is functionally extinct as of the end of the game.
Power-Up Letdown: Both male and female characters have access to a gender unique class that has a lot of unlock conditions, and each class has a unique high level movement skill. Bards, the male class, get Move +3 which is very useful to have. Dancers, on the other hand, get Jump +3 which is...not so useful. Having a high jump is a situational skill and to top it off, the easier to unlock (and available for both genders) Dragoon gets a superior jump skill that lets them jump to any height. Plus, since Dragoon is required to unlock Dancer, the opportunity to pick up the skill is always there for them. To top it off, the final insult is that the Dragoon jump skill costs less JP to unlock than the Dancer's.
Precision F-Strike: Dycedarg says "shit" upon being slain, the only instance of such strong language throughout the entire game.
Press Start to Game Over: If all the units you take into a battle are equipped with a Stone Gun, a rare weapon that makes the wielder petrified at the start of battle, and didn't give any of them another piece of equipment that prevents the petrification, you'll instantly get a Game Over as soon as the battle starts.^Explanation
Prolonged Prologue: The first chapter of the game is a flashback, depicting the events from a year ago that led to Ramza splitting off from his family and Delita embarking on his quest to kingship. To a lesser extent, the second chapter also plays out like one, detailing the events that would eventually lead to the War of the Lions breaking out, as well as how Ramza discovers who the real power players behind it are.
Punch-Clock Villain: Gafgarion - he expresses distaste for what his employers are doing, but he's loyal only to his contract.
Purple Prose: The dialogue in the remake.
Purposely Overpowered:
- Orlandu, to match up to the story that seems to imply him to be someone who is extremely powerful. When you get him, he's possibly the best character you can have, assuming you're playing at a normal pace. He also comes with ridiculously powerful equipment that can last you to the end of the game.
- Some of the Guest Star Party Members are interesting examples. While not all of them have particularly high stats that makes them completely broken in combat, they do have some of the most overpowered abilities in the game. Amongst them, Alma and Ovelia have a Status Buff spell that puts Protect, Shell, Haste, Regen, AND Reraise on another character, with a casting speed as fast as the the first tier of Fire. Orran has a global skill on that inflicts Stop, Disable, and Immobilize instantly on every enemy and costs no MP.
Rags to Royalty: Both Delita and Ovelia in different ways.
Rape as Backstory: Heavily implied with Rapha.
- Made more blatant in the PSP remake.
Grand Duke Barrington: *chuckle* You cannot [kill me]. Do you know why? The flesh remembers, Rapha. It remembers fear, cold and trembling. But it will not always be so. In time, your fear will blossom into another flower - and I shall have that one as well.
Razor Wind: The Kamaitachi geomancer ability.
Reality Warper: A Time Mage can manipulate physics in multiple ways, as seen here.
The Red Mage: Pick a mage class and then another school of magic. Or just go Calculator and have them all! As summoning is the sole magic class that Calculator doesn't cover, a Summoner with Calculator as a sub-class is the epitome of magic.
Red Oni, Blue Oni: Goltana is the red oni while Larg, his rival in the War of the Lions, is blue. Larg is a planner who spent a lot of time in the years proceeding the war shoring up his resources and doing all he could to weaken Goltana, eliminating his (potential) allies and staging a False Flag Operation to discredit his legitimacy to the throne. Goltana, meanwhile, isn't clever enough to pull anything so underhanded and only catches on to Larg's schemes thanks to Delita doing some scheming of his own, and responds to everything with overwhelming military force regardless of how costly it would be.
Regional Bonus: The western versions of War of the Lions have dubbed cutscenes, whereas the original was text only.
Religion Is Magic: Implied. The Faith attribute determines a character's spellcasting ability as well as how strong the effects magic will have when cast on them, hinting that magic comes from a higher power and that the more pious a person is, the better their ability to channel and receive that power. Consequently, any character afflicted with the Atheist condition will No-Sell any spells cast on them, though at the cost of their own spells doing nothing.
The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified: Wiegraf Folles, the leader of the Corpse Brigade, is fighting against the aristocracy and nobility for corruption and abuses against the commoners such as denying pay to many peasant soldiers after the Fifty Years War. When word gets out that Marquis Elmdore of Limberry has been kidnapped by his Lieutenant Gustav Margriff, Wiegraf finds and executes him and releases the Marquis to the arriving rescue party, explicitly stating that the Corpse Brigade are not bandits but revolutionaries who are fighting for the common people of Ivalice against the oppression of the monarchies.
Replacement Goldfish: Delita sees Ovelia as this for Tietra.
Required Party Member: You're forced to play most of Chapter One denied of one slot of your five member party limit. In two instances, one of these slots is occupied by a dead NPC who can't be revived at all (Tietra in the final battle of Chapter One and Marach in the Riovanes rooftop battle, and in a third, Boco the Chocobo takes up the slot as a Guest for the enemy.
Retcon: Parts of the story have been edited in the PSP version to fit in better with the The Ivalice Alliance that spawned from it.
The Reveal: In the original translation, the historian Alazlam signs his name at the end of the game as Alazlam Durai. In the retranslation, his full name is in the Chronicle all along.
Revive Kills Zombie: This IS a Final Fantasy game, after all—but note that only the Phoenix Down and Life 2 spells are instant kills (regular flavored Life/Revive only does the same damage that it would have granted as healing magic).
Reward for Removal: Recruited monsters will lay eggs that hatch into more of their kind. If you're worried about hitting the party member cap, you can dismiss them. Or you can invoke this trope by bringing them into battle and having a party member with Poach equipped team kill them for items. This is the only way to acquire some items.
Robe and Wizard Hat: Standard gear for all of the magician classes, most obviously the Black Mage.
Rocket-Tag Gameplay: The power of physical attacks grow at a quadratic rate, and there are very powerful spells that will deal out a lot of damage, especially when backed by high Faith. However there is no defense stats in this game to counteract the ramping in offense; units can just increase their HP through levelling up and wearing armor, and increase their evasion with shields and other equipment. The rate at which the damage increases easily outpaces the rate at which HP increases, as a result by midgame even the tankiest units will usually not be able to survive more than a few hits in relatively equal engagements, aside from units running the game-breaking combination of low Faith and Blade Grasp with high Brave. Even the Lucavi that have HP exceeding the 999 HP cap can be easily killed before they get to make more than a couple turns, if any at all.
Rush Boss: Most Lucavi, especially Velius, can be killed relatively quickly, but can, on the other hand, very quickly obliterate you.
Save the Princess: Deconstructed in Chapter II. Ramza and company attempt to rescue Princess Ovelia from Delita, but when they catch up to him, it turns out he was rescuing her from Larg and the Order of the Northern Sky, who intends on killing her. Worse, Ramza has just made an enemy of the Northern Sky and is in no way equipped to protect Ovelia. In the end, all Ramza accomplishes is getting wrapped up in the political games he was running away from, and Ovelia ends up exactly where Delita was taking her in the first place: under Goltana's guardianship. Furthermore, rescuing the princess was never about saving her life, but to use her as a political tool that would go on to kickstart the War of the Lions.
Scream Discretion Shot: Played straight except when Delita seems like he's about to kill Balmafula when the "camera" jumps away and Balmafula screams, but she later turns up alive.
Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: Characters with too little permanent Bravery or too high permanent Faith will leave your party, out of cowardice or to go Walking the Earth respectively.
Sealed Evil in a Can: The demons seem to be inhabiting the Zodiac Stones, but after Marach is resurrected by one, Ramza wonders if it's just a portal to either Heaven or Hell.
Self-Made Man: Delita claws his way up from being an orphaned stableboy to the King of Ivalice by selling out everyone who cared about him. This makes him sound like an outright bastard, but he did bring peace to Ivalice this way. Sometimes personal relationships are worth sacrificing for benefit of the greater good.
Shoot the Dog: Moments after Zaalbag realizes that Dycedarg is up to no good, he is turned into a vampire and you have to kill him.
Shoot the Hostage: After Argath's defection to Zaalbag's knights, he shoots and kills Delita's sister before shooting Golagros/Gragoroth at Zeakden Fortress. This was set up earlier in the chapter, as Argath is of noble birth and despises the lower classes as animals, including Delita.
Shoot the Medic First: Starting partway through chapter 3, anyone using White Magic in your formation may as well have a target hung around their neck, because the AI will make them a priority one target.
Shoot the Shaggy Dog: The Corpse Brigade.
Shout-Out:
- The treasures and lands you unlock in the bar are mostly callbacks to previous Final Fantasy titles. There's also a Shout-Out to Breath of Fire with the Zenny Sword, described as 'a sword made of foreign coins'.
- As mentioned in a quote under this page's Knight in Sour Armor example, the updated script of The War of the Lions contains a shout out to A Game of Thrones.
  - It's pretty clear Joseph Reeder is a fan of George R. R. Martin. Aside from the blatantly obvious "game of thrones" line, there's also the term used to refer to Agrias and her knights, the "Lionsguard," which sounds pretty inspired by "Kingsguard."
  - The Ivalice Chronicles continues the reference by referring to knights as "sers".
- In the remake, when Ramza lands the killing blow on Gaffgarion, the latter's last words are "I feel... cold."
- The Vampire Cape/Dracula Mantle, which has a black outside and a crimson red inside, seems to be modeled after Alucard's cape from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
- A new bonus boss, the Dark Dragon, has a specific line of dialogue after his defeat—"ungaah!" (Just like the Emperor in Final Fantasy II.)
- Cloud can wear ribbons, as mentioned above.
- The name of the floors in Midlight's Deep^notethat's Deep Dungeon for the oldskools is inspired by Apocalypse Now, such as NOGIAS and Valkyrie.
  - The Deep Dungeon itself is a reference to one of Squaresoft's old games.
- Just like with Tactics Ogre, Matsuno shares his love for Queen by titling chapter 4 as "Somebody to Love".
- The bill for The Siedge Weald errand in the remake makes reference to Henry David Thoreau and his work Walden.
- The Zodiac Stones, as ancient artifacts that allow humans to sell their souls to godlike demons for power in times of desperation, are effectively the Behelits from Berserk in all but name.
- Chulainn is pretty much an expy of Oogie Boogie from The Nightmare Before Christmas.
- The story of Reis and Beowulf is very similar to that of Ladyhawke. Consider: an evil, high ranking individual in a church lusts after a woman. When she instead loves someone else, he curses the woman to become something animalistic, requiring her badass swordsman boyfriend to seek a cure to return her to normal.
- Several to Fist of the North Star:
  - The Monk has a rapid punch attack and the ability to end an enemy's life in three turns.
  - Holy Knight has an attack that has a similar naming convention to Kenshiro's attacks (more obvious in the Japanese version).
  - The two main armies, Hokuten (Northern Sky) and Nanten (Southern Sky), have their names derived from the two main martial arts schools of the manga: Hokuto Shinken and Nanto Shinken.
- Beowulf and Wiegraf's names are references to the classic story of Beowulf.
- The Gokuu Pole is a reference to the Chinese legend Xiyouji (Chinese) / Saiyuki (Japanese) / Journey to the West (English). The staff-wielding monkey king Sun Wukong's Japanese name is Son Gokuu. (The staff-wielding Dragon Ball character of the same name is himself named and modeled after Sun Wukong.)
Shows Damage: Units at sufficiently low health are in "Critical" mode, are very nearly prone, and enemy AI changes to run away (and heal if able) unless they are the only surviving unit left.
Shrouded in Myth: In a way, this is the core theme of the antagonists and the greatest detriment to human potential in the entire game. The Glabados Church's hero, Saint Ajora Glabados, was canonically remembered as a messiah who brought healing to the sick and judgement to the old Pharist church. Ramza unmasks the myth throughout the game: Ajora was possessed by Ultima, who planned to conquer humanity because her creators were banished from the world. Ajora being an assassin and professional spy is simply an unfortunate coincidence. History created a story around Ajora that left out most of the more brutal aspects of the backstory: the modern Glabados myth characterizes Ajora as a famous healer and prophet who was eventually executed by Pharist prophets (who feared that the Pharist church would eventually lose adepts to Ajora's more radical movement); this resulted in the destruction of Mullonde in a cataclysm. Those that spread the story grabbed power from Ajora's followers, not realizing what it was they were sacrificing for a lie. Add in the fact that the game takes place after the Age of Dalmasca, when a tyrant prince and his demon ally managed to save the entire world from a group of manipulative cosmic entities, and you realize that the old legends got twisted and reversed into a prophecy about a hero receiving the blessing of the gods (which is the exact opposite of what happened), which was then perverted by Ajora into the exact opposite of the independence ideal the original event had once stood for. Basically, humans have more potential than they realize, but are very impressionable: they are easily tempted into mindless worship by the deception of "miracles" (which are really elaborate acts), therefore making humans fantasize and violently enforce a complex story that can ensnare the entire world. Ramza's defiance of these myths is what unleashes his humanity. Delita stands on the opposite side of the spectrum: by manipulating a system based on a twisted, convoluted myth, he easily ascends into kinghood - but has to deal with all the crushing debts alone.
Significant Name Overlap: By the game's climax, it's revealed that Alma is needed for the resurrection of Ultima, leader of the Lucavi. It just so happens that Alma's name sounds similar to Ultima, but is one syllable off. It's made even more apparent in Japanese, where Alma's name is spelt as「アルマ」(Aruma) and Ultima's name is spelt as「アルテマ」(Arutema), with the addition or removal of the kana「テ」(te) making all the difference^*. Thankfully, first time players won't get spoiled by their name similarities since Ultima is only referred to by her Red Baron as the "Angel of Blood" throughout most of the game. It isn't until her resurrection towards the climax where she proclaims her proper name before the final battle.
Sixth Column:
- Argath has a falling out with Ramza and shows up at Fort Zeakden as an enemy.
- Gafgarion betrays the party early on in Chapter Two.
Small Role, Big Impact: Gragoroth (aka Golagros) is a member of the Corpse Brigade that you never actually fight, who kidnaps Tietra. While Wiegraf tells him to leave the girl, he decides to take her to Ziekden, which sets the entire plot in motion.
Smug Snake: Dycedarg, who's not aware that he himself is an Unwitting Pawn while he attempts to manipulate events in his favor (including poisoning his own father to death) and not smart enough to close the door while having discussions with his co-conspirators.
Snow Means Death: The final battle of Chapter 1 takes place at Ziekden Fortress, and involves the first major character death among the protagonists and their allies. Tietra is shot dead by Argath in order to bypass an attempt to use her as a hostage, sending Delita on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Gear:
- When Gafgarion Face Heel Turns in Chapter Two, he fights you with whatever equipment you bought for him. Snatching his sword will prevent him from using his sword-based techniques against you, making the fight much easier. You can also change his character's class just prior to the battle. This can result in some hilarious situations such as fighting Gafgarion, the naked White Mage.
- In the PS1 version, the same character also causes a reverse Wutai theft - when you beat him, you get whatever he was equipped with at the beginning of the battle. If you stole everything during the fight, it magically doubles.
Socialization Bonus: The PSP remake requires you to link up with another player to do the multiplayer battles that give out some of the uber equipment that could only be gotten via theft in the US version (not the Japanese version) of the original.
Sound Test: Enter PolkaPolka as Ramza's name in the PSP port or the Classic mode of The Ivalice Chronicles, and you can access a hidden music player with all tracks from the game, including a few unused ones.
Spotting the Thread: After things have been resolved at Riovanes Castle, Ramza voices his opinion that the Lucavi are a separate fourth faction from the church and the ones truly manipulating events by what he's seen of the Templars. Weigraf and Izlude were both high ranking members of the Knight Templar, yet Weigraf seemed just as shocked as Ramza when the auracite spoke and, from the looks of massacre around his body, Izlude died with the soldiers fighting against one of the demons, not with it.
Sprite/Polygon Mix: Characters are sprites, the playing field is polygonal.
Stalker with a Crush: Delita. Not to love, but to protect. Does one honestly think he met with Ramza in Warjillas by chance? He said in text that he was basically stalking him, and, in an indirect way, trying to protect him as well. After all:
Delita: We have ears in many places...
Status Buff: In addition to the classic Final Fantasy buffs (Float^note, Haste, Invisible^note, Protect, Regen, Reflect^note, Reraise^note, and Shell^notetake less magic damage), there's also Faith^note
Status Effects: In addition to the classic Final Fantasy ailments (Berserk^note, Blind/Darkness, Doom^noteDeath Sentence in original translation [aka "Condemned" in other FF titles], Frog, Petrified, Poison, Slow, Silence, Stop, Sleep, and Undead/Zombie), the game distinguishes between Charmed (the afflicted mistakes enemies for allies and vice versa) and Confused (does completely random actions, including ineffectual ones), and there's also Blood Drain^note (similar to Charmed, except the unit can only use "Blood Drain" as an attack to pass that status ailment on other units, and causes a Game Over if all allies are affected), Morbol, Disable^note, Immobilize^noteDon't Move in the original translation, Chicken, Atheist^noteInnocent in original translation (effective Faith of 0, though of course that can work as much in your favor as against you), and Oil (supposed to make one more vulnerable to fire, but fortunately it's bugged and does nothing) ^noteFixed in the Ivalice Chronicles remake.
Stealth Mentor: Gafgarion to Ramza to some extent, particularly in the battle at the waterfall. When Ramza disagrees with the assassination attempt on Ovelia, Gaffgarion tells him to suck it up, as this is what sellswords are paid to do:
Ramza: But... this isn't right!
Gaffgarion: What of it? You are still a child... a child who does not see the world for what it is. A man does not turn his back on truth. A man accepts it, and walks the path he must.
- And in the following cutscene, Ramza understands his actions will result in the Northern Sky knights hunting him down, saying "This is the path I've chosen."
Stone Wall: Making one is so easy that you can set up a veritable Great Wall of Characters. To begin with, the buffs Protect and Shell stack with the support skills that raise your unit's physical and magic defense respectively...
Storybook Opening: The PlayStation Portable port opens with a variation after the player names and chooses Ramza birthday. It opens with Arazlam Durai opening a map scroll of Ivalice as part of him uncovering the Durai Papers, which transitions into the prologue of the game itself.
Stripperific:
- In a very strange variation, Ultima's penultimate form ("Nice Body") features a very thoroughly clothed torso and arms, but from the waist down, it's nothing but a thong and knee-high boots. Which is hardly surprising, as she looks exactly like Morrigan Aensland.
- Averted with most of the Job outfits, which are usually sensible across both genders. The only outfits that show a lot of skin are the male Monk, who wears a loose vest with no shirt, and the male Geomancer and female-only Dancer, who expose their misections.
Succession Crisis: The titular War of the Lions is kicked off over this. Being a thinly veiled version of the War of the Roses, this shouldn't be a surprise.
Sudden Downer Ending: The epilogue, where we discover the fates of Orran, Delita, and Ovelia:
- While we don't see it, the ending narration states that six years after the game ended, Orran was branded as a heretic for writing and presenting the Durai Papers, which reveals the full truth behind the War of the Lions. At least his death wasn't in vain, as the Framing Device revealed, and his descendant is determined to have the Durai Papers accepted as historical canon.
- The Stinger shows that Delita and Ovelia's marriage went in shambles after Ovelia stabbed Delita out of justifiable paranoia, fearing she'd be next in line to be betrayed by him. Delita stabs her back in self-defense, and wonders whether his plans were worth it. Neither of them died, according to Matsuno, but the bond of trust between them would be forever shattered.
Super Boss: Zodiark/Elidibus, the most difficult boss of the game, who resides in the Deep Dungeon.
Super-Power Meltdown: The Lucavi explode when they die, leaving behind only their (supposedly benign) Zodiac Stones.
Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Outside the summon spell, there are no moogles in the game, and flavor text even outright states they're extinct. However, the rare Pig enemies are cute, goofy-looking Cartoon Creatures that look very similar.
Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: Seemingly played straight and then horribly subverted. After completing the battle in front of Riovanes Castle, the game benignly offers to let you save your progress. If you're playing the game for the first time, you have no idea that you're about to be immediately thrust into Ramza's duel with Wiegraf, and once you save, you can't go back. If Ramza's level/skill/equipment set isn't up to snuff and you don't have another save to fall back on, you are screwed. Ivalice Chronicles lets you at least go back to the world map (while resetting your entire progress) if you're stuck though.
Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Some monsters take more damage against varying elemental spells, and Zodiac compatibilities follow a fairly complicated chart of affinities and weaknesses. (At least the game is nice enough to show you how much potential damage you can do at what success rate before you commit to doing anything - if you can actively tag the target with whatever you're doing, that is.)
Take Your Time:
- Thanks to an In-Universe Game Clock that advances one day for each location you pass through, your characters can literally spend years before finishing the game. (Additionally, regardless of how many turns it takes to finish a battle, the game always considers you to have spent a full day in that location.)
- The game explicitly jumps also one full year between all of the chapters but the last two. At the start of Chapter 1, Ramza's 16. By the time Chapter 3 rolls around, Ramza's 18...if not older, thanks to the aforementioned one day per location.
Taking the Bullet: Marach for Rapha.
Talking the Monster to Death: The Mediator job class has "Death Sentence," an ability that can cause the enemy to die in three turns if successful. It also has the ability "Mimic Daravon," which causes the "Sleep" status ailment if successful.
Technicolor Death: Zodiac Demons explode into a sparkly rainbow light show upon death.
Tense Tremolo: Can be heard throughout the soundtrack. One appropriately named example is "Tension", which starts with tremolo strings underneath sharp note hits.
This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman:
- Axes are weapons with relatively huge power values compared to other weapons, but have a random damage component that rarely makes them hit at their advertised power (most other weapons calculate damage by WP X the unit's PA, whereas axes calculate by WP X a random number between 1 and the unit's PA), and often results in them hitting for less damage than significantly weaker conventional weapons, while that unreliability also makes it imposssible to properly strategize around their use. Plus they require two hands to wield and thus a unit can't use a shield or dual wield with an axe equipped. Overall, axes are an impractical weapon, but when it comes to the Throw command, thrown axes will ignore their random damage component and be treated like other weapons for damage calculation, so with their inflated weapon power they will always deal massive damage when thrown and will be the ideal throwing weapon to stock up on. The Jump command will similarly ignore their random damage component, but since that would require actually equipping the axe and having a Lancer/Dragoon give up their support skill slot for the "Equip Axe" ability or giving the Jump skillset to a job that can wield axes, setting this up isn't as practical as just having some axes in your inventory to throw.
- The reaction skill, Catch, only serves to counter one other specific skillset in the game, the Ninja's Throw (where Catch compeletely blocks the damage from thrown weapons and gives them to your inventory). While Throw can be quite dangerous, Ninjas are uncommon enemies that you'll fight in only a few story battles and rarely in random encounters, and it's rare that Throw will show up as a character's secondary skillset, so the vast majority of the time Catch is doing nothing. Then even in those few battles where Throw is a factor, it's probably better to use the busted reaction skills like Blade Grasp and Auto-Potion instead that will help you in many more instances. However what weapons enemies will throw is determined by their level, and at extremely high levels they can throw some extremely valuable weapons that you can't ever buy in stores, like Orlandu's Excalibur and the Chaos Blade. So if you're high enough leveled for enemies in random encounters to spawn at very high levels, you can go to a map where Ninjas can spawn with Catch on your characters, and then farm as much of these normally very hard-to-obtain weapons as you want as they keep throwing them at your characters (as the AI will never see that you'll just keep catching them and all AI enemies have an infinite supply of their items).
Those Two Girls:
- Alicia and Lavian, Agrias's two female knight followers. They're rather popular among the fandom despite being generics.
- Celia and Lettie, the silent lady assassin duo that accompany Elmdore. It turns out that they're Ultima Demons in disguise. And while they have access to powerful offensive spells in their original forms, their shared Assassin job while in disguise allows them to use swift, surefire status ailment skills. This makes them more deadly in their human guises!
Throwing Your Sword Always Works: Most weapons (of which swords are a mere subset) can be used as projectiles via the Ninja's "Throw" command, at the cost of throwing that weapon away permanently (but considering how much money you get and how you can always grind for more, it's pretty negligible).
Throw the Book at Them: Books (equipped as a Brown Note type weapon in a few classes) can also be thrown by Ninjas.
Time Skip: One year passes between Chapters 1 and 2, and three months pass between Chapters 2 and 3. Averted for the final chapter, which occurs immediately after Chapter 3.
Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Characters whose permanent Faith levels are above 95 will leave the party to go Walking the Earth either as The Atoner or just to ponder the mysteries of the universe.
Transformation Sequence: The Lucavi follow the Monstrous Transformation type to fully bond with their hosts. You see usually the same one every time you fight them Ultima gets special mention for not only getting a unique transformation sequence before her fight, but doing ANOTHER ONE after already summoned.
Transformation Trinket: The Zodiac Stones. Luckily you only fight six demons instead of all 12. 7/13 if you count the Serpentarius Stone.
Transhuman Treachery: All people who become hosts for a Lucavi, no matter how much their original personality is intact, throw their lot in with the rest and betray humanity.
Truer to the Text: The Ivalice Chronicles excises the additions made to the War of the Lions version (Luso and Balthier, the Dark Knight and Onion Knight jobs), since that port was handled by a different team, and several original Tactics developers returned to work on the remaster; however, the updated script was retained for its superior readability.
Tutorial Failure: As a result of its horrible translation, the tutorial largely fails to teach very much. It's actually Lampshaded in-game: one of the Mediator class's abilities is called "Mimic Daravon," a technique that puts enemies to sleep by supposedly imitating the game's comically obtuse tutorial instructor character.
The Unfought:
- Gustav appears to be built as a Disc-One Final Boss, but Wiegraf stabs him in a cutscene and runs away.
- Barrington is chucked off the roof of his own castle before he can be a problem for the party.
- Only about half the Lucavi Demons are ever fought, the rest never make an appearance.
- When you confront Draclau/Delacroix at the end of Chapter 2 after his betrayal of you, he immediately transforms into Queklin/Cúchulainn, giving you no chance to fight him.
- There is a battle where Volmav/Folmarv participates, appearing alongside Rofel/Loffrey and Kietian/Cletienne in a battle against you near the end of the game, but the battle immeditely ends once any of three are put in critical condition, with it being able to potentially end before either of you two even make a single attack on each other. Then when Volmav is confronted again on the Airship Graveyard, he immediately transforms to Hashmalum/Hashmal, preventing you from ever getting a proper duel with him.
Unintentionally Unwinnable:
- The infamous Wiegraf 1-on-1 duel at Riovanes Castle can be impossible to win if your Ramza is at a low enough level and/or lacks proper equipment and abilities, because it occurs immediately after a prior battle where you're given the opportunity to save in-between. If you only kept one save and go into the battle unable to win, you won't be able to back out to go grind up and get better equipment/skills, leaving your file stuck in a state where you're completely unable to progress any further. This can even lead to a meta Hope Spot, because it's entirely possible to be capable of winning the duel with Wiegraf and then be incapable of winning the fight against Velius/Belias, a boss that could be even more difficult than Wiegraf, that happens immediately after. Getting stuck like this could theoretically happen at any other point where you fight consecutive battles if you've neglected to keep any backup saves, but none of these other fights feature such a huge spike in difficulty over the prior battles, so it would be incredibly unlikely, if not outright infeasible, that you could get to them and be completely unable to win.
- Through an extreme amount of luck and self-sabotage, it's possible to get the very first battle stuck in a never ending state. First you need the enemy knight Lezales to spawn with the Pisces sign (so he has worst compatibility with Gafgarion), Item for his secondary skillset, and the ability to use Potions unlocked, and then you need to be able to kill everyone else but Gafgarion and Lezales (which itself requires a ton of luck to do before Lezales dies, especially with killing Agrias). Once everyone but those two are dead and you then get Ramza killed, Gafgaron and Lezales will end up in an infinite loop where Gafgarion keeps spamming Night Sword and recovers any health he lost in the process, while Lezales repeatedly recovers his health with Potions, which will recover more than the Night Sword inflicts as the worst compatibility cuts Gafgarion's damage output in half. Additionally enemies in this game are programmed with infinite items so Lezales will never run out of Potions, Night Sword has no cost and so Gafgarion can keep using it forever, and Ramza is flagged as a Guest in this battle so he will never crystalize when he is down. Once this state is achieved these two AI-controlled characters will go at it forever, with neither one being able to die even as they level up to level 99 in the process, and the player will be completely unable to intervene with Ramza down, leaving resetting the game and starting over to be the only recourse.
Underdogs Never Lose: At the beginning of the game, both Ramza and Delita start off as squires, the most basic class. Delita, a peasant commoner, rises up to win the Ivalice political chess game. Ramza goes on to save the world from a supernatural demonic threat. This goes even double for Ramza; Delita manages to become one of the most powerful classes in the game, with kick butt sword skills. Meanwhile, Ramza stays a squire with just a few special skills and traits, and still manages to beat a Demon-God.
Unwitting Pawn: The Corrupt Church plays the politicians, Delita plays everybody, and Ramza is played by everybody.
Useless Useful Spell:
- All the Knight's Break/Rend skills will usually be this. Rarely will it be more useful than inflicting a status effect or just attacking the enemy, and they have very shaky accuracy to boot. Plus if you really want to deprive an enemy of their equipment, it's better to try stealing it instead, as then you get the equipment yourself to use or some extra money from selling it. They're typically only helpful for intentionally stalling out battles to grind out more EXP/JP when you don't yet have access to a debilitating status effect move like Frog to cripple the last enemy.
- In the Archer's Charge/Aim skillset, it's not really useful in general but about any of the charge levels beyond +5 are squarely this, and going beyond +3 is pushing it, as they simply take too long to charge up and the enemy will easily be able to move out of the way before it goes off unless you immobilized the enemy beforehand. Plus, unlike with spells, you can only target the panel a unit was on, not the unit itself, so your attack can't follow where they go if they move out of the way first. This was partially rectified in Ivalice Alliance by shortening everyone's charge times.
- Any of the Jump+ movement skills. Typically it's much more useful to have your movement boosted than being able to jump higher, and if you want to make height a complete nonfactor to your movement, there's the Ignore Height, Fly, and Teleport skills you can invest into instead. For the extra insult, the Jump+3 skill costs more JP than the completely superior Ignore Height and Teleport skills^note, and requires you to first unlock the Dancer job which takes a lot longer to do than unlocking the Lancer/Dragoon and Time Mage (which have Ignore Height and Teleport respectively).
- Fly has an amusing animation, and on its own is a neat movement skill that lets you completely bypass height and any obstacles in the way, the latter of which the aformentioned Ignore Height can't do. However it is obsoleted by Teleport, which functionally does the same thing, but gives you the chance to try moving outside your movement range whenever you want or need more movement, and in the international PlayStation version, Teleport only costs half the JP to learn while being in the Time Mage job, which is much easier to access than the Bard/Dancer jobs, which have Fly (and it's so much worse in the Japanese and PSP versions, where Fly inexplicably costs 5000 JP, compared to Teleport's comparatively meager 650 JP in those versions).
- The Finger Guard reaction skill, which only protects you from Talk Skill. Besides the very narrow niche use, you really don't even fight Mediators/Orators, with them showing up in only two story battles, rarely showing up in random encounters, and you don't see enemies using Talk Skill as a secondary skillset either. So 99% of the time this skill will be completely useless.
- The Arrow Guard reaction skill, which lets your unit catch arrows shot at him/her. Not only does it have a niche use that protects your unit from only two types of weapons (bows and crossbows), but the Blade Grasp skill does the same thing but against every non-special physical attack, including arrows, leaving Arrow Guard ridiculously obsolete; Blade Grasp doesn't even require that much more JP to learn, either.
- The Gilgame Heart reaction skill, which gives you gil equal to the amount of damage you take when hit. Unless you're really late into the game against very powerful enemies and have a high enough HP pool to take brutal hits, you're only getting a pittance of gil from this skill, while money is very easy to come by just by winning battles, especially at the point in the game where you could be getting an amount of gil from Gilgame Heart that isn't laughable. It's also doing absolutely nothing to help your unit survive or defeat enemies, so there's just no real scenario where this skill will be at all worth using.
- Riding Chocobos is a neat way to substantially improve a unit's mobility, but when it is being ridden the Chocobo loses the ability to act at all until the rider dismounts or is killed, so using a Chocobo as a mount means you're essentially sacrificing one of your team slots, and through movement skills and accessories you can boost a unit's mobility to match or exceed that of a Chocobo anyway.
Video Game Caring Potential: Characters will die permanently after three rounds of KO status; people have been known to restart a battle just to avoid losing one of their generics. For many, this was just because dead units take their experience with them; losing a party member meant either a) turning to a much weaker party member you haven't played with for a while and is thus less useful, or b) recruiting and training a new member from level 1. It simply wasn't worth it.
Video Game Cruelty Potential:
- Using Rock Throw on your own allies in the early parts of the game to gain JP.
- Breeding, and then poaching your own monsters in order to gain items; this is necessary for rare items as not all monsters spawn in random battles.
- Absorbing your own allies' soul crystals to pick up the abilities they learned.
- Inviting enemy characters just to strip them of their equipment and kick them out of the party immediately afterward.
- Knocking out your allied AI-controlled Guest units in story battles to prevent them from killing enemies when you want to stall out the battle for whatever reason (such as when waiting for enemy corpses to crystalize or drop treasure chests, to grind out EXP/JP, or when trying to Invite one of the enemies). Guest units can't die, so you can keep them knocked down as long as you want without risking permanently losing them, and you'll never be penalized for it unless keeping that Guest unit alive is the mission objective.
- Hiring a new level 1 recruit and taking them into a battle with you, where then once you have a battle essentially won with only one debilitated enemy left, you have your other units beat up (and heal back up) the level 1 recruit to grind out JP while gaining barely any EXP (as the amount of JP you get per action is based solely on your job level while EXP depends on the level difference between you and the target), and thus unlock more jobs and learn more skills without increasing your level to avoid making the Level Scaling random encounters more difficult. Known as "hazing" among FFT players, with it being especially prominent in mods that have the story battles level scale, too, as it's the only way to really grind in those mods without it being outright counterproductive.
- Going for total enemy kill in the "Kill X" missions, which makes for a bit of Gameplay and Story Segregation in the first battle against Miluda when Ramza will say "surrender and we'll spare you" even if you've wiped out her entire party and waited around until their corpses turned into chests or crystals. Furthermore, you can Level Grind your party to ridiculous amounts, making any story-based battle massively one-sided.
Video Game Delegation Penalty: Inverted with respect to the Calculator/Arithmetician job, which can hit any unit on the field with nearly any spell, instantly and for free — provided you can line up the level/experience and factor criteria. Doing so manually involves either guess work, trial and error, or actually doing the calculations, but putting the Calculator on automatic results in the computer going ahead and utterly, efficiently devastating your enemies. That said, if the AI can't just one-shot every enemy at once, they may not pick the targets you would have wanted to take out, and the AI is unreliable with healing/reviving/buffing your units, while you can also forget about the AI using the Math Skill ability to status the enemy instead of nuking them with Holy/Flare.
Video Game Stealing: This is the heart of the Thief's kit. As per usual, there are fancy bits of equipment that can only be obtained via Stealing, the iconic Genji Gear being an example: you'll only see it once, on Marquise Elmdor.
Vindicated by History: Ramza, in-universe. He went down in history as a traitor to his family, but the Durai Reports have been released to the public revealing him as the true hero of the War of the Lions.
Visual Initiative Queue: There's a list of active turns and all actions being charged accessible via a menu, as well as a visual representation of all participants in battle (minus Zodiac bosses) that can sorted by a number of stats.
Wake-Up Call Boss: Not so much a boss, but the Slums of Dorter has a notable difficulty spike compared to the previous storyline battles in that it throws Black Mages, Knights, and Archers at you. You're going to need more than the Squires and Chemists you've likely been using up to this point.
Walking Shirtless Scene: Male Monks. Male Geomancers also qualify for this trope, because... whatever it is they wear on their upper body looks like somebody has chopped off 2/3rds of the fabric.
Weaksauce Weakness -
- Zodiac monsters, having the biggest pile of HP to whittle down, are extremely vulnerable to Drain (absorbs 25% HP), Demi (takes off 25% HP) and Demi 2 (takes of 50% HP), to the point where their AI will focus fire on anybody with Yin Yan Magic or Time Magic equipped as abilities.
- The bosses are also just as susceptible to the stat break skills as anything else. Bring in a team of Knights or Dancers and you can reduce pretty much any boss to a pile of hit points that almost never gets a turn and does absolutely pathetic damage with its attacks.
- Revive Kills Zombie works in this game; by the latter half of Chapter 1 you should be able to easily afford a ton of Pheonix Downs to never risk running out. As a result, as long as you have at least one unit that can use Items, undead monsters become some of the least threatening monsters in the game, especially if your item-using unit is capable of throwing them.
Weapons-Grade Vocabulary: Mediators usually talk the monster to death or manipulate their stats with speech skills, but they can also equip dictionaries which they read from; reading from them (somehow) hurts enemies. (The in-game animation shows them simply opening the book to inflict pain, so it could be a case of literally weapons-grade words.)
We Cannot Go On Without You: The game ends if Ramza dies and turns into a crystal/treasure chest. A few other battles also end the game prematurely if the NPC you're tasked to protect is killed. Both cases are justified as the entire story is portrayed as a recently-revealed scripture detailing the story of Ramza and the truth behind the War of the Lions; the story would completely fall apart if Ramza or characters that were crucial for a historical event were Killed Off for Real.
Western Zodiac: The holy stones are all named after the constellations, and a Super Boss is the "thirteenth," Serpentarius/Ophiuchus. Each Zodiac sign has a specific set of affinities and weaknesses as well. Only one character, the aformentioned super boss, has Serpentarius/Ophiuchus as their Zodiac sign and it is the one sign in the game with neutral affinity to all 12 other signs.
We Used to Be Friends: Ramza and Delita were best friends throughout their childhood. However, the death of the latter's sister at the orders of the former's uncaring aristocratic family more or less destroy it. While they don't become enemies, it's clear Delita is no longer the person Ramza knew, and that he views his former friend as an ally of convenience at best and a disposable pawn at worst.
Wham Episode: So, so many.
- The last battle of Chapter 1, at Fort Ziekden. You finally find Tietra, being taken hostage by Gragoroth against a force of the Order of the Northern Sky led by Zalbaag and Argath. Zalbaag orders Argath to shoot Tietra to get to Gragoroth, and departs to pursue Wiegraf. Argath then attacks Ramza and Delita; during the battle, Gragoroth uses his last moments to set the explosive-filled fort ablaze. Ramza tries to convince a shell-shocked Delita to leave Tietra's corpse and run, but he won't listen, so he runs away, watching his best friend being apparently consumed by the explosion.
- In Chapter 2 alone, each third battle or so sends the plot moving in a completely different direction. The whammiest battle is the final one of Chapter 2 where the Lucavi are revealed and that Delacroix is one of them.
Wham Shot: The awakening of the Lucavi's leader at the end of the penultimate battle. It's St. Ajora.
What the Hell, Hero?:
- Ramza starting out, then Delita as he slides down the slippery slope.
- Characters of sufficiently high Faith will also complain at the end of every battle about the necessity of slaughtering everyone and everything you come across. If a character's permanent faith level passes 95 they'll abandon your party and devote their life to religious pursuits.
What You Are in the Dark: Ramza again. He doesn't care that he's sacrificing himself for nothing and that history will remember him as a villain (until the Brave Story is revealed). He'll know, and the world will be saved.
Where It All Began: The very first battle you see in the game takes place at Orbonne Monestary, which is also the entrance to the final dungeon. Downplayed in that that first battle is a flash-forwards; you then skip back and play an entire chapter that takes place before it.
White Mage: Available in the game as a job class.
Written by the Winners: History turned Delita into the hero who saved Ivalice from another devastating war and Ramza a murderous heretic. However, the Durai Scriptures, the supposedly true story that you play through in the game, has still survived.
Xanatos Speed Chess: Regardless of who won the War of the Lions, the Church would come out on top. And it did, but only because Delita needed it to (With all of its leaders and Knights Templar dead, it's not in as good of shape as it imagined it would be). The same applies for the Lucavi.
You Are Too Late: Ramza Beoulve is the patron saint of this trope. (Perhaps they anticipated the Level Grinding?)
You Bastard!: The entire point of Chapter 1 is getting you to hate the system Ivalice runs on and question why you (Ramza) are even a part of it, in order to prepare you for when it starts to put the screws to you.
You Can't Go Home Again: Matsuno's tweet on Valentine's Day 2012 confirmed that Ramza and Alma survived the ending but had to flee Ivalice and move to another country.
You Can't Kill What's Already Dead: Undead monsters have a chance to spontaneously rise back up after three turns rather than simply becoming a crystal or item. The only way to prevent this is to use the Petrify status.
You Have Failed Me:
- Ludovich Baert is killed by Cardinal Delacroix after bringing back a false Zodiac Stone. The cardinal hastily dismisses his replacement, the dark knight Gafgarion, from the meeting, before walking around the table and personally offing him as the camera pans upward and we hear Baert’s horrified scream.
- In the Sound Novel Oeilvert, the titular protagonist is disposed of by her superior if she takes too long to kill the man she was instructed to.
You Killed My Father:
- Delita flies into a rage against Argath for killing Tietra, and eventually decides that it's Ivalice's entire system that's at fault, dedicating his life to being the one at the top deciding who lives and who dies.
- Wiegraf hates Ramza for killing Milleuda so much that he's willing to sell out his ideals (and eventually, his humanity) in order to gain the power for revenge.
- Meliadoul gains a grudge against Ramza because she thinks he killed her brother. When she discovers that her own father Folmarv, who by then had already been possessed by a Lucavi, was the one who did it, she's quick to call off her quest.
Youngest Child Wins: Ramza is the most noble and like Barbanath of the Beoulve family despite being only half brother to Zaalbag and Dycedarg. Alma, the true youngest, is the Damsel in Distress for most of the plot, but still gets to shrug off a Grand Theft Me from the local Eldritch Abomination.

I got a good feeling!

Final Fantasy Tactics

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Video Game / Final Fantasy Tactics 11 Following

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Dycedarg Beoulve

Final Fantasy Tactics

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