Final Fantasy Tactics is Square's first attempt to produce a chapter in their Final Fantasy series as a strategy/rpg game. In it, you play as Ramza Beoulve, the son of a aged kind whose passing brings about a rift in the family line. Behind this rift is numerous betrayals and conspiracies, firstmost being a ground of individuals who are seeking to claim all 12 of the zodiac stones. This stones, who are believed to have benevolent power, are actually hosts to the Zodiac beasts, demons bent on destroying the world.

To say Final Fantasy Tactics is deep might be an understatement. There are numerous skills and numerous abilities and magics for each skill. With a lengthy, full story-line, one might need a scorecard to keep up with all the players. In fact, the game itself comes with a listing of all the people you meet which would take hours to go through. Since you can recruit both monsters and human players, a player can have any type of party to take through this game. With a variety of job classes, which open new ones with the more experience you gain, any dedicated gamer could spend hours just building up skills and attacks.

Think of this as Final Fantasy on a 3-D chess board, where your men/women have certain movements and abilities. The spell effects are gorgeous and you can easily find yourself spending lengths of time just building your party the way you like. While there are no CG FMV story elements outside of the intro movie, the story is told through in-game scenes both on and off the battlefield. Also included in the game is a system of Propositions, where you send off players to jobs that earn money and experience, and poaching, where killing monsters will net you special items in Fur Shops. For those who really believe they have mastered this game, there is a hidden dungeon where the 13th zodiac stone and a variety of difficult dungeons wait to be found and explored.

My only real gripe is that you spend most of the first half of the game building up your team with all these great abilities only to have all these special guests with unattainable skills (Orlandu) that you have to keep to win the game. The effect almost cheapens the effort you went through just to get through the hurdle of the first three chapters.

You'll probably lose weeks of your life to this game. It's a solid game that offers a change from the standard Final Fantasy RPG. With so much to do and so many placed to go, you'll probably forget that you had a life before this game.

- - kinderfeld