Things That Are Bullshit About Final Fantasy Tactics

I've been playing through Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions on PSP.  It's my first time playing through it properly, though I did try it for a few hours on my friend's Playstation close to the time it first came out.  Since that time I've played the other two FFT games, and so I decided recently that I might as well go back to where it all started and see if the original was as superior as most people have been saying.  Generally it is, but...

When I first played it back in the 90s the thing that struck me as the coolest was the 3D terrain that you could rotate to get a full view of the battle.  When playing through Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Final Fantasy Tactics A2, I remember wishing that I could do the same with the maps.  Now that I've played through most of Final Fantasy Tactics, I can tell you that it is one of the most annoying aspect of the game.  The rotatable view allows for more interesting level designs, but it also you have to constantly spin the thing around to see everything on the battlefield on some levels.  On some maps there are sections that you simply can't see very well from any angle.  Also, when you have the sound off, or can't hear (such as when I'm on the subway) you won't be able to tell if a character is killed if he is obscured by background when he is attacked.  After a while I get tired of rotating the thing and seeing it spin around for different attacks.  (Plus, the environments aren't as crisp or detailed as the raster-based ones in subsequent games.)

Also the menus are kinda bullshit.  Some of them, anyway.  There's tonnes of tiny little things that are less than optimally designed but one of the things that annoys me over and over (and it's pretty minor but still) is how few screens will tell you what your current job level is.  Even in the job change screen, it will show you your level in every single job except the one you're currently in.  Why?  Why isn't it just on the regular character info sheet you get when you highlight the character?  They had room to put the character's zodiac sign and a bunch of other numbers, and there's a big blank space where they could have put it.  Annoying.

Magic in this game is bullshit.  When you tell a character to cast a spell, they don't cast it right away - every spell has a certain casting time it takes to prepare, so if you're not careful a targeted enemy could move out of the way, or your spell caster could be killed before they finish casting their spell.  This is actually not that bad on it's own - it ads a bit of strategy to spell casting.  The problem is that many of the non-magic classes (Samurai, Monks, etc) have their own ways of doing magic-like things including healing, resurrection, and elemental attacks, but without this delay, without MP cost, often with a greater hit rate, and without requiring the unit to be a physically weaker job class.  (Dragoons also have a delay for their Jump command, but with them it's even worse, because unlike with magic you have no way of checking the time it will take to complete the attack with the turn order list.  I did not use Dragoons much consequently.)

I think my least favorite aspect of the game is how slow some attack animations are.  A lot of the spells and attacks are really well animated given the time the game was released - flashy and filled with all kinds of particle effects and the like.  The problem is you have to watch the entire animations every single time.  It's fine the first few times you see an animation, but it really grates, especially for attacks that hit multiple targets - you have to watch the same animation for each character hit by the attack.  Some animations have to be watched even when they don't hit the targeted unit.  My desire to avoid lenghty animations is one of the largest influences on what character classes I take to battle with me and what abilities I use.

The game's story is definitely the best of the three FFT games, though, and the game can be a lot more difficult than the portable ones if you're used to playing these games lazily like I was.