Final Fantasy Tactics's Mages

As a general rule, I think that Final Fantasy Tactics’s battle system was constructed extremely well, to the point that you could call it masterful.  But it’s certainly not perfect, and nowhere is this more evident than with the role that magic plays in the game.

Basically, FFT did mages dirty.  They’re mildly useful very early in the game, and they theoretically lead somewhere great in the late game, but overall, the way that magic works, and the laws of movement and turn order, hobble spellcasters for the majority of Final Fantasy Tactics, and through essentially all the stages of the game when you most need your team to be fully reliable and functional.

First of all, let’s talk about the biggest problem: charge time.  Magic takes time to use.  Once a mage decides they want to cast something, they have to stand there, motionless, until the spell activates.  That’s not so terrible when it comes to the beginning magic, but the more powerful the spell, the longer it takes to charge, and that alone more or less nerfs this type of combatant, for 2 major reasons.

Reason 1: your mage is defenseless and exposed the whole time.  Now granted, any unit that acts is stuck sitting around until their next turn, so it’s not completely different, but the thing is that the mage hasn’t actually acted yet.  When your knight walks up to an enemy and hits them, then ends his turn, well, he’s done his damage, he’s gonna sit there until his next turn, and that’s that.  But when your mage’s turn consists of beginning to charge up an attack (or healing spell, or status spell; whatever the case), that means that he only has actually helped your battle strategy at all IF he finishes charging the spell and casts it.  If an enemy uses your knight’s exposed status to kill the knight, well, at the least, the knight contributed to your cause by having gotten his licks in first.  But if an enemy takes advantage of the fact that your mage is sitting with his hands in the air like he just doesn’t care, that can mean that said mage dies without having done anything for you.  I’m pretty sure the FFT enemies are smart enough to know to target opponents who are charging whenever they can--they sure as hell seem to always know as much when I play, at least--and even if they don’t and who they attack is purely randomized, mages can’t take as many hits as most other combatants can to begin with, so they still have a higher than average chance in this scenario to croak before they finish casting.

And it’s not like killing a mage is the only way to stop them from finishing their casting sequence.  Sleep, Stone, Confuse, Stop, Toad, Silence, Disable, any of them successfully hit the mage while he’s charging up and he’s all done.  Hit a knight with that shit, and maybe he’ll be inhibited going forward, but again, at least he got his attack in beforehand.  And the fact that Silence is a status ailment that affects magic but not physical abilities just makes the situation worse, because mages even have 1 more status ailment that disables them than everyone else has.

Also worth noting is that the most powerful and thus slowest spells can have such an obscene charge time that the same mage’s turn comes up AGAIN before he/she’s finished casting, meaning that you’ve actually spent 2 turns locked in place for the same 1 action.

Second reason?  Enemies aren’t polite enough to just stand around and get hit.  As a general rule, enemies in Final Fantasy Tactics use their turns to act AND move, and I’m relatively sure they recognize when they’re in the spot that’s about to get nuked by Fire 3.  Yes, your mage can specifically target an enemy, not an area, but it’s still a problem--the whole point of an area of effect ability like most of FFT’s magic is to hit as many enemies as you can, so if the guy you’re targeting decides to take Green Day to heart and walk alone down the Beoulve-ard of Broken Dreams, then the spell you thought was going to blast 2 - 5 enemies is only gonna hit the 1 now.  Additionally, there are times when you want to target a specific area of the landscape rather than the enemy themself (if 2 baddies have a space between them, for example, you could target that space and catch each one in the peripheral area of the spell’s effect), so again, if they can leave before the spell takes effect, your turn is wasted.  This is all well and fine early in the game when level 1 magic is effective since that doesn’t usually take long, but once you hit the point that second level spells or higher are (or at least should be) the standard, having a long charge time severely inhibits your mages’ ability to hit the enemies you want, in the numbers you want.*

Oh, and this doesn’t help when it’s curative magic, either.  Because just as enemies aren’t gonna stand around, so the same is true of your own characters.  If your knight’s turn comes up before the white mage is done charging a healing spell, then your knight has to choose between risking running into the fray again while still injured, or wasting turn time waiting for the healing.  Yes, just selecting Wait without acting or moving will speed the knight’s next turn up, but it’s still losing time that may be important; FFT isn’t an easy enough game that you can always afford to delay your turns.  And again, yeah, you can target your ally to be cured specifically so the spell will follow, but if you were trying to get multiple allies healed at the same time (which is largely the point of using a curative spell instead of just a single-person potion), then that’s not ideal.

Additionally, healing magic’s at a disadvantage with charge times in the sense that the more dire the need for it, the less time an ally has to wait for it.  The more hurt a companion, the stronger the healing they need; the stronger the healing spell, the more time it takes to cast; the more time an ally has to wait, the greater a chance they’re gonna sustain further enemy attacks.

The second most damning flaw to mages also functions as the other reason that the moving-while-being-targeted situation isn’t ideal, whether it be ally or enemy.  It is thus: if your ally is in the area of your black mage’s Ice 2 spell when it goes off, then that’s too damn bad, because Ice 2 does not play favorites.  Cure 3 takes its Hippocratic Oath seriously, so if an enemy is its area of effect, it’s healing your foe just as surely as it’s healing your ally.  By and large, area of effect spells affect everyone in that range, regardless of their allegiance.  And these areas cannot be adjusted.

This cripples the tactical use of magic.  If an enemy unit and your own are standing next to each other, then any mage that wants to cast a spell on the enemy has to either target the area near the bad guy to avoid hitting an ally (which, depending on charge time, gives the enemy the chance to just move), or make the decision to hit both friend and foe, if you can’t move your unit out of the way in time.  But even if you can manage your own allies, that doesn’t mean the enemy can’t, if he’s being directly targeted by the spell, move up next to your party members so they’ll get hit in the blast.  And it’s far worse with healing magic--the allies who usually need healing the most are the ones who are actively trading blows with enemies, often attacked on multiple sides.  If you want to heal them with magic, you may be forced to also heal your foes at the same time--you might be distributing more healing to the opposing team than to your own!

And of course, to continue the trend of the most powerful magic in FFT also being the most useless, the highest level spells often have even bigger areas of effect.  So when you combine that with the obscene amount of time it takes them to charge up, giving enemies the ability to move wherever they want, there’s a damn high chance that if your mage actually manages to live long enough to fire it off, it’ll either hit nothing, or several targets you don’t want it to.

So yeah, we have charge times that range from inconvenient to completely untenable, and area of effect logistics that ensure magic is either as much or more a danger to your team as it is an asset, or so much trouble to set up for success that it’s not worth it to you, as a person with finite time on Earth, to bother.  Surely that’s enough handicaps to give to 4.5** of the 20 job classes in the game, right?

Oh, not hardly, my friends.  Square’s got 1 more crusher to deliver: attack spells can be blocked.

Yeah, that’s right.  In addition to everything else they’ve got going against them, spells in Final Fantasy Tactics have to roll dice just like everyone else when it comes to whether or not the attack will hit.  For all the effort you put into arranging the timing and positioning of the spell, taking enemy turn order into careful account and forming your strategy on which units to advance where...there’s a decent chance the enemy is just gonna lift his shield up and deflect the electrical deathray you just custom ordered from Zeus’s Etsy.  Even when you can balance every other factor holding your mage back, he/she might just goddamn miss.

I know that Tactics isn’t the first in the Final Fantasy series to have a mechanic for evading magic--FF6 famously is bugged that magic evasion is the ONLY evasion stat that gets factored, in fact--but it really did not need to add this drawback to an already painfully ineffectual arena of combat.  It’s 1 thing for a monk to have his/her punch deflected--the only setup to that was the monk walking up to the enemy and throwing hands; there’s only so much of your battle plan that can go awry from a single, immediate 1-target attack failing to land.  But when you’ve got a spell whose timing and target area has to have been planned out, and accounted for with actions taken since, not being able to 100% guarantee it’s even gonna land is a huge burden.  I’m used to status ailment magic being unreliable in RPGs,*** but outright attack magic is supposed to be fairly dependable!

And we’re still not done!  Those are the big 3 reasons why magic is so damn problematic as a whole in Final Fantasy Tactics, but there are still more, smaller factors that drag it down further.  For starters, the actual casting range of mages is pretty limited.  They can only target an individual or spot of land a few paces away with most spells.  And in different circumstances, this might be a pretty okay attempt at keeping a mage balanced, because it wouldn’t be very fair if they could just sit at the other end of the map and safely sling spells willy-nilly, but when the magic requires charge times and the enemy can see it happening, forcing a mage to be within a single turn’s walking distance to any potential target of their spells does not increase their life expectancy on the battlefield.  Even by 1998, technology had still evolved to be smarter than the average villain (or writer, for that matter) of Dragon Ball Z--as stated previously, the bad guys aren’t just gonna stand around waiting for your black mage to finish charging up his KamehameFire4, so forcing said mage to get closer than COVID regulations recommend to begin casting just makes magic that much more unwieldy to use.

Next smaller factor: the Faith stat.  Let’s say that, against all odds, everything goes according to plan with your casting of Ice 2--your caster didn’t get Silenced halfway through, the enemies couldn’t change formation fast enough so you’re still hitting 3 of them at the same time, and none of them are quick enough on the draw to use a shield to inexplicably stave off a sharpened block of ice the circumference of 3 men crashing down on them.  Well, you still are not necessarily guaranteed a decent damage payout!  Because a lot of the damage the spell will inflict will depend on whether or not your enemy believes it should.  A higher Faith stat means that your ability to cause harm with and be harmed by magic is increased, while a lower Faith stat means that magic has less effect on you, and your magic has less effect on others.  You CAN permanently raise or lower characters’ Faith stats, but it’s a long process of small gains or losses over turns in battle, so if you don’t resign yourself to the hand you’re dealt as far as your characters’ Faith scores go, you’ve got some tedium ahead of you.  Either way, there won’t be much you can do if you happen to go up against an enemy with a low Faith score protecting him from your magical offenses.

Now, in theory, this shouldn’t be too much more than a basic balancing factor similar to Magic Attack and Magic Defense, just rolled into a single stat, right?  Sure, I guess, in the case of attack spells...but it affects healing and status ailment magic, too.  So while having a character on your team with low Faith is beneficial in the sense that they can shrug off magical offenses, it also means that cure spells won’t do much of anything for them.  As if white mages didn’t already get the shit end of the stick in this game.  And of course, if your enemy happens by chance to have a low Faith, that also makes the prospect of getting a magically-induced status ailment to stick harder than ever.

Don’t have to worry about that shit with the Brave stat, I’d like to add.  More Bravery means more physical damage dealt by attacks, but it doesn’t increase the amount of physical damage taken.  So that’s yet another mitigating complication you have to compensate for with magic in FFT that other abilities and even just normal physical attacks aren’t obstructed by.  Once again, we see that magic’s ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the force...of a spear getting rammed through your ribs.

Another thing: if you want long-range attacks with accuracy, you don’t HAVE to resort to a black mage--you can just get an archer, or a gun-using class.  Archers’ve even got a charging feature, too, if you’ve really got a hankering for that standing-in-place action.  And unlike a black mage, your enemy doesn’t need to have accepted High Velocity Object as his personal lord and savior for the arrow to work to its fullest effectiveness.  Worth considering also is the fact that not a lot of the enemies you’ll encounter in the main quest battles in the game--which are the tough and unavoidable ones, mind you--have elemental weaknesses, so that potential advantage of black magic doesn’t amount to much more often than not, and thus physical attacks like the archer’s are rarely noticeably less effective than any elemental source.

Meanwhile, if you want ranged healing, you don’t HAVE to resort to a white mage--you can just get a chemist.  Hell, they’re 1 of the beginning job classes.  They can throw a healing potion or a status ailment remedy at whoever needs it, and they can do it right now.  As in, the time that the healing is actually needed.  They can’t heal more than 1 person at once, but on the other hand, throwing a jar of heal juice into an ally’s face means that nearby enemies aren’t going to accidentally get a free magical bandaid just because they were invading your ally’s personal space.  And again, unlike the magical version, your ally can get as existentially inquisitive about the nature of potions as he likes without it affecting their ability to reassemble his bones.

Even in the 1 arena in which magic should have the advantage on a Chemist, that being curing KO, it really doesn't, thanks to Faith--Phoenix Downs items are very limited in that they only bring a character back to life with a few HP, so the healing magic Raise and Arise, which restore far more HP when getting allies back on their feet, ought to be a better option, yes?  Except that your ally's Faith stat could potentially cause the revival magic to miss--and that's a real bad thing to have to gamble on in a game where leaving a character in KO for too long results in permanent death.  Yeah, apparently combatants in Final Fantasy Tactics are so dedicated to their level of belief in higher powers that they'll decline a second chance at life out of principle.  I actually witnessed a moment in 1 of Icy Brian's streams in which a knight of the Church had a low enough faith stat that his employer, a high-ranking church official, was unable to successfully cast Arise on him.  This knight fought literally to the death for the sake of a religion that he is so adamant in his refusal to believe in that he'd rather bleed out and die than accept it as true.  Can't nobody convince me that a a reliable Phoenix Down isn't the superior option after I see something that absurd.

Hell, even the oracle and, to a certain extent, the time mage have a simple, effective alternative available not too terribly far into the game, in a sense.  He may not be able to do anything but Disable and Immobilize, but Mustadio can at least inflict those 2 from a distance with an okay success rate, and frankly, Disable covers almost everything you particularly need from a status ailment by itself.  And these abilities activate instantly.  AND, once more, your enemies’ current level of belief in their own limbs doesn’t much affect whether those limbs have been rendered inoperable thanks to a bullet.

So it’s really not like the mage job classes offer much in the way of strategic advantages that other classes in the early-to-mid-game don’t.  Time mage’s Haste and that’s about it.

Lastly, this is a pretty small one, and normally it would just go with the territory, but it’s worth noting that the standard detriment of mages’ shitty weaponry isn’t helping the situation any.  Sure, in most games, it doesn’t really matter that magic-users tend to go out of their way to equip themselves with the least effective weaponry they can find or invent (40% of the entries on my Stupidest Weapons list are the equipment of spellcasters; for Ajora’s sake Norma put the fucking bubbles away and buy a goddamn switchblade or something).  But when your magic use is as hampered as it is in Final Fantasy Tactics, having a decent backup for damage-dealing sure would have been helpful.  It’s not too big a deal since you can still equip another ability to a mage, so you can at least stick another job’s more useful abilities onto them, but still, being able to rely on a properly damaging weapon in a pinch--and pinches come up an awful lot if the turn order just isn’t in your favor--would’ve been helpful.

Okay.  So, with all of that said, and magic fully proved to be goddamn useless in Final Fantasy Tactics...

...There is a way to actually make magic work for you, which gets around almost all of these problems.  Sort of.  No, it’s not the Short Charge support ability--while obviously very handy, that one requires enough job points that it’s inconvenient to have to wait for, and uses up the support ability slot that could be used for other skills that aren’t just making up for a deficit.  Other units get to use their support ability slot to add to their combat prowess, but mages are stuck wasting it on something that just makes their 1 and only combat purpose closer to strategically feasible?  Making up a little of the mage classes’ lost ground is not the same as a legitimate battle strategy.  Not to mention that even halving spellcasting time doesn’t make the most powerful spells’ charging time especially viable.

No, I’m talking about the job class that FFT mage apologists**** will point to as the ultimate defense for magic in the game: the calculator.  The calculator basically can cast any magic spell that the unit knows from previous experience as a mage, but will cast it instantly.  AND the spell will affect targets anywhere on the map, according to conditions you select from a list--for example, you can pick Height and 5, and any character at a height on the map that’s a multiple of 5 will get hit by the spell, or you could go with Level and Prime, and any character with a level that’s a prime number is the target.  While this is no guarantee against an ally getting hit in the crossfire (or an enemy getting healed by accident), it’s a hell of a lot more reliable than charging areas of effect that anyone can just dance in and out of.

With the calculator, you can (probably) heal the party members who need it, WHEN they need it.  You can (probably) throw Bolt 4 at your enemy, and not simply have to hope that his grandson will still be standing in the same area of the map when it finally finishes charging.  You can (probably) make a difference to the battle without having to put the team’s squishy member so far into the middle of the fighting that you’d swear he/she was trying to be the nougat center of a candy with a battle-hardened shell.*****  And while the calculator is so damn slow to act that it’s practically like waiting for spells to charge anyway, and has a surprisingly low magic attack stat, you can always take the class’s abilities and stick them onto 1 with more appropriate stats, so that’s not really any significant detriment.

So that’s that, then, right?  The calculator is great.  Redeems FFT’s whole damn magic system altogether, right?

...Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

See, here’s why I said that this way of making magic useful only sort of gets around all the problems.  As great as the calculator is, it’s also a job that requires a hell of a lot of build-up to get.  You have to level up the black mage, white mage, time mage, and oracle several times each to get the calculator unlocked, which takes a decent bit of time--more time than most other classes might, in fact, for the fact that those classes are so damn useless that they negatively impact your ability to effectively fight as a team.  Then, once you have the calculator, you have to devote a lot of time to learning the class’s jobs before it’s actually useful--the whole point is to have enough factors to choose from that you can find combinations that will cause spells to target units you want while not hitting others, so you need at least most of the Calculator’s abilities to make it work for you.  Which, considering the poor speed of the class, is even more time-consuming a process than it is for any other class.  And finally, even when all THAT is done...if you want your calculator to be using the big boy spells like Holy, Cure 4, Meteor, Petrify, etc., then he has to have advanced far enough in the associated mage classes to have unlocked them.  You want to drop precision Ice 4s across the battlefield?  You still have to take the time to level your black mage skills up accordingly.

So where does that all leave you?  Well, generally speaking, unless you’re just grinding nonstop (which isn’t a valid argument for the calculator's utility, since grinding nonstop will make ANY character combat-viable anyway) on random battles, you’re probably only going to have a fully realized, completely viable calculator late in the game.  Which, first of all, is an issue because by the late game you can have dual-wielding monks running around and any other fully tweaked job class combination you desire anyway.  Where you really need job classes with an edge is in the early and especially mid game periods--and that’s when you’re stuck with regular mages and, at best, a calculator whose options are still few enough that he/she is really only slightly better than a standard mage.  The calculator may very well be 1 of the most powerful and useful ability sets in the game, but it’s still an endgame job in an RPG whose endgame gives a LOT of options for overpowered units, and the paths that lead to those other units involve job classes that will actually make that journey to the endgame easier, rather than more difficult.

The second issue with this cost of time is that, by that same time, you’re most likely going to have some or even all of the following characters on your team: Agrias, Meliadoul, Beowulf, Mustadio, Worker 8, and Orlandu.  Mustadio, as discussed, is able to Disable and Immobilize enemies from a good distance, immediately.  Meliadoul’s basically a ranged, damage-dealing Knight, meaning that any time you’re fighting human enemies, she can both destroy their weaponry and other equipment from a distance, instantly, AND deal damage at the same time.  Worker 8 has a terrific ranged attack.  Beowulf has a whole set of oracle status ailment abilities that activate instantly.  Agrias has got a small but extremely effective set of ranged, area-of-effect attacks that activate instantly (and may cause a status ailment, to boot).  And that crazy son of a bitch Orlandu’s got everything Agrias and Meliadoul have, can heal himself with Gafgarion’s instant ranged draining attack, and comes with a weapon that automatically gives him Haste--there’s a damn good reason the boy made my and everyone else’s list of the Most Overpowered RPG Characters ever.  And ALL of these characters’ powers work regardless of their target’s Faith stat, take far less time to learn these abilities than any single mage unlocks his/her full potential, and (aside from Mustadio) can take a hit better.

I mean, that’s not to say that the calculator is useless by comparison--the instant powerful healing magic is something that no specialty character duplicates, and just because Orlandu’s sword constantly doses him with caffeine, that doesn’t mean the rest of the party can’t benefit from a Haste spell or 2.  But it does mean that it’s difficult to logically argue that the effort and time spent creating a battle-ready calculator is worth the result, when you can fill your team with viable alternatives--sometimes better alternatives--that the game’s giving you for free.  When you’ve got Orlandu, Beowulf, Agrias, and the other specialties coming to you eventually anyway, what really counts in determining how useful a job class is in FFT is whether it’s useful (or whether the path to it is useful) during the period of the game before uniquely powerful story characters are being passed out like lies in an official Activision statement.

And since that’s the period in the game in which the calculator’s path incarcerates you in the frustrating world of FFT’s magic system, I strongly contend that the class is not, in fact, the redeeming savior that a lot of players think it is.  You can make magic in Final Fantasy Tactics useful--but you basically have to go specifically out of your way to do so, taking time and effort to achieve the same effectiveness that comes naturally with other, easier options that are actually useful all along the way.

Fun fact: When I set out to write it, I thought today’s rant was going to be a quick one!  Yes, I really am that naive and stupid.





















* Granted, you can employ status effects to keep enemies immobile, but that would basically mean you’ve got 1 party member whose job is specifically to make up for the shortcomings of another.  Not to mention that for most of the game, the major status ailment job is another mage, who brings the same problems to the table.


** Summoners count as half here because they’re the only ones whose spells distinguish friend from foe.  But they’re still as hurt by the charge times as any of the others.


*** Although frankly, that one’s another major pet peeve of mine.  In fact, I’m surprised I haven’t written a rant about this already.  Probably gonna do so sometime soon, now that it’s in my mind.


**** Shut the fuck up it’s my blog I’ll make up any term I want to.  So nyeh.


***** Look, not every analogy is a winner.