Final Fantasy Tactics's Faith Stat

The Faith stat in Final Fantasy Tactics is weird and doesn’t make much sense, when you think about it.  I mean, at first glance, it seems sensible enough--a stat representing the power of belief to influence the effectiveness of magic spells.  Magic being a highly indefinite force, what with the whole it’s-literally-magic thing it’s got going on, there’s no particular reason why its power shouldn’t have some basis on how strong its user’s and target’s belief in it, or the divine being it theoretically comes from, is.  And with FFT being a game whose events and setting are so specifically steeped in the actions and truth behind an organized religion that also serves as a world power, it certainly makes sense that Faith would be an appropriate stat to add to the regular mix.  Right?

Except for the fact that Faith isn’t a static, unchanging stat.  While it doesn’t change according to leveling up or changing job classes, like most of the rest of the stats in FFT, it is possible to intentionally raise or lower a unit’s Faith stat through the use of certain combat abilities.  And there’s even a quirky little feature in the game for when a unit’s Faith hits 95 or higher--that individual will decide, at that point, to leave the party due to religious convictions and seek out a higher calling with God.

And if the potential for a character’s Faith to be changed exists, and exists in the capacity that it, in even so small a way, ties to the narrative (rather than just being a strictly battle-mechanic number), then everything about Faith kind of makes no sense, upon any scrutiny.

So let’s assume that Faith indicates just how fully convinced an individual is that God, Ajora, and the general hoopla of the divine and supernatural exist, with 100% being completely and totally convinced, and 0% being an outright, full-on atheist.  This is a reasonable interpretation given that Faith is used, in battle equations, as a percentage (thus 0 is none and 100 is full), and the actual maximum a unit can get is 97 (only Ramza, since he can’t actually leave at the 95 mark) and the actual minimum a unit can get is 3 (except Worker 8, who naturally and permanently has 0), falling within the range of the perspective that it's a percent situation.  It’s also reasonable to interpret Faith as being about belief in God and Ajora and higher powers and so on, given that having a 0 is regarded as Atheist status--it wouldn’t be called that if it was about not believing in anything intangible; atheism is generally associated with a disbelief in religion first and foremost, after all.  This being the case:

How the fuck is it rational for any party member in the game to maintain a low Faith score?

Because I don’t know if maybe they just didn’t notice this, but at a certain point in Final Fantasy Tactics’s story, Ramza and company are fighting real, actual fucking demons, and dealing with events, relics, and beings that very clearly indicate that Ajora was a real person, and that several manners of crazy divinely magical shit went down around him in the past.  Even if Ajora turned out not to be the saint that people thought he was, how exactly can the people following Ramza around rationally simply not believe very strongly in the spiritual when they’re watching the stones of religious yore summon demon lords from Hell and create miracles like restoring life to the dead?

How does a party member with a Faith of 49 watch Rafa use a divine stone to call her brother’s soul back from the heavens and into his body, witness a guy who’s been a roof corpse for at least an hour sit up good as new, and still remain more a skeptic than not that there are higher powers in the world?  Hell, how does Malak himself maintain a Faith score of a measly 31 after this?  Does this asshole just open his eyes after the will of God in Rafa's hands hauls his soul back to the corporeal realm, and his first thought is, "I think there's a better than 2/3 chance that I staged this whole thing about dying.  Can't pull the wool over MY eyes, Me!"

How exactly can your belief in the beings from the scriptures not be pretty damned solid as 1 of them holds you up with 1 hand, beats you raw with 3 more, and tells you to start a New Game, because your save file is his bitch now?

But let’s take a step back.  Maybe that’s not exactly what Faith indicates.  Maybe Faith isn’t necessarily a non-specific belief in God and Ajora and the powers beyond the ken of mortals.  Maybe Faith is supposed to indicate how much a character buys into the teachings of the Church of Glabados, specifically.  It’s not just their faith in God and all His jazz, but also in how God and said jazz are depicted, interpreted, and documented by the organized religion of Ajora.  That’s also a reasonable perspective, since the messages for a unit whose Faith is high enough that they’re leaving the group, and the warning messages for when that point is approaching, by and large show the individual doubting Ramza’s cause because it doesn’t jive with the teachings of the church (or doubting that Ramza can achieve anything through combat when the scriptures preach peace and faith as the ways to heal the world).  We assume, now, that the Faith score directly ties to a unit’s belief in the teachings of the church of Ivalice.  That being the case:

How the fuck is it rational for any party member in the game to maintain a high Faith score?

I mean, as the game goes on, shouldn’t the Faith scores of Ramza’s party start dropping drastically?  What with, y’know, this being the group that’s specifically laboring to expose the lies of the church and the truth of the past events regarding Ajora the false saint?  I dunno, maybe I’m just crazy, but I feel like if someone found hard evidence that Jesus was actually the son of Lucifer, and that his daily routine consisted of poisoning wells, kicking kittens, and being acting CEO of Ubisoft, that might lessen just how much stock the person puts in the Catholic church.  Ramza is holding a book in his hands that proves that Ivalice’s messiah was actually the prototype for Randy Pitchford, and that doesn’t lower his Faith in the church a single point?

Or maybe it’s a different scenario.  Maybe Faith is just a belief in the supernatural as a whole.  Sure, God, Ajora, all that junk is in there, but Faith also covers how much a character buys into magic, ghosts, statements made by Pete Hines, vampires, Santa Claus, the ability for the average citizen of the United States to retire, leprechauns, luck, superstition, and so on.  Faith is exactly as the definition of the word implies, signifying a belief in everything that isn’t immediately real and tangible.  This is, of course, backed up by the fact that the Faith stat directly influences how effective magic is when it is cast by or cast upon a character.

But if that’s true, how can anyone’s stat stay low after any battle with a mage?  What, you don’t BELIEVE that your buddy next to you just burst into flames as a mage pointed at him and shouted a catchy little slogan about it?  A lightning bolt just popped a squat on your ally’s head, he fell down dead on the ground, and that’s, what, a coincidence?  Your white mage wants to do something about the fact that your skin’s draping off you like old wallpaper after your last encounter with a samurai, and you’re gonna say “nuh uh all that hocus pocus is a scam!” rather than clap your hands and declare that you do believe in fairies, if by “fairies” they mean “not being bisected”?  Does a low-Faith character just watch the battlefield around her and genuinely think half of what’s going on is an elaborately staged bit of LARPing?

For that matter, ghosts are enemies that you can actively encounter in the game.  Animated skeletons, too!  And squaring off against a lame-ass vampire is an unavoidable part of the main story of FFT.  If Faith describes belief in the general supernatural, how does any unit’s score in it not rise when a ghost comes up to them and punches them in the face?  Does a party member with a Faith of 49 or lower just stubbornly insist, in this scenario, that there’s an above-average chance that his tooth just decided to dislodge itself?

And forget just fighting mages and ghosts and such.  How exactly does it work when you make a low-Faith character into a mage?  How exactly does a black mage not particularly believe in a spell when she herself casts it and sees the spell do exactly what she intended it to do?  Like, imagine if in the first film Luke asked Han Solo, “You don’t believe in the Force, do you?” and then after Han affirms this, Obi Wan pipes up with a “Yeah me neither.”  While he’s opening Han’s mini-fridge with his mind and floating a cold one over.  That’s what’s happening when a low-Faith character gets put in a magic-using role.

It’s not even consistent, really.  I mean, yeah, Faith will have an influence on the success of any and all abilities that count as “magic” by the game’s technical reckoning, but there is shit in FFT that doesn’t technically get calculated as magic which so clearly is magic.  Holy Knight abilities, for example, work completely independently of the Faith stat.*  Meaning that when Agrias swings her sword, shouts a strangely pithy yet abstract catchphrase, and calls forth a spectral blade up from the earth to give her enemy the worst kind of enema, it doesn’t matter whether or not the foe especially believes in magic ground knives, he’s still not gonna be sitting right for a good long time afterward.

I’m sorry, but how is it exactly that you can atheist away a lightning bolt when a dude in a robe summons it down onto your head, but when some hottie swings her sword to bring it down, THAT one you can’t just shrug off as superstitious nonsense?  I’ll give you that a few of these non-Faith-but-clearly-magical abilities are difficult to dismiss as fake--it would be hard to claim that Meliadoul’s Shellbust Stab is all in your head when the armor it broke is currently sitting in pieces around you--but plenty of these unique unit abilities are quite clearly just as unreal as the actual magic in the game.  More so, really, because things like fire and ice and lightning actually are real, physical phenomena, while I’m mostly sure that glowing broadswords sprouting out of the dirt like crabgrass are not.  Unless moles developing and launching tactical sword warheads is a regular and documented happening in Ivalice,** someone with a low Faith count should be way less doubtful of a spell evoking some fire, which is a thing they’ve seen before, than just about everything in Agrias’s arsenal.

And I haven't even gotten into the fact that monsters and animals also have Faith scores.  So depending on what exactly we believe the Faith stat to represent, at least 1 of the following is a cold, hard fact: that ghosts and animated skeletons in Final Fantasy Tactics are not fully convinced that they themselves exist, that demons in Hell don't completely buy into religious lore that is their own literal past, and/or that every random goblin, panther, and bird in Ivalice has given thought to the matter of, and formed a distinct personal philosophy regarding, the feasibility of a higher power and its presence in the works of man.

Yeah, it’s not a bad idea in theory, but in practice, Final Fantasy Tactics’s Faith doesn’t make much sense.  It’s capable of influencing the game more than just the battlefield alone (in that characters with too much will leave to pursue devotion to God), and it’s not unchangeable by human action, so we can safely regard it as a dynamic trait rather than solely as a battle stat...but once that’s done, as soon as we start thinking about FFT’s Faith at all, it becomes clear that the way it works doesn’t make any sense.





















* Which in and of itself makes no sense; of ALL the Job Classes in the game whose abilities should have some interaction with the Faith stat, shouldn’t a Holy Knight be 1?


** Which if it is true, then what are all these idiots doing worrying about stuff like royal succession, societal upheaval, and the invasive incursions of the devil into reality?  They clearly have bigger issues demanding their attention.