The Expert Final Fantasy Tactics Game Guide: 20 Essential Starting Tips
Welcome to the definitive Final Fantasy Tactics game guide for the Ivalice Chronicles. Whether you’re a newcomer navigating the complexities of the Job System or a returning veteran dusting off the classic mechanics, this analysis provides twenty essential tips and tricks to optimize your early-game success and streamline your entire playthrough.
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Foundational Character Setup and Mechanics
Maxing out your main party members first is most crucial for successful progression in Ivalice.
Zodiac Signs and Character Compatibility
The selection of main character Ramza's birthday determines his Zodiac sign, which also affects his compatibility bonus with friends and enemies.
Default Choice: We strongly recommend taking Ramza's default date, which sets his sign in Capricorn. The sign has the highest total compatibility multiplier to the majority of the major allies and bosses in the main quest, and it simplifies the campaign considerably.
Recruiting Strategy: To have best synergy, recruit generic allies of Virgo and Taurus signs.
Multipliers: Amazing compatibility provides a 1.25x multiplier, and optimal compatibility provides a robust 1.5x multiplier to actions (positive and negative).
Recruit Quality: Consider dropping your initial generic units and adding new recruits with favored Zodiac signs and high Brave or Faith values.
Brave and Faith
These two main stats basically decide the combating power of a unit:
Brave: Affects your physical damage, physical skill power (like Blade Grasp), and overall physical skill accuracy. Brave is most valuable to physical attackers.
Faith: Controls magical spell power and hit rate. High Faith will cause your offensive spells to deal more damage and hit more frequently, but it will also make the unit more susceptible to magical attacks from the enemy. Low-Faith units are harder to heal, but harder to hit for the enemy as well.
Gender Differences in Stat Growth
Stat growth in Final Fantasy Tactics is naturally based on the gender of a character, which must be accounted for when building a party:
Males: More stat growth in Physical Attack and HP.
Females: Better stat growth in Magic Attack and MP.
Ramza: The game's main character is the sole exception, with neutral growth that balances Physical and Magical stats equally.
Important Early-Game Job and JP Management
Efficient Job Point (JP) control allows for faster learning of the most useful skills and job switching for optimal stat gain.
Squire and The Power of JP Boost
Squire, accessed from the start, possesses two of the game's most valuable abilities:
JP Boost: A passive skill that must be purchased as soon as possible and applied to all characters. It increases the JP gain rate for every job, which accelerates your overall progress path.
Accumulate: Gives +1 Physical Attack per turn and rewards JP per use. It's low-risk and spammable, and great for passive JP farming in low-level fights.
Stone Throw: Gets honorable mention as a risk-free way to deal damage and earn the value of a turn of JP without making high-damage attacks.
Don't Skip the Chemist
The Chemist is an excellent career that is never ever useless, not even halfway through the game.
Healing & Items: Chemists are proficient at making use of X-Potions, Phoenix Downs, and status-reversing material. They are also uniquely capable of using Ethers efficiently to restore MP.
Throw Item: This skill allows the Chemist to deploy all of their healing and support materials at range, significantly improving their value.
Safeguard: This ability protects equipped gear from being permanently destroyed or stolen in combat—an incredible defensive feature.
Treasure Hunter: A movement skill that allows the unit to search and harvest rare, hidden treasures exclusive to specific maps.
Using JP Spillover
You don't need to be on a specific job in order to earn JP for it.
Allies who are actively working on a job provide a small amount of JP spillover to their allies for the same job, regardless of what job those allies are actually on.
This is a great way to farm that hard-to-level job efficiently: simply get three or more characters concentrated in the same job, and they'll accrue JP a lot faster with the bonuses.
Final Fantasy Tactics Game Guide: Combat Awareness and Safety Protocols
There are some combat mechanics and overall policies which must be adhered to strictly in order to avoid catastrophic loss of gear and progress.
Keep Your Gear Safe
Equipment can be destroyed: Powerfull enemy units such as Knights with the Arts of War ability can destroy your equipment, causing permanent loss.
Avoidance: Always have the Maintenance (or Safeguard) ability on key units so that their precious equipment is not stolen or broken.
Strategic Leveling and Random Battles
Level Scaling: Random fights are scaled to your party's highest-level character. If your leading unit is level 40, all the enemies in a random fight will also be level 40.
The Power Gap: Having an enormous power gap between your high-level character and other characters in your party (such as Level 40 and Level 20 units) will make random fights almost impossible. Distribute XP evenly to keep your team's power level consistent.
Saving and Guest Characters
Save Often: The game is tough and merciless. Ensure that you are frequently saving so you do not lose hours of progress from a difficult story battle or a random, crushing encounter.
Strip Guest Characters: Guest characters typically bring with them uncommon and high-powered gear that is superior to yours. Always strip this gear as soon as they arrive and fit it out on your keepers prior to the guest leaving the party, and you without the valuable equipment.
Healing the Undead
Damage Mechanic: The aspect that you are able to use healing skills to damage Undead enemies is a game-saver.
Cure spells will harm instead of healing them.
Raise spells harm approximately 50% of the Undead target's maximum HP.
Phoenix Down will have a chance to kill an Undead foe outright, thereby making it a useful damage tool.
Crystal Skills and Death
Permanent Death: Dead units or enemies have a timer set upon them. When the timer hits zero, the unit's death is irrevocably sealed, and they are eliminated from the roster permanently.
Skill Transfer: Defeated foes sometimes become Crystals. Gathering these crystals might cause the gathering character to acquire skills common to the original owner, provided the character meets the needed Job requirements. This is a wonderful way of acquiring hard-to-get skills in a timely manner.
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