"Enjoy E3 or die in obscurity!" We've all been told that from time to time. But what if I offered an alternative? An alternative to E3? Doesn't that sound nice? Certainly nicer than crowding together inside a stuffy fake church hall, I'd bet. That's what we're doing here, in this Alternative to E3 series that - for 2018 at least - is looking at various "randomizer" hacks to see how fun it might be if our favorite games decided to lose their darn minds. As always, if you're not sure what a randomizer is or you still believe that Indie developers are the only ones turning everything into a roguelike these days, I'd like to introduce you to the darndest little fellow named Garflink and his adventures.

Today's case study is none other than Final Fantasy Tactics. I thought long and hard about which of the many FF randomizers to check out, and then I realized that FFT already has an interesting past when it comes to making big changes to the distribution of enemies. Some years back now, a group of fans created the "1.3" patch, built to address FFT's weird difficulty curve and how much of the second half of the game felt undercooked, letting the player run roughshod over all the powerful late-game jobs (word up to my Calculators! Deadliest nerds this side of the Manhattan Project) but still making every enemy group a boring combination of knights, mages and archers. It's a really smart tweak that improves, and makes more challenging, the pivotal battles towards the end of that game. The randomizer's sort of in the same spirit, but far less discriminate: I wasn't sure what to expect going in beyond absolute chaos. Let's see if my predictions were right.

Day 1: "Sniff Scat at Anal City"

The Game: Squaresoft's Final Fantasy Tactics, originally released June of 1997. Next week it'll be legally allowed to drink in the US. I got a good feeling indeed.

The Randomizer: FFT Rumble Chaos Crashdown Randomizer v26.

The Rules of the Randomizer: This one really goes hog wild with what it can change, with fifteen different flags the player can activate while setting it up: the assortment of units, the job stats, skills attached to those jobs, items in stores and their prices, items you receive as spoils, monster stats, and even the battle music. There's also a flag for "special surprises" (disclaimer: I did not see any of these, at least no surprises I'd consider especially special).

In layman's terms, this makes the game kinda nuts, but still beholden to a few laws here and there to ensure it's not a completely unplayable mess. For instance, job progression still seems to be the same: e.g. you need two ranks of Squire before you can switch to Priest (White Mage) or Wizard (Black Mage). That's not quite the same as the original game - Squires lead to Knights and Archers, not Mages - but the overall flow from one job to the next follows a similar suit. That said, those jobs aren't quite how you remember them... in fact, there's a lot of new wrinkles that can make progression take some interesting detours, and a few nasty surprises from the CPU who is always way ahead of you in that regard. Suffice it to say, this won't be one of those RPG randomizers that'll be easy right off the bat.

The Playthrough:

At any rate, I think I've shown enough of this game's randomizer off. I'm sad I couldn't get to any of the "special surprises" it talked about, but we've definitely had some challenging battles that have forced me to consider my options more than usual, beyond "let Delita handle it". In fact, I actually kind of want to play more of it. I'd like to see how some of the other early jobs have been affected by the randomizer, like the Monk and Thief, and whether or not I can quickly get Ramza into a state where he might actually be formidable.

I'm not sure I reaped the benefits of every single flag that I activated, because of course I had to activate them all, but I suspect this playthrough will continue to surprise me if I stick with it, tossing all manner of ludicrously tough monsters my way as I'm forced to seriously consider my tactics and team composition. Even random encounters are going to be more dangerous than the story missions where I'm at: the randoms tend to involve more monsters, and I can't help but wonder if I'm going to bump into a Lucavi or Ultima Beast at this rate. Definitely one of the first randomizers I've played this week that I can objectively say has improved on the experience, though perhaps only because it's shaking up some otherwise straightforward early battles. Man, I really want to know what those special surprises are...!

Rating: A-.

Man, you're just making me want to replay Final Fantasy Tactics again. My dream would be to have the Octopath devs do a proper FFT sequel for Switch as their next game.