If Square Enix ever stops kicking their best studios to the curb long enough to put Final Fantasy Tactics out on Steam, you and ZombiePie should figure out how to do competing playthrough blogs on it. I'd be curious to see if you give up on the same fight.

(And I realize I'm one to talk after Jagged Alliance 2. The final straw was losing all my progress in one fell swoop because I had the temerity to rest when the game told me to.)

I'd absolutely do a competing FFT playthrough if that sucker ever showed up on PC and let me speed up animations. Although, at one point ZP was talking about doing competing Grandia II playthroughs and that didn't sound half-bad either.

Wait... weren't we at some point meant to do competing blogs for Grandia II? Am I crazy for thinking this?

Fair warning - Silent Storm is buggy as a motherfucker. Look up how to do the console codes because as cool as that game is, it's very, very broken in its vanilla release.

That said, it's the best squad tactics game released between Jagged Alliance 2 and XCOM: Enemy Unknown. That's not saying much, and I will fully admit that Silent Storm has its issues, but I still think it's an overlooked gem.

And Jagged Alliance 2 should probably be played with console codes on if you've never played it before. Or play Wildfire - I want to say that one fixed a lot of issues, but I could be mistaken. I get all the post JA2 releases mixed up. Just don't play any modern JA. They're all hot fucking garbage.

Disgaea 5 is a better game on a technical level than almost every game of its type out there, including the FFT games. Doesn't have the heart or charm of the FF series, but from a pure gameplay perspective, it's digital crack. At least to me, anyways. I know the numbers intimidate people but they really shouldn't. It's possible to play through the main story of that game with no hassle whatsoever and the post-game stuff is real easy to take in bits and pieces, much more so than its predecessors. Disgaea 4 is still the best game in the series but far less accessible to new players. My advice for 5 is to just play it straight through the first time - except when you want to level your weapons a bit, ignore the Item World. After that, maybe start tinkering little by little with the Chara and Item Worlds, then learn more through a FAQ.

Never heard of Tear Ring Saga but now I want to play it.

X-Com Apocalypse is a game that deserves a reboot, at least spiritually. The idea of an XCOM game with corporations instead of nations is still a good one. It was perfectly all right, but it just wasn't X-Com or Terror from the Deep.

I think I have Eisenwald and Warhammer from Steam monthly bundle things. I should play those sometime.

@zombiepie: You are not. That was something we discussed, but my computer was having problems so you decided to embark on another Final Fantasy misery tour instead, iirc.

This may sound unbelievable, but I found the iPad version of Final Fantasy Tactics to be the best one.

@arbitrarywater: so I met the creator of Legends of Eisenwald at PAX two years ago. seemed like a super nice guy, also justifiably worried about how his game would do . I was the only guy at his booth at the time for a good ten minutes. It got a little uncomfortable.

Unfortunately the game didn't impress me much, seemed like a classic case of not having enough money to make the game the way he probably intended to. Like a lot of kickstarter games.

But I ended up buying because I felt bad for him and also felt given the resources he could make something really good

fwiw just play the PS1 version of FFT. That's what I played back in the day at release and it was amazing then. Personally I found the translation plenty goo enough to catch what's going on. That's the game that made me a fan of the whole genre

Speaking as someone who wrestles a lot with this very issue,Don't overthink it. While there may be no optimal version of the game, it's a great game no matter how you play it. You can always look up a better translation for dodgy parts of the text so go with runs best imo. The worst thing to do is let this issue box you into a mental corner where you never play one of the all time greats.

@slag: Admittedly, my caveat on the fifth bullet point basically exists to address the fact that I'm well aware some of these games might have some interesting ideas that don't quite pan out in execution. Like 1/5th of this list is comprised of games developed by Nival Interactive, and it's not because of their sterling track record of classic hits (well, they did make the last good Heroes game before Ubisoft cocked it up, so they have that.) Eisenwald definitely falls into that category too, unless it ends up being another Eador: Genesis and consuming my life for a couple of weeks.

As for FFT, should I decide to give that game another shot at some point, I'm considering engaging in dark witchcraft to play a better version of the game than the devs intended. It's not just the part where the PSP version had agonizing slowdown (or that I found myself more attracted to Tactics Ogre, despite some of that game's systems feeling counter-intuitive) it's that even when that game is running smoothly it still takes like 30 minutes to go through a minor battle, and FFT is very much the kind of game that expects the player to grind things out (at least until you break everything and steamroll it all.) Playing through the newer Fire Emblems and being able to mash Start to skip the entire enemy phase if I want doesn't really help either.