Final Fantasy Tactics Review

Two things make it a landmark and they barely overlap. The first is the writing. Ivalice is a place with land disputes, a starving peasantry and a church running a scheme, and Ramza's tragedy is that he does the right thing and history records his best friend as the hero instead. It is genuinely about something, which almost nothing in the genre was. The second is the job system, twenty classes deep, with abilities carried across jobs so that a Ninja with white magic or a Calculator with anything at all becomes a build you invented rather than a build you were handed.

That freedom is also the balance problem. The system is broken open by anyone who looks at it for a weekend, and simultaneously the fixed party fights at Riovanes and Dorter will crush an underprepared save with no way back. The original translation was famously mangled, later fixed. Slow, unforgiving and unmatched in its depth.