Final Fantasy Tactics

• The PSP's translation is better, but the PS1's has more character. Which version you play is mostly up to preference. Some classes and items are renamed in the PSP version to better suit current Final Fantasy standards.

• Read the Tutorial for the basics, if you're playing PSP. Understanding how charge times and clock ticks work is a huge help.

• In the PS1 version the unit limit is very tight, if you want to have every unique character available you may have to fire your initial random rooster from the Gariland fight.

• The PSP had absolutely butchered the quality of most SFX, while also having terrible slowdowns, the latter can be fixed via ISO patching at least. Most seamless patch I found was the .exe patcher by plastik on the ffthacktics forums, no need to do encryption or UMD bonanza, just point to the ISO and patch it.

• Make multiple saves. The game tends to suddenly spike in difficulty, and there are some places when after you finish a combat, either another one starts up immediately, or you are placed in an area of the map where no grinding is available. That can really screw a game over in some points if you are not set up for one or two of the fights.

• Early battles, much like Deus Ex, will be boring! This is because your characters just can't do much other than use items and hit stuff. Hold out! As your characters start advancing in other jobs, the strategic options will open up.

• Make Ramza a melee fighter of some kind, he has two solo duels. If you're not sure what to do, his Squire job is unique and gets better every Act.

• Item never stops being a useful secondary skill, and can be viable healing all game. Auto-Potion automatically uses the cheapest type of Potion available, so it might be a good idea to sell all the cheap ones first.

• There is no specific benefit to finishing out all of a job's skills. Once you've got everything you need, move on.

• Other characters in the party gain a small amount of a job's JP as well. This can be used either to power level a certain job , or to get enough JP in a class to grab that one skill out of it you actually want instead of going up the whole tree. (For example, the Squire's JP Boost is good on just about everyone.)

• There are a hundred thousand ways to break the game in half, but don't worry about any specific goals, just do what seems cool. Experimenting with builds is half the fun. Don't bother hunting for anything close to 100% completion, either, all that stuff absolutely requires a guide.

• The Guest/Special characters are powerful as well, so feel free to use them. TG Cid is overpowered, but even Agrias and Mustadio are very powerful if used correctly. The exception here is Cloud. He starts out at level one and his unique skills are rather average.

• Triangle will bring up a turn listing, which will also show when spells will go off.

• Even if you don't use him keep Mustadio on the team, he will unlock some special sidequests later on that are missable if you don't have him on the party.

• If you don't care about magic, you can lower your faith via orator's skill Threaten, and make your units take like 5% of magical damage while also heavily lowering enemies chances to land magical debuffs.

• Some of the rarest loot can only be obtained by capturing monsters, breeding them into their alternate forms, and hoping for a rare poaching, it is a nightmare to do but some of the best stuff is available there, like Setiemson (permahaste) or Ribbons (immune to every stat).

• If you want to poach without dying inside, do yourself a favor and play the PSP version, the extra party room helps way too much.

• Women start with higher Magic while Males start with better physical Attack, but generally I'd recommend female units more than males because they get access to really good exclusive gear and the female exclusive job Dancer is much more useful than Bard, for example due to how speed works, debuffing the enemy with Slow Dance is much more effective than giving your party a tiny bit of Speed with the bard equivalent, or poking enemies to death from the other corner of the map with Mincing Minuet is infinitely more useful than giving every ally a measly 20 HP heal every few turns.