poorly balanced is a pretty good way to put it. if you are interested, there's a mod called cerabow which tweaks a lot of the abilities and makes the game pretty well balanced in my opinion. personally, I always beat wiegraf by spamming the speed increasing move on myself over and over again so I can get 10 turns in a row against him.
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2026
13 points (100.0% liked)
Games
21376 readers
101 users here now
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
Rules
- No racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, or transphobia. Don't care if it's ironic don't post comments or content like that here.
- Mark spoilers
- No bad mouthing sonic games here
- No gamers allowed
- No squabbling or petty arguments here. Remember to disengage and respect others choice to do so when an argument gets too much
- Anti-Edelgard von Hresvelg trolling will result in an immediate ban from c/games and submitted to the site administrators for review.
- Can't read Colon Syntax Emoji? :skill-issue:
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
"Modern game expectations"? My reference point is a game that came out two years prior. Plus this is the same series where Tactics Ogre PSP introduces us to archer counters...
The first time I beat Velius (or whatever he's called in the newer translations), I was down to my last party member - a Summoner - and the boss went up to just smack her in the face. He missed and I'd just happened to give her Counter, because I was still relatively new to the game and making bonehead decisions like that. Her hit connected, and that was the killing blow.
White mages should skip the healing staff for tgis purpose, small bonks can win the day often.
Yes, but there are some strong defensive options you can take advantage of to keep your guys alive while they're double fisting the enemies.
1/4 of the overall change to your Bravery and Faith that occurs during a battle persists afterward. (So if you start a battle with 50 Bravery, and end with 54, your permanent Bravery shifts to 51.) This means you can grind Bravery to 97, which will make your Reaction Abilities trigger 97 percent of the time. This is obviously good with Blade Grasp against physical attacks, or Hamedo against physical attacks that originate from inside your weapon range. (Note that some monster attacks don't trigger Blade Grasp.) With Auto-Potion and only X-Potions in your inventory, you get 150 HP back every time you take direct damage.
Damage to MP is interesting because as long as you have at least 1 MP, ALL of the damage is converted to MP damage, so you can pair it with Move MP Up to completely block the next damage you would take after every one of your turns, even from sources that there are otherwise few ways to mitigate, like the sword skills or Dark Holy. If you aren't getting attacked at least twice for each turn you get, this makes you functionally unkillable by damage.
You can also grind Faith down on your physical units to greatly reduce damage from enemy spellcasters, if you don't care about being able to target your own unit with magic buffs. (This will basically guarantee Raise misses, so be sure to bring Phoenix Downs and the Item command instead of relying on White Magic!)
If you don't care at all about battles being remotely fair and aren't above engaging in some simulated animal abuse, the actual strongest strategy is:
spoiler
Use a mediator to recruit a pig type monster, hatch a ton of pigs looking for the higher tier ones, and then Poach them for Ribbons and Chantages. Ribbons are headwear that prevents all negative statuses and Chantages are perfume-type accessories that give permanent Auto-Reraise, so that if the wearer ever dies they automatically revive on their next turn, over and over. If you're playing the OG or War of the Lions releases they can only be equipped by women, but in the recent remaster there are no gender locks on equipment so you can make Ramza immortal too. Also this is super annoying to do in the OG release because the army size limit is so small, so by the time you have an opportunity to take advantage of this you don't really have room for the eggs.
(I may have misremembered some of the ability names, or mixed up names from the various releases.)
Holy shit this fuckin game is so busted 
So you can really just raise or lower Brave or Faith permanently... I did not know Brave directly determines react%, that explains a lot and I hate it to death. Also fuck Hamedo seriously.
(Note that some monster attacks don't trigger Blade Grasp.)
Okay they so ruined Counter (as well as any other react ability in the game) in FFT. In Tactics Ogre all units do melee counter attacks 100% of the time, that's it. Now not only is there a % chance to attack, but it only triggers on SOME ABILITIES. I thought Counter Magic was gonna be busted but it only seems to work at all on black magic. Disgusting 
as long as you have at least 1 MP, ALL of the damage is converted to MP damage, so you can pair it with Move MP Up to completely block the next damage you would take after every one of your turns, even from sources that there are otherwise few ways to mitigate,
That takes a lot of ability slots but could be interesting, if you're sick of actually playing battles.
You can also grind Faith down on your physical units to greatly reduce damage from enemy spellcasters, if you don't care about being able to target your own unit with magic buffs.
Same to this, I haaaaate how brave and faith work in this game. I already have my white mage throwing phoenix downs too because Raise rate is piss poor on some units due to zodiac alignment or smth.
Use a mediator to recruit a pig type monster,
I was wondering if this game had recruitment, I hate how grabby the later Yasumi Matsuno games get with recruiting. In Tactics Ogre only your leader can do it, in this it's class specific?? and in Wheel of Fortune it becomes Abilities you have to buy... Why are these games alwaya turning into micromanagement clusterfucks?
Isn't there an opportunity to save right before this battle, locking you into it without the opportunity to improve your Ramza in case he simply isn't strong enough?
Yes, and it's epic. More of a problem on small, expensive, overstuffed PS1 memory cards back in the day. I keep a set of rolling saves now, but on original hardware I would suggest never taking the opportunity to do pre-battle saves. Annoying game.
Right?
んん。
This fuckin' game, LaGG.
I softlocked it at that point as a child because I didn't realize how OP monk (let alone monk/ninja) was. Had to replay the whole ass game lol
Many such cases it seems 
I played the original when I was like 12, and made Ramza a monk/ninja then just because I (correctly) thought monks and ninjas were cool. It steamrolled the whole game.
Another good trick on that fight is to use Ramza's ability that increases his speed over and over again in the first phase while just kiting Wiegraf around before his transformation. Do it for like 10 rounds and you'll be getting multiple turns for every one of Wiegraf's. The second phase is considered the same fight, so the buff persists. When the demon shows up, you can just pummel him to death before he even moves.
Oh yeah, my ninja Ramza currently has Monk puncharts instead of squire things, which is a bit of a shame. Yell is kinda nice.
FFT is so hard. I got soft-locked years ago and never went back.
FFTA, though, is goated.
It isn't actually that hard, it's more like the game's "Who Can DPS The Most" battles sometimes result in ugly choke points that require you to put out 500+ damage per attack...
okay. poorly balanced?
I think so, it's also the kind of game where if you have a ~60% chance of hitting, you'd better savescum because that hit is likely the difference between success and a reload, with how fast everybody dies in this. Tactics Ogre is an extremely deterministic game by contrast