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Final Fantasy Tactics is probably one of my favorite game of all time. It has a great engine, great music and really good plot. When this game came out I must have spent over 200 hours or so playing it over and over again. I also revisited it many times during my life.

I always felt like the original FFT was a bit too easy at times and I thought this hack would challenge me to really use the engine to it's full potential in order to succeed. Unfortunately this is where it all falls apart. I don't think this comes to a fault to the developer of this hack but rather how the game falls to pieces when you try to raise the difficulty too high.

You can play perfectly, be 100% prepared for a fight and have a great team composition and still lose since the deciding factor here comes down to luck. On the one map where you take on Algus in the first chapter, I kept loosing so I set up myself a save state at the start of the fight so I wouldn't have to watch the cutscene every time.

He has the ability to kill most of your units in one hit at 100% accuracy, unless of course his AI decides to use throw stone. I had restarted the fight multiple times with the exact same team composition and strategy until suddenly it went from being too hard to stupidly easy where I kept critting enemy units and they just could not land a single hit on me. This is where I felt that no matter what I did, it just didn't matter.

Another weird AI quirk is constantly reviving dead units, this may seem like it would be detrimental to the player but instead makes the game easier. In one of the maps if the AI had attacked me for massive damage instead of reviving a useless unit that I can just mow down the next turn, they probably would have won, but instead, ended just giving me free EXP and AP as well as an extra turn to attack.

So why do I recommend this hack if I didn't enjoy it that much? Well the hack itself has a lot of good stuff added in such as new spells, abilities, powerful passives for each classes and some balancing as well. So while I don't recommend the hard version, you should definitely check out he easy version of this hack. It keeps all the good stuff from the hack and throws away the terrible difficulty. Unless of course, you're a sucker for punishment, then go for the hard version.

I love RPGS, and I love strategy games, so I always loved FFT. However, it was always way too easy. The real shame is that the game had a very developed and fun battle system, but it is wasted on the vanilla version.

This hack solves that problem.

It is EXTREMELY hard. It is so hard that it usually forces you to come up with a genius plan, almost every battle. They made it so that the difficulty levels up with you as well, so you cannot, I repeat, CANNOT level your way out of problems. When you just can't win a fight, it's because you aren't thinking hard enough.

Let me give a quick example. There's a fight with 5 engineer classes, most of whom have dual wield magic guns, who will do about 400 per hit (800 per engineer). They have break skills, and they will break your items and, because of dual wield, do an additional attack after for about 600 damage. There are ways to win this fight, but it took me my whole weekend to finally win.

And that is the beauty of this hack. You can always win. On the forums for the hack they have a thing where frustrated people will submit their save files, and they'll make a video beating the fight. The game isn't hard just to be hard or punishing, it's not hard to encourage level grinding, it's not hard to unnecessarily lengthen gameplay, it's hard in ways that make you think, and will push your mind to the brink. That is what makes a strategy game great, and that is what I think makes this hack a god damned masterpiece.

I cannot recommend this hack enough.