The greatest Final Fantasy of all time.
Let's begin with the story. After starting a new game, a historian tells you of a story long ago, in which you'll be thrusted with your main character, Ramza, of the prestigious Beoulve family of knights. His father, a hero in the 50 Year War had just died. From there Ramza has to go through many treacherous events, which includes damaged ties with his best friend, betrayal, corruption, politics, battling of demons of the sacred Zodiac Stones. Keep in mind that was only Ramza's part in the story. It's all very complicated and extremely deep stuff, but it all adds up. Other characters have important roles too and when you take a look back, Final Fantasy Tactics' story is one of the best ever told. It's simply epic, on a huge scale.
I have easily spent over 100 hours each time I've played through Tactics. To all the hardcore gamers out there, this game is HARD with a capital H-A-R-D. It's really easy to get your characters killed if you don't plan your strategies and make sure they stay healthy. Enemies, even though their levels reflect Ramza's level (mostly I think), could easily kill your each of your characters with as little as 1 hit unless, provided you aren't too careless and/or if you're lucky you're not up against some overpowered goon. You are allowed to recruit fresh units although they do not play any important roles in the story, which is obvious.
Final Fantasy Tactics has a job class system in which you can choose the type of unit you want your characters to be. Say a knight for example, or a summoner, or a dragoon. There are 24 classes in total I believe, and that's excluding the special classes of your other main characters, each unique. You'll find that a party consisting of various jobs will aid you greatly and help you survive the difficult battles that await you. In battle, you earn experience for every attack, skill and item used. Along with that you'll also earn something called JP which stands for Job Points which is your currency to exchange for different skills exclusive to that job class such as Kikuichimonji of the Samurai class.
Battles take place on an isometric field where you move your pointer over square tiles on the field, sort of like in chess and checker boards, except of course there's foliage and the like here, not blank black and white spaces. One important aspect of the gameplay is AOE, or Area Of Effect. As in most strategy games with this feature, it's important to keep track of the surrounding areas each spell or special skill it covers. Depending on what you use, a spell/summon/skill/etc can cover square spaces ranging from just one square, to 5 connected squares making a cross-like coverage, to almost the entire field itself.
Later in the game you'll find that you are also able to recruit characters that are not human, such as chocobos and your enemies from the battlefield itself.
With this system there's really a huge variety of ways you can play through the game and it's simply satisfying.
On the graphical front this game is mostly made up of 2D sprites and just a bit of 3D. The artistic aspects of the game is pretty good. Character models are small and look doll-ish although the type of story Final Fantasy Tactics holds betrays the game's cute looks. Spells are great to look at as always courtesy of Square's tendency of making it look all magic-ky and shining. Summons though are just 2D drawings of your creatures with small static movements mixed with some 3D effects. You'll find that it's mainly these summonings and the big magic spells or skills that can cause slow downs, although I can't be too sure as it may just be the style of gameplay as well. Other than that, the game runs smoothly.
Overall, graphically speaking, Final Fantasy Tactics is a great looking game artistically and technically as a 2D graphics game, even though 3D has started to overshadow 2D graphics at the time.
The game's soundtrack, if it can be described with one word, would be 'epic'. It can get hold of your attention if you bother and the various tunes work really, really well for whatever situations. I can still remember that same battle theme even though the last time I've played the game was about 4 years ago. Now that's what we call memorable. Hell I once happened to hear that same battle theme being used on a Taiwanese talk show, you could not imagine the disbelief that befell upon me. They should have been sued.
Sound effects are generally very crisp as well and impressive overall. Although the sound of your male and female characters dying is a bit funny, you'll get used to it over time. Other than that, I think the game's sound engineers and designers have done a good job in accurately capturing that sound of a sword cutting through flesh and armor.
Conclusion - With this game spanning more than 100 hours long easily, and having a high replayibility value and just simply impressive and mesmerizing in many aspects. It would be a crime not to give this game a genuine look. Final Fantasy Tactics, I shall say once again, is the greatest game to bear the Final Fantasy name and truly a masterpiece. Get this game.