I bought and enjoyed the shit out of FF Tactics when it came out but remember very little about it. I know that Ramza’s last name is pronounced “bwelve” (rhymes with twelve) so yeah, I was a Square mark between FF7 and FF8 (seems like an instant but it’s a lifetime when you’re “bwelve” years old) and bought anything they put out, or at least as many as I could afford and downloaded all the Square ROMs I could, from Rad Racer to the untranslated Japanese-only games that I couldn’t read but tried to play anyway, which is why I bought SaGa Frontier. That was an actually good game though. FF8 was a huge letdown and I wasn’t as much of a dork after that.

The [adverb, I forget which] Unofficial Squaresoft Home Page, run by a guy named Andy Kaufman and some other guy, was a major resource during and after that phase. In something like 1999 they broadened their scope and renamed themselves RPGamer.com, which to this day is a major gaming resource. I have the satisfaction of being a fan not just from the beginning, but back to the site’s Good Morning Miss Bliss years.

Back to the point, all I remember about Final Fantasy Tactics is the openjng FMV of a herd of Chocobos running beneath an overpass, or at least were in a ditch. As a memory, it’s barely better than Ennius. I forgot it had Final Fantasy enemies in it, which makes me want to break it out and play it. I have the ROM. I’ve put my hard drives and SSDs back in my old computer so I have access to all that stuff in, but only one hard drive cable so when I want to switch drives I have to turn off the computer, open it up, unplug one drive, and plug the cable into another. It’s temporary though. Mostly I keep my 8TB hard drive plugged in.

You’re wrong about Dragon Quest. Only the first two games are massively unbalanced, and that’s probably fixed in the remakes because modern audiences have much less tolerance for things like that. Steer clear of the NES versions. If you’re going to play them, I recommend picking up the HD-2D remakes when they come out. They look great and probably are the easiest releases of those games, at least in QOL.