Final Fantasy Tactics, the War of the Lions: Palaverous vivification

When I was 15 I must have had the patience of a saint.

In my clouded memory, the original Tactics has shone like a beacon of integrity amidst a sea of unskippable self flagellatory battle sequences for nearly a decade, so naturally I felt its new and improved PSP version deserved another go around.

And I should know better than to think any Final Fantasy would indulge my predilection for not wasting time on repetitive twattle, but I guess I'll never learn.

A trip to the options menu (always the first place I go, as a matter of policy) allows us to increase the speed of the menu cursor, multi-height selections and text scrolling, and shave seconds off each move by disabling the boxes which say the name of every action, and then whether that action caused any kind of status effect, as well as the number of experience and then job points earned by every single character including enemies. In fact, you can skip basically everything except the stupid animation sequences.

Oh and since there is neither a quicksave nor a retry option, you have to reset the game before you can load and can't skip the talking before every battle no matter how many times you've had to sit through it.

But any amount of compulsory observation is easily offset by the game's beautifully rewritten script. Have you ever played anything else where people called each other "whoreson dogs" and "milksop rabble?" I didn't think so.