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Ramza isn't entirely human.
One of the unique spells Ramza can learn via the 'hit by attack and survive' mechanic later in the game is Ultima. The other two types of characters that can learn this spell is Ultima Demons... and Alma. Who is Ramza's mother, again?
  • In the remake, Luso also gets it. Then again, Luso in FFT is a walking Final Fantasy Tactics A2 teaser trailer, and his being a Ramza clone as far as abilities go, might be a way to indicate that Luso would be more like Ramza than like Marche.
    • It's because Alma is the "perfect host" for the angel Ultima. He's her brother, and some of the compatibility carries over; thus when subjected to Ultima's energies, he can control it a bit himself.
Saint Ajora has been reincarnated more than once.
In both the Japanese FFXII Clan Primer and the Ultimania timeline Ajora is called a woman. Yet, Germonique's scriptures refer to him as a man, not to mention there was a portrait within the game's data that shows Ajora with a fairly manish face. Keep in mind that it's been established that reincarnation exists in Ivalice. So therefore, Ajora was born a woman at first, does her thing and possibly makes contact with Ultima, dies, is reborn as a guy and makes history. He/She is reincarnated again as Ramza's sister Alma but is defeated.

The events of Final Fantasy Tactics were a historical simulation of the real events.
Explains why you're in no hurry to finish the main quest. And why Ramza, or any other character, can get so ridiculously, unstoppably powerful.
  • 'Ramza' and 'Arazlam' are actually modern-day Ivalician Ren-Fair performers.
  • Assassin's Creed crossover! GO!

The Church's history of events is actually more correct than that of the Durai report.
Ramza was a murderer and a heretic, and Delita was the hero-king who brought Ivalice out of the Lion War. What, Olan didn't have his own agenda when writing the Durai Report?
  • Conversely, the traits of the characters were magnified and/or distorted.
    • Say, for example, Ramza wasn't a saint, though he may have helped save the world.
    • And neither was Dycedarg a regicidal, patricidal, scheming manipulative bastard, though he was an opportunistic ambitious man.
    • However, Cid was still a friggin' badass.
      • Amen.
      • In fact, Olan probably thought his adoptive father's true baddassery wouldn't be believable and so he toned it down.
      • Toning down one's badassery wouldn't be unrealistic, there was a guy who in WW2 killed nazis with a machinegun with a grenade seconds of exploding on his hand and then threw it on a tank, it wouldn't feel out of place in a Rambo movie, but it was real life.
  • Doesn't seem likely. If the Durai Report was the only source or it differed too much from other surviving documents, historians would have dismissed it outright. (And the Church probably wouldn't have suppressed it for several hundred years.) Besides, aside from the magical stuff, nothing that happens in Tactics is all that different from Europe's Late Medieval Era. So why would Olan have to make anything up?

Olan was more or less on the mark... except that he couldn't resist writing himself and his uncle Orlandu as more badass than they really were.
(At least Orlandu really was a skilled warrior.) The whole rescue scenario makes a good deal more sense if Olan couldn't freeze enemies in time, after all...

The Durai Reports were written by Ramza
Ramza, the Beoulve Black Sheep and a "bastard" child (or at least the son of a concubine/second wife), shipped off to the Ivalice equivalent of boot camp, just happened to be the future king's best friend and the lynch-pin in saving Ivalice from demons trying to take over the church? Yeah, right. Olan was what Ramza was really like, changed into T.G. Cid's adopted son because he hated his real-life family.

Delita's another one of Balbanes' sons.
Why else would Balbanes bend the rules to have Ramza's so-called "best friend" enrolled in the Academy? (Teta, however, is Delita's half-sister by the man their mother married to hide this fact.)
  • You must not leave out the possibility, though, that Balbanes knew his bloodline was unfit to rule. Knowing this, he would have gotten Delita into the academy because he saw Delita's indeed impressive ability to make a plan and come out on top.
  • This would kind of undercut Delita's lack of noble blood being an important plot point. Also, why would Barbaneth acknowledge Ramza and Alma as his blood children but keep Delita a secret? The more likely scenario is that after their birth parents died of plague, Barbaneth 'adopted' Delita and Tietra after a fashion because of his kindness and their closeness with his blood children, as he made sure that Delita was sent to the same military school as Ramza, and implicitly also that Tietra and Alma were schooled together. It wasn't unheard of in medieval society for a well-off noble to take a child into their household to be a companion (and perhaps later servant/subordinate) to their own children. And given that by Ramza's teens, Dycedarg and Zalbaag were well into adulthood, Ramza and Alma might not have had any friends their own age otherwise.

Ramza is X returned
  • Germonique
    • "Ajora lives again, mortal-oh hell, not again."
      • Smack, Ajora hits the ground. "Ajora the mighty is getting sick of this shit. Stop getting reincarnated!"
    • Very vaguely suggested that Ramza is at least of some kind of bloodline that Ajora recognizes.
  • Cid, because Cid's so badass he's been resurrected before his death.

Final Fantasy Tactics takes place after Final Fantasy XII, so the adventures during Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Final Fantasy Tactics A2 were from time travel
If memory serves me correctly, Final Fantasy Tactics mentions somewhere that guns, airships, and some forms of magic were commonplace ages ago but are now ancient relics of the past. If you think about it, in the world of Final Fantasy XII, Advance, and A2, magic, guns, and airships were a part of daily life. It's possible that perhaps an extremely powerful magic wiped these out and most civilizations, which is why there are no moogles, vieras, bangaas, seeqs, nu mous, or grias in Final Fantasy Tactics. Marche also bears a resemblance to Ramza, so he could be his descendant. The Ivalice that Marche and Luso go to was at its prime, so the grimorie most likely made them go back in time. The order of the games would be FFXII > FFT > FFTA > FFTA2.
  • Or rather, {FFXII and Revenant Wings / FFTA adventures / FFTA2 adventures} > FFT adventures > Vagrant Story > FFTA framing device > FFTA2 framing device. There's also speculation that while FFTA2 is true time travel to the era of FFXII, the original FFTA took place in a fantasy version.
  • Gametrailers had a Final Fantasy Retrospective that confirms this, showing the map layouts of FFXII and FFT, specifically that FFT is to the west of FFXII. Historically and stylistically, FFXII could take place in the equivalent of the Roman Empire, whilst FFT is the Middle Ages. As for the tech decline, it seems the Airships in particular were fueled by magicite, and if this was all used up, and nethicite manufacturing was forgotten or deemed illegal due to accidental disasters or terrorist uses, they would stop working.
    • Gametrailers didn't really have their facts straight, but yes, this timeline is confirmed in the Ultimania. The patched together in-game maps from FFXII and FFT are wrong however; watch the prologue of FFXII again, and you can see there's a vast expanse of Ordalia in the way of that theory. The presence of Goug city in TA2, however, probably indicates that (following the Cataclysm that screws up technology) the Ordallian half of Jylland becomes the region from FFT. So FFT takes place on the other side of the continent from FFXII, but in the same region as FFTA2, though changed so much that it's mostly unrecognisable except insofar as it's a west-facing peninsula and has a city called Goug.

The ending was a result of Olan Durai "writing in" Ramza and company's death when they really survived and escaped Murond
  • Think about it. Ramza and company have just killed off Altima and they claw their way back up to the surface, alive and well. They've saved the world, but the world very decidedly wants to kill them. Everyone's at peace, pretty much. They could go ahead and continue the fight, or let everyone believe they've well and truly died. A little while after Ramza's funeral, Ramza drops off his accounting of the Zodiac Brave Story, which Olan adapts into the Durai Report, purposefully leaving out the portion where Ramza and everyone else survive.

The Scriptures of Germonique are themselves one big fat lie, and Simon's desire to propagate that big fat lie leads to a lot of chicanery.
Reading the Scriptures of Germonique, you get this bit of rambling from Simon about how they're entirely based in fact: "Although many spoke of their existence, none had ever set eyes upon these Scriptures of Germonique. Some might say they are fraudulent, written with the sole purpose of discrediting Saint Ajora. But I know this tome to be authentic."

"When I served as an inquisitor for the Church, many others in the Holy Office feared the existence of this work. And the same is no doubt true for the High Confessor. They were all fearful of these writings, for everything contained within them is fact."

However he never goes on to give any evidence that any of these claims made by Germonique, who was known to be a particularly sketchy and traitorous individual, have any semblance of truth in them. Germonique may just as well have had a vendetta against Ajora and wanted to wipe out his following, traitor that he apparently was. This would mean that the face-off with Ultima at the end of the game is largely the concoction of Orran's mushroom-addled imagination.

  • Alternatively, the Scriptures are a lie in that the story they tell is absolutely meaningless. The Scriptures, after all, were actually meant to contain the code to activate the portal in Orbonne, and are nothing more than elaborate Spy Speak.

When Delita was caught in Fort Zeakden's explosion, Teta's body crystallized shortly after and healed Delita.

Hence why Delita says Teta saved him.

On the other hand, since crystal are known for empowering others with the deceased's knowledge, Delita may very well have been privy to Teta's last memories. I rather doubt they were peaceful. Imagine if her last thoughts were, "I don't want to die." Or the realization that she's been betrayed by her adoptive family.

No wonder Delita has such a chip on his shoulder.

Ramza was due to star in a Harem Anime, bound to wind up like Tenchi or Sena, until the war erupted.

The man rescues women left, right, and center and even has a potential Unlucky Childhood Friend or Victorious Childhood Friend in Teta/Tietra. Note that, without the war and everybody in the country going stab-happy, every woman he rescues are people he could have reasonably been expected to meet over the course of his life anyway. He would have met Agrias while she was guarding Ovelia, met Izlude and Meliadoul through Vormav and Dycedarg associating with one another, and probably would have foiled an assassination attempt by Barinten, leading Rafa to fall in love with him in the process.

Damn. Now I want to see this.

Orlandu is actually Sean Connery
That's why he's so broken.

Non-Lucavi magic doesn't exist (or is extremely rare) outside of gameplay.
Which explains why the zodiac stones are viewed as extremely powerful in-story despite the fact that they don't do very much that can't be replicated in gameplay. Reviving the dead is something that every White Mage worth their salt is able to do, and yet no one thinks to use a raise spell on Tietra, and Malak's revival via zodiac stone is seen as a miracle.
  • No, it's because there's a difference between the Revive spells bringing people back from near death, and the Zodiac Stones bringing someone back from actual death.

Wiegraf is a Clueless Chick-Magnet
And this is why, the two times you fight him in a group, he appears with a bunch of ladies.

Ramza Beoulve and his companions are the heroes of The Zodiac Brave Story, and, by symbolic extension, the real Messiah of Ivalice.

So, according to the ZBS, a power hungry king summoned demons to the world, and a hero gathered the 12 Zodiac stones and Braves to defeat the demon king. Now, what happens in The War of Lions? Any of a number of persons qualify for "Power Hungry King", but none better than Folmarv and the Glabados' leader. So they grab the Zodiac stones and, surprise! Summon demons into the world. Meanwhile, Ramza Beoulve and his companions gather the stones and ultimately pry them from the hands of demons to save the world.

Notably, Ramza and company exceed the 13 permissible, though it could be said that some of Ramza's followers aren't equal to others.

So say we count only the 12 most important aside from Ramza. Namely, Agrias, Cidolfas, Meliadoul, Rapha, Marach, Mustadio, Beowulf, Reis, Alicia, Lavian, and Ladd. You can dispute the canonicity of say, Cloud, Balthier, and Luso, so we discount them from the theory. Boco, Byblos, and Construct 8 are unlikely for being of the non-human variety. Now, for those keeping count, we've got 11 not counting Ramza, and we need 13. We can throw Alma in the mix of this if we want to, but that makes the numbers a bit sketchy for the following part. Likewise, for those dissatisfied with the inclusion of Alicia, Lavian, and Ladd among the 12, we can swap out at least one for Olan Durai, who makes a decent John or Peter to Ramza's Christ.

The idea here is to make a ridiculous comparison to Christ and Arthur, so we need our Judas/Lancelot. We could say Delita, or Gaffgarion (especially because of his presence at the execution grounds, which bear a name suspiciously similar to 'Golgotha'.) or even Argath.

Ramza also shares a number of other parallels with Christ. He faces persecution from the existing government, is of noble birth, is accused of heresy,and is harassed constantly by members of the existing clergy. Oh, and the possibly dying to save Ivalice from the great evils that ran amuck in it.

Ramza is also the only person to have seen The Gods perform miracles via the Zodiac Stones, instead of the unholy monstrosities the Lucavi bent them for.

In any case, Ramza most definitely fulfills the ZBA, if not all the requirements of a Christ-parallel. He had his 12 followers, gathered the Zodiac Stones, and defeated the demon, saving Ivalice. For a Christ-like set-up, he has his 12, as well as other followers. One is a traitor, one is trusted, and he dies for his people's salvation.

  • CHALLENGE: I'm not saying you're wrong, I want to see if you can take the parallels further. Add examples as they apply. And yes, I know these are out of order.
    • The revelation of divinity.
    • The missing time from recorded adolescence to adulthood
      • Chapter 1 -> Chapter 2. With the costume change, it marks a pretty big maturity shift, even though it's a short time (how long was that Time Lapse anyway?)
    • Rebuking the moneylenders in the temple.
    • The miracles. All of them.
    • The temptations and the 40 days in the desert.
    • The sermon on the mound.
    • The baptism.
    • The crucifixion and resurrection.

Valmafra becomes Orran's wife/lover and the mother to his child(ren).
There wouldn't really be a reason for Valmafra to show up with Orran at Ramza and Alma's 'funeral' with Orran unless the two were somehow involved, since she had only met Ramza once and the two never really knew each other. Obviously, Orran had to have had at least one son, or...no Arazlam.

Ordallia is in just as deep shit during the game's plot
Hence why they aren't invading.

The game's plot is the result of several separate tabletop gaming campaigns featuring a Killer GM and the plot going Off the Rails.
  • The Chapter One campaign, "Cadets of Ivalice", where Ramza's player was Leeroy Jenkins and overall played everything like it was a buddy road movie, Delita's player was trying to roleplay a deep, serious, complicated character, and Algus' player was a total newbie who was just trying to learn the system. As the plot developed, Ramza and Delita grew to disagree about every facet of the game, and Algus, tired of being stuck in the middle, quits after the Sand Rat Cellar battle. The DM continues using Algus as a NPC, exaggerating Algus' previous character to the point of turning him into a Jerkass. The campaign ends with Fort Zeakden, except Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies.
  • Ramza's and Delita's players have a falling out for some time, but since they're friends in "real life" things eventually work out. Delita's player offers to GM a game set in the Yvalice setting, allowing Ramza's player to reuse his character (handwaving how he survived) and bringing on new folks. Except Ramza realizes that Delita is not as over the previous campaign as he thought, since Delita also comes back as a plot-important NPC. While Ramza plays along better this time, having learned his lesson, the new players are not impressed with Delita-as-DM and pulls the plot so off the rails that Delita gets annoyed and throws a freaking demon at the (at this point rather low-level) party. Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies again.
  • Some time later, Ramza takes a turn as a DM running a high-to-epic level party, handing off his character sheet to his girlfriend. Battle one of his campaign? A rematch against Queklain, of course. He also runs a B-campaign starring the Shrine Knights, but since they're all evil-aligned characters the ones who aren't killed by the A-campaign stab each other in the back. Eventually the players left in the B-campaign (including a certain Munchkin who was playing a Cool Old Guy) decide to join in the A-campaign. At this point the party hits epic level, so Ramza ditches the political intrigue portion of the plot and just has everyone go demon-slaying, since they were clearly having more fun doing that than anything else.

Ladd stays on Ramza's side when Gafgarion reveals his loyalties because he knows that Ramza will win.
And the fact that most of "Gafgarion's" party is composed of Ramza's old platoon means that the Dark Knight was going to be outnumbered anyway.

Viera became the Treants we see in this game
The treants we see in Tactics are much more human looking than, those from Final Fantasy XII, and aside from both being tree-like, and in fact, the two look nothing alike, aside from sharing a tree motive. The Treats in this game have even a pretty similar facial structure to Viera. Viera are described to have also very close relationship with the woods they live in, and even are regard themselves as part of it. It is possible that they decided to merge with the trees, or transfer their souls into them, in order to survive the cataclysm that decimated other intelligent races of Ivalice, aside from hume/humans. The sprites that are mentioned to give Treants their consciousness, would be in fact, souls of Viera.

Mustadio is a descendant or great- (x a lot) nephew of Balthier.
I mean, hell, WotL practically gives this to you on a silver platter if you know Balthier's true name - Ffamran mied Bunansa, not to mention the characters' similar function and skillset. And that Balthier's skillset is essentially Mustadio's on steroids. Also, even if Balthier's not the one Mustadio is descended from (which would naturally be one more reason to ask whether Balthier and Fran...), it's mentioned that Cidolfus Bunansa (Balthier's father) had two other sons whose names and statuses are not mentioned. A lot of times in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, missing relatives that don't ever show up = dead relatives - but what if they, like Balthier, lived under assumed identities, perhaps only resurfacing after Cid's death? Given that Mustadio's surname was given the smallest of alterations (from "Bunanza" to "Bunansa") specifically to match that of the FFXII father-son duo, their relation is almost a certainty. And if Balthier's the progenitor and the lesson of what happens when human beings screw with power they're not meant to wield, was passed from father to son, it would explain why Besrodio attempted to take control of the Zodiac Stone.

The Lucavi were NOT the result of Executive Meddling, and are in fact based on the Apostles from Berserk.
Over the years many people have taken issue with the Lucavi, feeling that they either didn't fit into the story or just took away from the uniqueness of Tactics' (comparatively) grounded story and morally grey political intrigue by adding an unambiguously evil supernatural entity. To justify this dislike many people have speculated that Square pressured Matsuno into adding some more supernatural elements into the game's plot to make it more in line with the rest of the FF series.

While this is possible, a number of people over the years have suggested that Matsuno is probably just a fan of Berserk and was inspired by it in the creation of Tactics, which makes a lot of sense when you consider the similarities between the two.

First, the setting, themes and general tone have a lot of similarities to the "Golden Age" part of the manga, with political intrigue, a Crapsack World Dung Ages setting, and themes of political ambition ESPECIALLY with Delita who is vaguely reminiscent of Griffith's character as a commoner with aspirations to the throne and who is willing to do whatever it takes to get to the top.

However there are two even MORE specific similarities that make the inspiration a strong possibility. The first is the whole reed flute thing, which in Tactics is a symbol of Ramza and Delita's camaraderie, is ALSO present in an iconic scene in Berserk where Griffith uses it to charm Charlotte by showing how earthly and down-to-earth he supposedly is.

But the HUGE one is the Lucavi themselves. In Berserk, there are items called "behelits" which are eggs with human features scattered about. They have a nasty habit of finding their way to people at just the moment where they are most emotionally disraught and/or about to die, at which moment the Behelit's features shift around to form a face, which screams and summons the Godhand, who are a group of godlike demonic entities. They propose a Deal with the Devil where the person will be free of their suffering, but they must in turn sacrifice whatever is most important to them (usually a loved one). When they take up the bargain, they are transformed into "Apostles", which are demons for all intents and purposes. This transformation usually (though not always) causes the person to lose most of their humanity and grow bloodthirsty and cruel. Their appearance changes, with many of them remaining humanoid but possessing warped, twisted features (unusual and menacing eyes are the most consistent feature), and they can also transform into another, much more monstrous and powerful form which is usually quite frightening and demonic.

Does any of that sound familiar? Because it's fundamentally the same way the Lucavi and the Zodiac Stones work, with a few minor to medium differences. They also serve a similar narrative purpose (in Berserk's golden age arc moreso) in that the setting is relatively grounded, and they serve as a looming, otherwordly, invasive and almost lovecraftian threat lurking in the shadows, an untold unspeakable terror that feels like it's too horrible to even exist.

The timeline for this also checks out; while the first Berserk anime had not aired yet (it was due to come out in a few months actually), the manga was being serialized and the story had already gone through all the aforementioned points and events even by the time Matsuno and his team would have started working on Tactics. This would mean that Matsuno was familiar with the manga, which is still plenty plausible still.

It's still possible that this is all a big coincidence (Berserk itself is subject to this, with a seemingly obvious inspiration for Guts' character actually being completely unknown to its creator before it was pointed out to him), but it's an interesting alternative to the oft-cited Executive Meddling that makes more sense on the whole.

Delita cut Valmafra's tongue out to force her to the sidelines
Okay, so we know that she fails to kill Delita, fade to black, she screams, and disappears from the game until the epilogue, during which she doesn't speak and communicates with pantomime. We also know that at least very early on she was going to be a playable character, and her class was Arc Witch - a spellcasting class. We also know that in FFT, spells are cast verbally because characters charging up to cast a spell can be seen chanting, and being muted prevents spellcasting. So a character with no tongue wouldn't be able to cast spells. And since Valmafra is a caster, Delita could render her mostly harmless without killing her by cutting her tongue out. Did he have to? Probably not, but it's a Delita kind of thing to do.

Ramza got out of Murond by screaming until a hole in space-time opened up.
Hey, if it worked for Buu and Gotenks, why not Ramza, whose specialty is screaming?

He was turned into what he was by the Lucavi.

Ajora Glabados was a transgender man.
Ajora is mostly presented as a male in the game. However, 12 implies they were female. The portrait of the False Saint/Phony Saint is male, but their sprite when possessing Alma is female. Yasumi Matsuno showed unused artwork of Tactics in a livestream circa 2018, and Ajora's art is clearly female. The most logical explanation is that Ajora was born female, but transitioned at some point to male (either to spread their gospel, or to continue to do their job as a spy, take your pick). This would explain nearly all the plot holes caused by the Virgo auracity during the sunken Mullonde arc, like why Alma is a suitable host, rather than a male. Ultima can't choose a male host because she's female in reality!

Dycedarg was Orinus's biological father, or at least planned to marry his mother Louveria.
In a society where the heir of a noble estate would have been encouraged, even expected to marry and have heirs to make sure his lands and titles stayed within his family line, it seems odd that no wife/children were mentioned for Dycedarg, who was nearing forty. Especially given that his scheme(s) involved essentially murdering his way to the rank of Duke. Focus is given to his longtime friendship with Larg (who notably also has no named children despite being a high noble and old enough that children should not only exist, but likely be old enough to have plot significance), to the point where Dycedarg gave his birthright title as Commander of the Northern Sky to Zalbaag so that Dycedarg could serve as close to Larg as possible. Given Dycedarg's plans in particular, being almost forty with no heir seems shortsighted... unless part of his plan involved Larg's younger sister, Queen Louveria. Dycedarg would have seen Louveria grow up given his close relationship to her brother, and may have been banking on a scenario where Orinus is crowned king with Larg as regent, and in return Larg gives away Louveria to Dycedarg as a bride, making Dycedarg the boy king's stepfather. Then Larg "dies suddenly", leaving the only logical choice for regent as Dycedarg himself. It's also notable that Orinus's own parentage came into question due to the king's ill health. As mentioned before, Dycedarg and Louveria would have been well acquainted......

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