Betting Gil on bots playing Final Fantasy Tactics is a great way to spend an evening

Or maybe I’m just really bored and have nothing better to do with my life. Either way, I had fun.

While most people who spend a good amount of time on Twitch tend to gravitate towards specific personalities and streamers they find entertaining, I’ll always find myself being more captivated by the novelty streams. I spent an ungodly amount of time watching the Bob Ross event back in 2015, was more than a little involved in Twitch Plays Pokemon and now I think I’ve found my latest free-time killer: Final Fantasy Tactics gambling. Started up a few days ago, FFTBattlegrounds sees an AI play through battles in Final Fantasy Tactics, the cult classic (and according to Geoff, very good) strategy game, while viewers place Gil, the game’s fictional currency, on the team they think will win.

As it turns out, it can be pretty difficult to figure out which team to place your made-up money on. Bots are known to play the game very quickly…but their actual strategic decisions aren’t always up to scratch, leading to some hilarious moments of confusion. You’ll start off your time in FFTBattlegrounds with 1000 Gil and by successfully predicting which side will win you’ll be able to grow your fictional wallet and earn XP as you align yourself with one eight teams, all differentiated by varying colour. I chose to be a part of Green Team, which wasn’t a great move because we’re currently not performing very well but we’re definitely sitting on some good rounds soon!

If you feel like really getting involved in the action, you can throw a “!fight” into the chat to maybe have your name displayed as one of the battling characters, which will see you net even more XP if your team comes out on top. A nice touch implemented by FFTBattlegrounds is that players will never drop below 100 Gil, so they’ll always have something to build up from. The channel is apparently still in “early beta” and more commands and actions are expected to be implemented as time goes by but that hasn’t stopped this early build from being strangely compelling. Give it a watch, if you got a few hours to kill and some spare fictional currency jangling around in your pocket.

Last Updated: January 16, 2020