Ronny Barrier
Guest
On my first day of work at IGN in 2018, I was asked, “What’s your favorite video game of all time?” My answer then was the same as my answer today: Final Fantasy Tactics. When I first played it on the original PlayStation back in the ‘90s, I was enraptured by the job system, the memorable cast of characters, and a story that offered little in the way of easy answers. Between the PSP re-release (The War of the Lions) with extra content but major performance issues, and mobile versions featuring only touch controls, the landscape of 2025 has long been primed for an updated version of this RPG classic that’s worthy of the original. Did Square Enix deliver with The Ivalice Chronicles? With only a few caveats, it absolutely did.
Despite all the improvements in the turn-based tactical RPG genre over the last two-and-a-half decades, the original Tactics is one of those classics that still holds up today. The story, told to you by a historian many years in the future, has a powerful beginning in which we learn your character, Ramza, will go down in history as a hated criminal while his brother in arms becomes a legend despite not being all that he seems.
What starts as a fairly focused tale spirals into conspiracies, backstabbing, the evils of a caste society, supernatural threats, and all the other staples you’d expect from a fantasy political drama. Throughout all of that it keeps Ramza at the center, with a foot in both worlds for perspective. It doesn’t give you tidy endings, and doesn’t shy away from the atrocities that the common people must face when powerful men with armies refuse to set aside their quest for power, and Ramza must continually come to terms with why he’s fighting in the first place.
Thankfully for our sake, all that awful fighting is still really fun to play through. Final Fantasy Tactics focuses much of the power in individual units rather than their synergy with each other, but the flexibility you have with how you want to use those units is immense. Each of the 20 jobs comes with its own set of action, reaction, support, and movement skills, and once learned they can all be mixed and matched with other classes. Want a Monk that can dual wield both fists (after leveling the Ninja class) while ignoring the elevation of the terrain (after leveling the Dragoon class) so he can jump 30 feet in the air to instantly punch a far-away enemy unit to death? Have at it.
What starts as a fairly focused tale spirals into conspiracies and backstabbing.
If you put in the work, you can create some truly busted characters. The act of simply leveling a unit is a joy because you get instant progression feedback from every action you perform, and can easily assess your progress through the new UI. Since progression occurs with each individual action and not by finishing battles, you can either run through a bunch of different maps, leveling as you go, or spend a long time in one map, buffing, attacking, and healing friends and foes alike until you gain just enough experience for the next skill or job.
That old-school grind may not sound fun at first, but having the option to master entire jobs in a single battle or just earn the requisite experience that you need rather than being stuck with one you don’t want long-term gives you constant, concrete goals to achieve as you continue to build your party. And that carrot-on-a-stick feeling of the next job or next spell being within your reach if you do just a little more is essential to enjoying a job system such as this one. Other than Xenoblade Chronicles 3, I honestly can’t think of another RPG job system with such satisfying progression pacing.
And you will need to progress, as the balance of the back half of the story is truly nutty. As sword-and-sandals warfare gives way to instant-kill techniques and screen-clearing summons from your enemies, you’re given some fantastically broken options in both late-game characters and classes. And because many of these late battles only require you to defeat one specific character rather than an entire team in order to win, it further emphasizes the outsized importance a single unit can have towards the end of the story, since you can plan around diving through the enemy team to take out its leader. One character you recruit in the very last stretch of story missions is a one-man wrecking crew, as is fitting with his reputation, but his inclusion is indicative of the wild swings Tactics leans into. You’re not forced to use him, but the difficulty is much higher if you don’t.
In terms of classes, you have the standard fare options such as Squire, Knight, Archer, and Black Mage, which can all be powerful on their own – but each character also chooses from jobs that include Geomancer, which use whatever terrain they’re standing on as the basis for their long-range attacks, and Arithmetician, which casts any black magic, white magic, time magic, or mystic arts you’ve learned with that character instantly and without using MP based on the multiples of stats like EXP or current elevation (without distinguishing between foe and friend). It’s crazy stuff that gets pretty broken by the end, but a wrong button press can still wipe out your entire party. It’s a small picture of just how volatile these late fights can be, but you really have to earn your way there as the prerequisites for the class are intense.
That carrot-on-a-stick feeling is essential to enjoying a job system such as this one.
All this busted stuff is also completely optional depending on how you build your team, as you could choose to fight your way through most of Final Fantasy Tactics using Ramza and a few chocobos if you really wanted to test yourself. That’s especially true for The Ivalice Chronicles since there are now three difficulty options. I played through on the middle difficulty, and it seemed much the same as I remember aside from some tweaks to stats, requirements for learning skills, and even some enemy placements. Having finished that, I’m now more than halfway through a new playthrough on the highest difficulty, and I am enjoying the extra challenge. Hopefully it maintains this pace through the final chapter, as that’s where many of the balance issues lie.
I’m also still working through Midlight’s Deep (known as Deep Dungeon in the original Tactics), an optional endgame multi-level dungeon set completely in the dark, with exits hidden on particular squares, that is filled with stronger enemies than you’ll find throughout the story. The harder encounters are fun, but finding the exits without a guide is honestly kind of a chore as you can’t defeat all the enemies until you’ve found the staircase to the next level. It’s truly for the sickos who want to push their parties to the limit, but I can’t see casual fans having much fun with it.
The original Tactics did have problems other than the balance issues that have thankfully been alleviated here. It was very poorly localized, with stilted dialogue that rendered the complex political landscape unintelligible at times, and had weird anachronisms like Ramza – a character from a supposedly medieval period – yelling out “Geronimo!” (a reference to an early 20th-century Apache military leader) as a war cry. Much of the depth of its characters was also hidden away in either hard-to-read menus or community guides, and the UI was needlessly clunky and complicated (as was the style at the time), making a lot of vital info a chore to understand. I’m happy to say that nearly every one of these issues, other than some of the endgame balance swings on the standard difficulty, has been addressed in The Ivalice Chronicles.
A New War
None of the extra content found in The War of the Lions version on PSP, including the new playable characters, new jobs, or multiplayer mode are present in The Ivalice Chronicles. I did like Final Fantasy XII’s Balthier as a party member since it’s a cool connection across the Ivalice setting, but I don’t particularly miss anything else from that version, and the original Tactics’ cameos from another Final Fantasy I won’t spoil are still included – now with voice acting, which is really cool to hear. The one holdover they’ve kept from The War of the Lions is the vastly improved translation, which is great to see.
Another immediately noticeable improvement is the updated graphical style, which is obviously much higher resolution while preserving the original’s retro isometric look. While I still yearn for a true HD-2D graphical remake with the look of Octopath Traveler or Dragon Quest III, this direction really grew on me after some initial resistance. At first glance, especially through YouTube compression, it looked almost like a smoothing filter over an emulated retro game, but I found that there’s almost a canvas-like quality to the texture of the screen as your toy soldiers march across the battlefield when I played it for myself. At its very worst, it didn’t bother me after a few hours; at its best, especially in scenes with warm lighting around the edges or the added tilt-shift focus, it can look really nice and enhance the illusion that you’re playing with miniatures.
If the new look is too heretical for purists, the original version of Final Fantasy Tactics is also included with The Ivalice Chronicles, but you have to load into a different game completely (as opposed to something like Monkey Island or Halo: The Master Chief Collection, where you can swap back and forth at will) and you can’t even transfer save files between the two versions. I can respect the choice to stick with the classics, but know that doing so means you’ll also miss out on the best parts of this updated version: the new features and voice acting.
I know “quality-of-life improvements” aren’t usually the sexy part of a review, but the myriad changes in The Ivalice Chronicles add up to much, much more than the sum of their parts. Dozens of changes, big and small, have sanded down many rough edges and made this feel like a comparatively modern game. A completely re-tooled interface fits modern TVs and places vital information up front, such as a dynamic turn order list on the left side of the screen, the current Job Points (a vital progression stat) of your character’s class, and optional life bars and names you can toggle on and off with the press of a button. There are quick options to retry a battle instantly or to retool your party before jumping back in, or to load a save straight from the pause menu. You can hold the left trigger and scroll through each character in the order of their actions to see exactly what spell that wizard is casting and where so that you can make sure you don’t walk right into it. You can reset your movement if you haven’t picked anything up in that space or committed to an action afterward. And when deploying your soldiers for battle, you do so on the actual map, not just a floating liminal space that may or may not work out how you planned once you commence the actual fight. You can even fast-forward, an almost necessary feature when revisiting retro RPGs through a modern lens – our tolerance for games wasting our time has shrunk to almost nothing these days, and it’s hard to argue that’s not a good thing.
A completely re-tooled interface fits modern TVs and places vital information up front.
Nearly all of these features and pieces of information were available in the original version, but only if you knew where they were hidden in the archaic menus and behind odd button presses, or by quitting and reloading. When you add up the time and headaches saved over a campaign that lasts for dozens of hours, these changes make a huge difference. All of these battle alterations feel methodical and deliberate, as if the developers cleaned the cobwebs out of a dusty old garage so you can appreciate the gorgeous, shiny car sitting inside of it.
Equal care has been given outside of battles. Quick guides for jobs that tell you what attribute damage scales off of and recommended skills to learn, a quick one-sheet of abilities at a glance, a job tree that shows you the requirements of your next unlock, pop-up tooltips that give you the important aspects of skills and equipment, combat sets that allow you to change your roster setup on the fly, the list goes on. You can even avoid random encounters on the newly redrawn map, and trigger previously random encounters at will. They’ve really done a great job with smoothing out the wrinkles without changing what made the original special.
New Voices
Another new addition that would be hard to imagine going without is full voice acting, and not just for cutscenes. Battle cries, small remarks during actions, and even pleas to your humanity as you dismiss a unit are expressed with almost universally excellent acting. Common robbers and peasants will speak in a working-class cockney accent, the nobles with florid flair, and mid-battle anger and anguish comes across much more clearly than before when it was just text. Some of the death wails, which used to be kind of a goofy and ethereal sound effects, now really drive home the point that you are killing these people on a battlefield. I was a little shocked by that at first, but it does make more sense.
One example of voicework elevating a party member is Rapha, a character I’d never really cared much for previously. Despite her story always being a tragic one, hearing the pain and anger in her voice, as well as her accent being so different from everyone else’s, rounded out her character much more this time around. Also, there are just some world-class insults in here, and it’s fun to finally hear them out loud.
One thing of note is that often the tone in the Japanese language track is very different than the English one. What can seem like intense anger in the former can be an appeal to reason in the latter. They both work, but if you want emotions constantly ratcheted up a notch, Japanese is the way to go.
With these new voices also come new conversations that you’ll only hear if you bring the right combination of characters into particular story battles. A lot of these are not very interesting, unfortunately – many just see them espouse platitudes about the nature of power and don’t reveal much new information about the characters themselves, and they tend to make battles a bit too chatty. But there are a few that offer genuine insight into relationships between people that were never explored in the original, which I really enjoyed.
Final Fantasy Chronicles
That doesn’t mean all these relationships are easy to keep track of, however, as the story involves several complicated power structures during a civil war, and so many people are double-crossing each other. Fortunately, much like the Active Time Lore feature of Final Fantasy XVI, The Ivalice Chronicles includes a fully interactive timeline called State of the Realm that shows you all the big movers and shakers as you continue through the story. Combined with a full encyclopedia, a list of all the cutscenes and the option to rewatch them, and a bunch of other tabs to keep terms, collectibles, and game tips straight, it helps a lot. While some of these overviews and biographies existed in the original’s Chronicle menu, their ease of access and updated layout here make them much less of a chore to peruse when looking for details I missed.
The tutorials have received an overhaul as well, with the layout becoming much more reader-friendly. As an example, the zodiac compatibility chart, a system you could complete the story several times over without knowing anything about, used to be presented in a screen that looked like an ASCII FAQ from the early 2000s; it’s now just written out in plain language and separated by tabs.
The tutorials' ease of access and updated layout make them much less of a chore.
There are also various criss-crossing side quests in the final chapter that are notoriously hard to follow, but their reputation will have to change now that they all have quest markers pointing you to new and important destinations. This doesn’t make these quests any easier to overcome, as you still have to fight the same tough battles to complete them, but it makes them a lot less frustrating because it saves you from having to look up where to go at every step. It’s just another example of getting you to the fun that was already there.