I’m old enough to remember how it felt to first play Final Fantasy Tactics in 1997–to remember its stirring score, deep tactical combat, and most of all, the complex story of broken relationships and valor set against a bitter, conspiracy-laden battle for royal succession. It all came together to create an unforgettable experience. More than nearly any game of its time, I was so rapt in it that I would find my mind frequently wandering back to it, planning new strategies, wondering what would happen next.
Tactics is a game that has lived on as a cult classic with sporadic attempts at giving it its due, as with 2007’s War of the Lions. The Ivalice Chronicles is the latest and best version so far, modernizing just enough to keep its spirit intact and enhance its memorable story without sacrificing its classic charms.
The story primarily follows the life of Ramza Beoulve, the youngest and most obscure member of a storied house of nobles, and his fractious friendship with Delita Heiral, a commoner who was treated like family by the Beoulve clan. As narration informs us before the game begins, history remembers Delita as the conquering hero of the War of the Lions–but it was the relatively unknown Ramza who should actually be celebrated.
That framing device, of a scholar uncovering history’s hidden secrets and revealing lost truths, immediately sets our expectations and raises intriguing questions. How did Delita rise to become a celebrated historical figure? And why was Ramza overlooked? It’s a small, brilliant way to shade everything we see unfolding afterward.
When we join the characters in their own time, it’s shortly after the resolution of another period of bloodshed, the 50 Years War. The conflict was grueling and strained relations to a breaking point between nobles and commoners. Against this backdrop, the death of a regent leads to a bitter battle over succession, ultimately igniting all-out hostilities known as the War of the Lions. Again, Final Fantasy Tactics establishing a historical record first gives us grounding for interpreting the events.
The tale of palace intrigue, betrayal, and conspiracy was always one of Final Fantasy Tactics’ best features, but its original translation was hit-or-miss, with some sloppy and even confusing moments. The 2007 PlayStation Portable game Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions retranslated the game and in the process made the translation much more Victorian English, with Shakespearean flourishes. The Ivalice Chronicles uses the War of the Lions translation as a base, but reworks it to accommodate its full voice acting. I don’t have the War of the Lions translation memorized, so I can’t attest to the exact differences, but from the standpoint of a fan, it at least seems to be very similar in style and tone.
The major difference, though, is the voice acting itself. In the same way that your high school English teacher may have told you that Shakespeare is meant to be heard, not read, this translation just feels noticeably more alive than the PSP game’s when you can hear the characters lending their voices to the lines. The performances add texture and emotions to the text, and the actors were clearly given room to make each role their own by adding groans and affectations.
Judging by the performances, the actors even seem to have been familiar enough with the full story arc that they were given space to imbue lines with suspicion or foreshadowing that isn’t necessarily present in the text itself. In a story full of twists and turns that centers highly on betrayal and conspiracy, the performances add intrigue and suspense, as you wonder how much meaning you should read into a character’s tone.
But that also means that The Ivalice Chronicles can be extremely talky. While the in-game cutscenes themselves are full of stage direction, with characters moving about the space and impressive sprite work illustrating their gestures, most of the story battles have at least a few interstitial dialogue moments. The flowery language used for the script means these can last a while, so sometimes you’ll be thinking of your next tactical move and then have your train of thought interrupted by a surprisingly long conversation. The voice acting was so great that I didn’t want to skip it, but at the same time, sometimes I really just wanted to get on with the battle.
When I played the original Final Fantasy Tactics as a teenager, it was my first real experience with this style of Elizabethan tragedy, at least outside of an English literature classroom. FFT carries all the same hallmarks in a fantasy setting, with royal intrigue, doomed lovers, and power struggles.
It is a lot to keep track of, but Ivalice Chronicles has a few new tools for those who really want to dig into the details of the story and its sometimes tangled royal machinations. For starters, an evolving encyclopedia is included as a quick reference of people and locations. A menu for “Auracite,” magical stones that become a key plot element, shows not only the known stones but who is in possession of them at any point in the story. And my personal favorite, a State of the Realm chronicle, shows a timeline of major events laid against a map of Ivalice, which you can browse through to see where and why major characters and their armies have moved throughout the story.
The movements of armies are approximated by your tactical battles, which are smaller in scope than the grand story would suggest. Usually you’re limited to four or five party members, often with one or two guest characters in tow performing their own automated actions, against an opposing force that is around eight to 10 units. Battles take place on small 3D planes where elevation can provide advantages and elements like deep water can limit your movement. With such small-scale battles, positioning each unit and specifying which direction they face at the end of the turn becomes vitally important. It also features a slightly generous form of permadeath, as downed units can be revived within three turns before they’re gone forever. You can always recruit new units in cities, but given the grinding needed to upgrade your characters and outfit them with a number of different skills, it hurts to lose a soldier permanently, and even worse if it’s one of your powerful named characters. Thankfully, Ivalice Chronicles has frequent auto-saves, so it’s easy enough to find a recent spot before a doomed mission.
Final Fantasy Tactics was and remains a grind-heavy game, even with the rebalancing of Ivalice Chronicles making it slightly less so. That’s partly because of the Job Class system–Tactics is the earliest example of the system in the Final Fantasy series for many fans, unless they happened to import the then-Japan-only Final Fantasy 5. There are 20 standard Jobs for your units, alongside special Jobs held by named characters such as Ramza. Each Job has its own set of skills that can be purchased with Job Points (JP) earned during battles, but it wouldn’t be quite accurate to call them skill trees, since the skills can be purchased in any order. If you just want to save up all your JP for the priciest skill, you can do that.
Many of the later jobs have prerequisites from earlier ones–you need to reach a certain proficiency with a Black Mage before you can become a Time Mage, for example. When you multiply all those jobs by several characters, even if you stick with a core group of eight or so, it can get demanding. There are power-leveling strategies from the original version that still work, but having a high-level party can still be a commitment. There’s a fast-forward feature to speed up battles, but there are no experience points or JP multipliers like we saw added to the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters.
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As you begin to unlock more classes and start to combine their skills, you can create some wonderfully broken combinations that make all of your work feel much more satisfying. The best part of any class-based combat system is experimenting with different combinations, and few do it nearly as well as Final Fantasy Tactics. The flexibility of setting a main class alongside secondary abilities, passive abilities, and movement abilities–with hardly any restrictions–makes it feel very rewarding to tinker with different builds and find combinations that almost feel like cheating.
The difficulty of raising up an army in the early game accentuates somewhat odd balance later on, though. You spend the first three chapters dutifully grinding to build a force with hardly any special units and then, in the last chapter, you suddenly get access to lots of strong, named characters with great special abilities and stats that outdo your basic units. It’s one rare aspect that feels mildly wonky by today’s standards for tactical RPGs, which reinforces this game’s place as a museum piece for an earlier age in the genre.
On that point, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles largely excels. This is hands-down the best way to play this classic of the genre, thanks to a wide array of improvements. I’ve already praised the retouched translation and excellent voice acting, along with new tools to track the story and some rebalancing. The new difficulty levels are a nice new feature as well, letting you dial back the challenge if you want an easier time through the story or would prefer to ramp up the difficulty to really test your tactical prowess. The music remains as good as ever, and since starting the remake I’ve been idly humming battle tunes to myself.
The Ivalice Chronicles version also includes subtle visual updates, making the beautiful sprite artwork of the originals stand out. There’s something homey and comforting about this visual style, with its squat figurine-like characters, and those get a chance to shine in the visual update. The world map looks clearer and more detailed than you remember, and even the relatively simple polygonal battlefields have a nice dash of retro personality.
The one drawback are the character portraits, which are blown up in the same style as the sprites, but don’t look nearly as good for it due to some odd artifacting and jagged edges. Those portraits were captured from original hand-drawn artwork, so it may have been a nicer archival approach to rescan the artwork at a higher resolution, if Square Enix still has it in its archives.
And on that note of preserving history, this excellent version of FFT is just shy of being a definitive edition. While it’s nice that the game offers both the “enhanced” Ivalice Chronicles version alongside a “classic” option, both versions still use the War of the Lions translation from the PSP version, so there is no option to see the original translation if you wish. And both Ivalice Chronicles options lack two special job classes added to the War of the Lions version, Onion Knight and Dark Knight. The community is sharply divided on whether these two classes are any good, naturally, but it still would have been nice to include them and make this a truly definitive package.
Final Fantasy Tactics is a formative game in the tactical RPG genre, and still one of the greatest. Its unforgettable story has never been better told thanks to a retouched translation, stellar voice acting, and smart new tools to help track all of the palace intrigue. Combat remains incredibly rewarding and flexible, which is an especially impressive achievement given its smaller scale compared to many modern action RPGs. The Ivalice Chronicles lacks a few nice-to-have features, but it’s easily the best way to play this all-time classic.
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