I was captivated by the job system, the enduring cast of people, and a plot that provided few simple solutions when I played it for the first time on the original PlayStation in the 1990s. 2025 has long been set up for an upgraded version of this RPG classic that is worthy of the original, thanks to the PSP re-release of The War of the Lions, which had more material but significant performance concerns, and mobile versions that only had touch controllers. Did The Ivalice Chronicles by Square Enix meet expectations? It certainly did, with a few exceptions.
Even though turn-based tactical role-playing games have advanced over the past 25 years, the original Tactics is still regarded as a classic. The narrative, which is presented to you by a historian many years later, starts off powerfully by revealing that your character, Ramza, would be remembered as a despised criminal while his brother-in-arms becomes a legend despite not being everything that he looks.
What begins as a pretty focused story devolves into backstabbing, conspiracies, caste-based horrors, supernatural dangers, and all the other elements you might anticipate from a fantasy political drama. Ramza remains in the core of all of it, providing perspective from both realms. Ramza must constantly confront the reason he is fighting in the first place, and it doesn’t spare you from the horrors that the regular people must endure when strong men with armies refuse to put aside their desire for power.
Fortunately for us, it’s still a lot of fun to play through all that terrible fighting. Although Final Fantasy Tactics places a lot of emphasis on the capabilities of individual units rather than how well they work together, you have a great deal of freedom in how you choose to deploy them. Once mastered, the action, reaction, support, and mobility abilities required for each of the 20 vocations can be combined with those from other classes. Want a Monk that can jump thirty feet in the air and instantly punch a distant enemy unit to death? He can do this by dual-wielding both fists (after leveling the Ninja class) and ignoring the elevation of the terrain (after leveling the Dragoon class). Go ahead and do it.
What begins as a fairly focused story devolves into backstabbing and conspiracy.
You can make some very amazing characters if you work hard enough. Simply leveling a unit is enjoyable since the new user interface makes it simple to evaluate your progress and provides immediate feedback on your progress for every action you take. You can either level up as you go through a variety of different maps, or you can spend a lot of time in one map, buffing, attacking, and healing both friends and foes until you have just enough experience for the next skill or job. This is because progression happens with each action rather than by completing battles.
Being able to master entire jobs in a single battle or simply gain the necessary experience instead of being stuck with one you don’t want long-term may not seem like fun at first, but it gives you consistent, measurable goals to work toward as you continue to assemble your party. Enjoying a job system like this one requires having the carrot-on-a-stick mentality that the next job or spell is within your grasp if you just put in a little more effort. I honestly can’t think of another RPG profession system with such gratifying progression pacing, except for Xenoblade Chronicles 3.
Additionally, you will need to advance because the latter part of the story is rather crazy. You are presented with some incredibly broken options in late-game characters and classes as sword-and-sandals combat gives way to instant-kill strategies and screen-clearing summoning from your adversaries. Additionally, since you can plan around slicing through the enemy team to eliminate its leader, the fact that many of these late battles only require you to defeat one particular character rather than an entire team to win highlights the disproportionate importance a single unit can have toward the end of the story.
As befits his reputation, one character you hire in the final plot tasks is a one-man wrecking team, but his participation demonstrates the wild swings Tactics leans into. Although using him is not required, it will be considerably more difficult.
Your entire party could be destroyed by a single button push, but it’s insane stuff that becomes really broken by the end. You really have to earn your way there because the requirements for the class are rigorous, but this is just a small sample of how heated these late bouts can get.
Enjoying a job system like this one requires that carrot-on-a-stick vibe.
Depending on how you assemble your team, all of this is also entirely optional. If you truly wanted to push yourself, you could use Ramza and a few chocobos to battle your way through the majority of Final Fantasy Tactics. With the addition of three difficulty settings, this is particularly true for The Ivalice Chronicles. Except for a few changes to the numbers, the criteria for acquiring new talents, and even the positioning of some enemies, it looked to be pretty much the same when I played through on moderate difficulty. Now that I’ve done that, I’m over halfway through a fresh game on the hardest setting, and I’m loving the added challenge.
Another alternative endgame multi-level dungeon that I’m still working through is Midlight’s Deep (called Deep Dungeon in the original Tactics). It’s entirely dark, with exits concealed on specific squares, and is full of more powerful creatures than you’ll encounter throughout the narrative. The more difficult confrontations are entertaining, but since you can’t defeat every enemy until you’ve located the stairway to the next level, figuring out the exits without a guide is really a pain. I don’t think casual fans will enjoy it much, but it’s definitely for the sickos that want to make their parties the best.
Other than the balance difficulties, which have fortunately been resolved here, the original tactics did have some drawbacks. It had strange anachronisms, such as Ramza, a character from a purportedly medieval era, shouting out “Geronimo!” (a reference to an Apache military leader from the early 20th century) as a war cry, and was terribly localized, with stilted dialogue that occasionally made the complex political landscape incomprehensible. Additionally, a lot of the character depth was concealed in either difficult-to-read menus or community guides, and the user interface was excessively convoluted and clumsy (as was the fashion at the time), making it difficult to understand a lot of important information.
The Ivalice Chronicles lacks all of the added content from the PSP edition of The War of the Lions, such as the multiplayer mode, new jobs, and playable characters. Although I didn’t particularly miss anything else from Final Fantasy XII, I did enjoy Balthier as a party member because it’s a cool connection across the Ivalice setting. Additionally, the original Tactics’ cameos from another Final Fantasy that I won’t spoil are still included, this time with voice acting, which is really awesome to hear. It’s wonderful to see the greatly enhanced translation, which is the only remnant of The War of the Lions that they have retained.
The revised graphics design, which is plainly much higher resolution while maintaining the original’s classic isometric look, is another instantly apparent enhancement. After some initial resistance, I really came to like this direction, even though I still long for a full HD-2D graphical update that looks like Octopath Traveler or Dragon Quest III. When I played it for myself, I saw that the texture of the screen had a texture similar to a canvas as your toy troops marched across the battlefield. At first view, especially when compressed by YouTube, it appeared to be a smoothing filter over an emulated retro game.
The original version of Final Fantasy Tactics is also included with The Ivalice Chronicles, if the new look is too radical for purists. However, you have to load into a completely different game (unlike Monkey Island or Halo: The Master Chief Collection, where you can switch between the two versions at will), and you are not even able to transfer save files between them. I can see the decision to stick with the classics, but be aware that doing so will also prevent you from enjoying the voice acting and other features that are the highlights of this upgraded version.
Although “quality-of-life improvements” aren’t typically the most exciting aspect of a review, The Ivalice Chronicles’ numerous improvements add up to considerably more than the sum of their individual parts. Numerous minor and major adjustments have smoothed out many rough spots and given the game a more contemporary feel. Your character’s class’s current Job Points, a crucial progression stat, a dynamic turn order list on the left side of the screen, and optional life bars and names that you can toggle on and off with a button are just a few of the essential details displayed in a completely redesigned interface that fits modern TVs.
Quick alternatives include loading a save directly from the pause menu, retrying a battle instantaneously, and retooling your party before going back in. To ensure you don’t walk straight into a spell, you can use the left trigger to scroll through each character’s actions to see exactly what spell the wizard is casting and where. If you haven’t committed to an action after picking up anything in that area, you can reset your movement. Additionally, you deploy your troops for battle on the map itself, rather than a liminal place that might or might not go as planned once the actual conflict starts.
You can even fast-forward, which is practically a must when reliving old RPGs from a contemporary perspective. We can’t stand games that waste our time nowadays, and it’s hard to argue that it’s a bad thing.
Verdict
I’ll be reaching for Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles the next time I return to play my all-time favorite video game. It has stood the test of time because to its amazing tale of intrigue and treachery as well as one of the most fulfilling role-playing game career systems available. Because it doesn’t contain all of the content from all versions (and doesn’t adequately address the original’s endgame inequities), this mostly by-the-book recreation can’t quite be referred to as a full or definitive edition, but sometimes less is more.
Final Fantasy Tactics is nearly entirely modernized by removing its flaws and highlighting its unique qualities through clever user interface changes, practical features, and superb new voice acting. Without defending the original’s 1990s creakiness, it let me realize why it was so great in the first place and gave me the confidence to suggest it to novices.
