As a young’n, in my late primary and high school days, Final Fantasy was everything. Spurned by a complete obsession with 1999’s Final Fantasy VIII, I sought out every possible taste of the series that I could. Remember Ehrgeiz? Because I sure do. Enter Final Fantasy Tactics, a game very much outside of my reckoning at that point in time but with that all-important name on the box that meant I had to play it.
We will, of course, gloss over the fact that the game was never released in PAL territories and that the bulk of my PS1 games were coming from a schoolwide black market of pirated software picked up on family trips to Bali.
Anyway, for all of us that ‘never got to play’ the original PS1 version of Final Fantasy Tactics back in the day, the good news is that an enhanced remaster of the game is just weeks away. Dubbed Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chronicles, it revamps the series’ pioneering TRPG spinoff with nicer visuals, improved interface and gameplay, and voiced dialogue for the first time. I recently was able to check out a very short hands-on.
This short taste of The Ivalice Chronicles certainly wasn’t enough to get reacquainted with its heady tale of warring territories, one that leans heavy on Final Fantasy’s penchant for neo-medieval settings underscored by magic and monsters. The addition of full voice acting seems to add nicely to the drama though, and the script now sits very closely to the superior translation from 2007’s PSP iteration of the game, Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, with just some slight grammatical tweaks to suit the flow of actual speech.
It’s been a hot minute since I’ve played the original Final Fantasy Tactics, so I’ll admit that I’d forgotten how simultaneously obtuse and overly simple battles and the battle UI were in comparison to modern TRPGs like the Fire Emblem and Disgaea series. Thankfully, The Ivalice Chronicles fixes a lot of that with a much nicer and more helpful interface making good use of the extra screen real estate and decades’ worth of learnings. Being able to see turn order at a glance, as well as a heap more information on ally and foe status and the plethora of tactical options at your disposal makes this a significantly more accommodating experience.
Given how much we’ve seen this tactical flavour of RPG grow in scale and scope over the years, Tactics’ battles do ring considerably…small. Taking place in cramped environments with few combatants, it’s a very harsh reminder of the game’s age, but there’s also a bit of comfort in it. My demo kicked off from the very beginning of the game, so I made liberal use of the new fast forward function to get through some achingly basic initial combats. To be fair, I did also forget that friendly fire was possible and had an amusing moment where I accidentally smacked an ally with a rock, but the connecting hit was enough to level up the acting party member – a feat which they verbally celebrated.
It’s really cool to see that the team behind The Ivalice Chronicles hasn’t looked solely at gameplay and UX as an avenue to increase accessibility, but also Final Fantasy Tactics’ often convoluted plot and world politics. Cribbing a standout feature from series sibling, Final Fantasy XVI, this new version adds an encyclopedic wealth of information to pore over at any time, including a State of the Realm screen that updates as events unfold to explain the past and present state of things as you go. I think, out of everything else, this is the additional feature I’m most excited about in this re-release.
It’s not something I’d picked up on in trailers or screenshots, but the visual treatment here is more than just high-res versions of the original pixel sprites and simple 3D backgrounds.
A number of added embellishments are at work to give the whole thing a lovely, almost organic vibe. There’s a really interesting screen effect at play that feels somewhere between a CRT filter and a paint canvas, for example, and some subtle but effective depth-of-field stuff going on in the various environments. I’d worried that the graphical touch-up in The Ivalice Chronicles was purely a case of softening and blending all the pixel detail into something vaguely easier on the eyes – because that’s how it looked in passing – but sitting down in front of it reveals that it’s actually quite tasteful and nice to look at.
[Top to bottom] PS1 (1998), PSP (2007), PS5 (2025)
There’s a whole other side to this redo, though, and that’s a completely separate and optional Classic Mode which marries the game’s visuals and gameplay as they were in 1998, with the same WotL-based translation. That makes this mode unique in its own right, given it’s the vanilla PS1 game updated with the dialogue from the PSP, but presumably not any of its additional content. I’m not really sure who this suits, and I didn’t bother to mess around with it during my preview, but it’s there for the curious.
All told, this seems like a genuine effort to revive a game that deserves its acclaimed status. All of the additions I’ve seen so far – from the subtle but artful visual update to the massively improved UX and adaptation of the War of the Lions translation – should hopefully add up to a great way to experience Final Fantasy Tactics again, or ‘for the first time.’
Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chronicles releases on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, Switch 2 and PC on September 30, 2025.
Previewed on PS5 at an event hosted by Square Enix
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