Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chronicles Review

For new or returning players to Final Fantasy Tactics, The Ivalice Chronicles is the best way to experience one of the most surprising and epic tales ever spun out from the greater Final Fantasy series. Unlike the party-based antics of the core games, Tactics is instead about taking turns moving a handful of combatants across a square grid. They flex their various jobs (classes) while avoiding the permanency of death. Moving us one step closer to what will hopefully be a Tactics Advance remake, Square Enix has done an admirable job of making the 1997 classic more palatable for current audiences. Largely, it’s a success, with a story that should resonate particularly well with players who now have 2023’s medieval epic Final Fantasy XVI in the rearview.

Sole protagonist Ramza Beoulve, a highborn bastard caught between social strata, is given new life courtesy of The Ivalice Chronicle’s English and Japanese voice cast. Like Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, this is a very Game of Thrones, The Wars of the Roses-esque tale with a staggeringly high body count and little regard for the mortality of established characters. Because of this, the English cast from Ben Starr to Joe Pitts absolutely kills the loosely Middle-English script from start to finish, with every single line of dialogue in the game voiced. The fifty-plus years of in-game history and shifting dynamics of various nations very much flew over my head as a teenager, having to navigate the initially intimidating writing style.

I’m not used to seeing such grim topics getting a mention in a Final Fantasy

The drama infused by the voice actors inhabits the spirit of the writing enough to pull players through the murky waters of noble and socio-economic politics, chivalry, and warring inequities. In 2025, Final Fantasy fans owe it to themselves to see this story through. Beware, though, the themes are much more adult than is typical of the series, going to dark and distressing places that genuinely surprised (unnerved) me.

The Ivalice Chronicles’ visuals are very much faithful to the PlayStation One original and its subsequent War of the Lions redux that arrived a decade later. Ivalice remains explorable from the same simple overworld map, gradually filled with destination nodes. Moving Ramza between these will trigger optional random encounters along the way. Combat encounters are relatively intimate isometric stages that the player will rotate on an axis while moving little pawns that represent our heroes and their recruits. The dialogue cutscenes, not a wasted one among them, still take stage upon these well-presented isometric spaces. With the voice acting layered over the top, there is a renewed sense of theatre in these scenes. Overall, this is a visual remaster that honours the distinct and beloved art of Square’s tactical RPGs that endured from Tactics Ogre through to the subsequent Final Fantasy Tactics titles.

I switched to the Tactician difficulty, which felt on par with the standard difficulty of current contemporaries like Fire Emblem and King Arthur

What has seen a greater glow-up are the interfaces and presentation of Tactics, and sensibly so. Menus all have a trendy glossiness to them, which gives the game a desirable sheen that pops on a nice display. I spent 45 hours playing this on the living room setup, with no issues reading any of the loads of text throughout. There are also new menus for navigation, which will show the stock options of each town’s outfitter and what each place of interest offers without having to race across the world map to check. There is a lot of backloaded story and worldbuilding in this game, 50 years of it, and following in Final Fantasy XVI’s footsteps, the developers have sought to put in a comprehensive encyclopedia. There is so much information, both game and plot-specific, that having a well-written and organised base to house these references is a godsend. Because the game has no chat backlog, I would often have a quick flick through the encyclopedias to keep abreast of the story’s many moving parts. 

Interface glow-up

As someone who had previously played Tactics via its War of the Lions version on iPad, I had a few concerns about The Ivalice Chronicles. I remember getting less than a dozen hours into that older version before dropping it due to my growing perception of a steep, challenging grind and some control funkiness. Though repetitive battles and stomach-cramping difficulty remain integral to the experience, olive branches are now available. 

My favourite new gameplay addition to The Ivalice Chronicles is the freely switchable difficulty options. Having spent most of this review on the standard (Knight) difficulty option, I hit a wall just after the midway point, where I was spending more time grinding through random encounters and optimising my party. With each main mission completed, it seemed I would need to hit the random encounter treadmill to do it all again. One step forward, two steps back. God forbid you let a crucial unit die in battle; that could be hours of investment gone. Eventually, I switched to the Tactician difficulty, which felt on par with the standard difficulty of current contemporaries like Fire Emblem and King Arthur. 

A little more attention could have been given to the goings-on during combat. My biggest issue was how this game relays information during combat. I mentioned the terrific encyclopedia above. This will function as your de facto PlayStation One FFT game manual, covering all of the deep eccentricities of the many systems, such as the zodiac compatibility systems. Geminis and cancer and all that. Unfortunately, none of this vital reference material is available during combat (where it is needed). I had to physically copy down notes from the extensive resources available between combat and hope it was the relevant deep-cut information I needed to refer to. 

Third act Ramza sports a cute little red thong

This lack of reachable information gets more frustrating as the game goes on and introduces more layers without necessarily telling you. Enemies and characters with specific immunities or quirks that players will be forced to reckon with via trial and error. Much of the second half of the game’s main missions becomes a struggle of having no possible way of knowing how to compose your thin, situational five-person party. Oftentimes, restarting fights upwards of a dozen times to reconfigure my party and address a new wrinkle that one of the enemies just surprised me with in a later stage of a fight. There is a new autosave feature to rewind rounds in a battle, but with no naming convention on these autosaves to reflect the round or match progress, good luck seeing where these saves land you during a battle. 

What really caused me to crack the shits was when the controls would be taken away from me when a battle was going wobbly. An example I ran into a lot was enemy teams being able to manipulate my entire party within a turn or two of a fight via status effects such as confusion. Now my party is automatically behaving without my input, to their detriment. The kicker: the only time the player can access any of the menus, save reloads, and combat functions is specifically when a player can issue an order to their character. If a player cannot issue orders to their characters, for whatever reason, you must see the combat encounter play out until its inevitable defeat before you can save, load, restart, or do absolutely any deterministic input. This is only one example of the game not giving the player the agency expected of them in 2025, and there’s plenty more. 

There’s presumably some action hidden behind those trees

Other gameplay frustrations that haven’t been addressed are admittedly minor but still baffling. Terrain elevation is an issue that can impede the player’s ability to freely observe the battlegrounds. There’s no silhouetting or readable telegraphing to show when a character is obscured because there are simply a couple of vertical terrain blocks in front of them. Combat in populated locations is particularly bad, with buildings constantly blocking the player’s view. There is a new overhead, ‘strategic’ camera that immediately addresses this, but the player cannot issue any gameplay commands from this camera. It only serves to give a clue as to where everybody is positioned, before resetting to the isometric camera and having to blunder about trying to target hidden units and tiles.

Final Thoughts

Progress is hard fought in Final Fantasy Tactics, arguably the hardest of this isometric strategy sub-franchise. At the same time, it wastes none of the player’s attention, rewarding us with an incredibly un-Final Fantasy setting and characters. Its story is the biggest winner from this pseudo-remaster, with the professional voice cast offering their dramatic best. The themes hit so much harder this time around. Its main players are far more sincere and tragic for the emotion well voiced through the often overwhelming, but nevertheless compelling, writing.

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher

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