Last year when my family sold my grandparent’s house, I went through the basement and stumbled on a box of old, forgotten action figures. I used to put the figures in my grandma’s flower bed, turn on the hose, and pretend it was a flood. Seeing those figures again took me back to a very specific moment in my life, flooding me with memories of family, school, and my love of things like Final Fantasy.
Jumping into The Ivalice Chronicles is the closest I’ve ever been to that moment again — a sudden electric shock in my brain taking me back to playing the game with my brother on our old CRT television. I was enthralled by Final Fantasy Tactics, I ate it up like a five-star buffet. It was the game that quite literally launched a lifelong obsession with strategy games — and a timeless tale that I can remember almost perfectly today.
Returning to Ivalice was a surreal feeling like those action figures, but instead of a layer of dust, it’s been given a shiny new coat of paint, some oil, and brand new joints. After playing roughly an hour, I can already see The Ivalice Chronicles doesn’t just want to respect the legacy and impact of the original, but to make it a definitive version that can fully deliver on the design ethos behind the classic PlayStation RPG.
In my demo, I got hands-on time with the Enhanced version of The Ivalice Chronicles, playing through the game’s opening battle, as well as a pivotal story battle at Zirekile Falls. And the first thing that immediately jumped out was just how remarkably more intuitive every menu and interface element feels in this version.
There’s absolutely none of the slowdown that plagued every single version of the game when using intense spells or summons, and the entire UI has been rebuilt to offer more tactical info. For example, when you’re about to attack an enemy, you get an exceptionally detailed battle forecast that shows projected damage, dodge rate, defense, and more. This is complimented by a new turn order element on the left side of the screen that shows you all the upcoming turns, pretty much exactly like Final Fantasy 10. And I was able to notice a host of other little elements too.
There are dozens upon dozens of little tweaks and changes that add up to make Tactics feel far more intuitive and streamlined — but the core challenge and feel of the combat definitely remains intact. While it might sound trivial, this Enhanced version lets you cancel your character’s movement, addressing something that made the original game surprisingly punishing. This new feature helps if you misjudged the distance of your abilities (although you can’t rewind an entire turn).
Past those quality of life elements, the two major things I worried about with this remake have been pretty much entirely erased — those being the graphical style and voice acting. What’s genuinely incredible is that the Enhanced version of The Ivalice Chronicles looks exactly like I have the game in my memories, even though it’s technically not.
Because Square Enix lost the source code for the original, Final Fantasy Tactics had to be entirely rebuilt from the ground up. During a PAX West panel, director Kazutoyo Maehiro said the team used the original as reference, but what was really the key to making The Ivalice Chronicles, was the decades of archives that fans have painstakingly put together on the game’s development materials. Meahiro and much of the original team are working on this remaster, including art director Hiroshi Minagawa, and were able to piece together the game through their own knowledge and referring to the fan archives.
It’s remarkable how well they did. By combining character pixel art with highly detailed, almost diorama-like maps, Final Fantasy Tactics has always had a sort of storybook-esque aesthetic. It feels like The Ivalice Chronicles leans into that to an even larger degree. The stages have been given gorgeous, painterly strokes and strong colors, while the character models themselves have intricate animations and details, down to posture changes, hand signals, and more. These aspects were there in the original, but in The Ivalice Chronicles they feel more emphasized. The storybook feel is heightened even more by new art for the world map and towns, and there’s clearly new lighting to help strengthen scenes. If you want something that feels more in line with the original game there is Classic mode, but the visuals upgrades in Enhanced mode are so good that, personally, I think I prefer it.
Similarly, the new voice acting helps lend a new sense of gravitas to events, while still keeping the overall tone in line with the game’s medieval inspirations. Maehiro confirmed in an interview with Inverse that the Enhanced mode still uses the War of the Lions script as a base — and the voice acting does still have that slight Shakespearean twinge. But the performances, at last in my small demo, were pretty stellar across the board — on par with anything you’d hear in a mainline Final Fantasy game.
Final Fantasy Tactics is one of those games that has such a special place, both in my own personal life and in the grander scheme of video game history. It’s served as inspiration for countless games over the decades, and the story of oppression, freedom, and prejudice has just as much bearing on the modern world as it did in 1997. In that way, I’m glad this version feels like it can be approachable for all types of players, as Tactics’ story feels like an important message for this moment in time. I was already excited about The Ivalice Chronicles, but I’m now convinced it’s going to forever secure Tactics’ spot as one of the greatest RPGs ever made, period.
