Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles Review

It’s strange how memory works. You think you remember everything about a game, the shape of its maps, the faces of its characters, even the sting of its battles, but then a remake comes along and proves you didn’t really remember it at all, not the way you thought you did. Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles did that to me. I had spent years replaying the old versions: PS1, PSP, even that clumsy mobile port that made me squint at touch menus, and I thought I knew every inch of Ivalice. Turns out, I didn’t know what it felt like to see it again, this way, in 2025, rebuilt for modern eyes without losing the soul that made it the tactical gold standard in the first place.

You begin as always with Ramza Beoulve, the noble-born son who grows up questioning everything about his world, his family, and his place in a kingdom falling apart after the Fifty Years’ War. His friend Delita Heiral, the commoner raised alongside him, takes a different path, clawing his way upward through manipulation and brilliance until history remembers him as a hero. Except, as the game tells you right from the start, it was Ramza who truly fought for Ivalice’s salvation while Delita’s hands stayed spotless in the record books. This isn’t a fairytale about destiny; it’s a history lesson told by a future scholar who reveals how truth gets buried under power. Every time that old parchment-colored narration rolled across the screen, I got chills.

What makes this new version so arresting is how it’s performed. The voice acting brings humanity to what once was a wall of text and baroque phrasing. Nobles speak with refined grandeur, peasants spit their words through clenched teeth, mercenaries bark their lines with the exhaustion of people who’ve lived too long at war. Rapha’s story, which I once glossed over as a side chapter, broke through this time because her voice carries every tremor of grief and anger she’s endured. The English cast leans into restraint and gravity; the Japanese actors play every emotion at full flame. Switching between them, I found myself hearing the same story told through two different hearts.

But I’ll be honest, the narrative still takes a backseat the moment you enter battle. The strategy in Final Fantasy Tactics remains untouched in its brilliance. You drop into an isometric 3D map, small by modern standards, but dense with possibility, and immediately your mind starts ticking. Every tile, every slope, every wall can make or break you. Something is thrilling about positioning your archer on high ground, sending a white mage into cover, or calculating whether your knight can take a blow before your next turn comes around. The game still runs on that same methodical heartbeat: move, act, face, wait. You fight in squads of four or five against eight or ten enemies, but it feels intimate, personal. When one of your soldiers goes down, that three-turn countdown before they vanish forever still makes your stomach twist. Losing a veteran you’ve trained for hours is the kind of heartbreak that modern games rarely risk anymore.

And then there’s the job system, the real obsession at the core of the experience. Twenty jobs in total, each a sandbox for creativity and chaos. You start humble: Squire, Chemist, Knight, Archer. Then the branches open, and the experiments begin. A Dragoon who can leap across the map and strike from the heavens. A Monk who punches enemies through walls while dual-wielding fists learned from the Ninja class. An Arithmetician who turns math into magic, instantly casting devastating spells without consuming MP, annihilating everyone—friend and foe—if you’re reckless enough to miscalculate. It’s that freedom that makes Tactics ageless. You can bend it toward perfection or break it through curiosity.

The progression still runs on Job Points, earned through every single action you perform, not the battle’s outcome. You can grind endlessly or evolve organically. I found myself losing track of time on maps where I wasn’t chasing victory so much as watching my team evolve. There’s something hypnotic about that moment-to-moment growth, every little number feeding into a grand plan that only becomes clear hours later. It’s the kind of slow-burning satisfaction that most games today are too impatient to trust their players with.

And while the systems remain, the scaffolding around them has been rebuilt with real care. The interface is modern, elegant, and mercifully logical. On-screen, a turn order list sits neatly on the side, HP and MP bars are cleanly visible, Job Points update in real time, and you can toggle names and lifebars at will. You can preview an enemy’s upcoming spell and adjust before it lands, rewind movement if you haven’t acted, or retry a failed battle straight from the pause menu. I didn’t realize how much time the old version had been stealing from me until these options appeared. Even deployment feels smarter—you now place your soldiers on the actual battlefield, not in some abstract void that never quite matched the terrain.

The best part, though, is the new control you have over exploration. The redrawn world map lets you toggle random encounters on or off, a small detail that changes everything. Sometimes I’d disable them to savor the story uninterrupted; other times, I’d turn them on and grind out JP for a new spell I was desperate to unlock. The tutorials are a revelation compared to the old ones, which looked like spreadsheets from another era. Now they’re written in clear, conversational language, even explaining the famously confusing Zodiac compatibility chart in a way that finally makes sense.

And yes, Midlight’s Deep, that cursed, wonderful, pitch-black dungeon, returns. It’s still a labyrinth of frustration and glory, its stairways hidden on random tiles, its enemies crueler than anything in the main story. I spent hours fumbling in the dark, convinced I’d missed something obvious, but when I finally cleared a level, the rush of triumph was unlike anything else. It’s a gauntlet that rewards only the most meticulous tacticians – a challenge that feels handcrafted for people who can’t stop strategizing even when they’re supposed to sleep.

The visual overhaul walks an interesting line between preservation and reinvention. The isometric perspective stays true, but the textures are richer, the lighting warmer, and a tilt-shift blur adds a sense of scale that makes the battlefields feel like miniature works of art. During sunset fights, when gold light glows off armor and shadows stretch across the field, it looks stunning. Some of the character portraits don’t quite hold up; the edges can appear rough, like scanned art stretched a little too far, but in motion, the game has a painterly beauty that feels new without betraying its roots.

Audio-wise, the experience borders on perfection. Hitoshi Sakimoto’s score, with its regal horns and aching strings, sounds even more powerful through modern speakers. The orchestration swells with the same tragic grandeur that defined the original. I found myself humming the battle themes days after logging off. The sound effects have also been remastered—swords ring with more resonance, spells burst with texture, and the cries of the fallen cut deeper than before. It all feels alive in a way the old MIDI compositions could never manage.

There’s a certain irony in how The Ivalice Chronicles includes both this revitalized version and the untouched original, but you have to load them separately. There’s no instant swap like in The Master Chief Collection or Monkey Island. No save transfers, either. The one loss that still stings is the absence of The War of the Lions extras. No Onion Knight, no Dark Knight, no Balthier cameo from Final Fantasy XII, and no multiplayer. I do miss those, especially the thematic link that Balthier brought to the Ivalice shared universe, but their exclusion doesn’t break the experience. If anything, the focus on the core story and systems makes this version leaner and more deliberate.

After fifty hours, a handful of brutal restarts, and one too many close calls with permadeath, I ended up where I always do: in awe. Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is still the finest example of the tactical RPG form, rigid in its rules but limitless in its imagination. It’s a restoration rather than a reinvention, an act of devotion from developers who clearly understood what made this game sacred to so many of us. The Metascore hovering around 88 feels right; critics see what I see, a classic reborn with care.When the credits rolled, I didn’t rush to start something new. I lingered in the menus, scrolling through my roster one last time, checking the abilities I hadn’t mastered yet, the job trees I still wanted to explore. I realized that, in all my years of replaying Final Fantasy Tactics, I had never really stopped chasing perfection. The Ivalice Chronicles doesn’t make that chase easier; it makes it worthwhile again.