‘Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles’ Review

In the first battle of Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, Ramza, the youngest son of the noble Beoulve family, helps put down a band of former soldiers turned thieves, driven to desperation as their families starve and jobs vanish. At the end of the battle, Ramza says, “Honest work would see them die old in bed, yet they choose instead this early grave.” 

It’s a cold comment, drenched in personal superiority. In this moment, Ramza literally can’t grasp the idea of someone pushed to the brink, willing to do anything to simply survive — the poor must simply be making the wrong choices. It’s impossible to play Final Fantasy Tactics right now and not see stark, harrowing similarities to the state of modern America — especially in the face of a Fox News host saying the state should “just kill” homeless people who decline mental health assistance. It’s a similarly callous remark, informed by an astounding sense of privilege and ignorance. 

More than anything, that’s what makes Final Fantasy Tactics feel so important, even more prescient now than it was 28 years ago. It’s a game with a relentless message to impart, a scathing criticism of classism and social prejudice, all wrapped up in a fantastical world and story laced with political intrigue. 

Originally released on PlayStation in 1997, Final Fantasy Tactics is a spinoff of the main series that plays like a strategy game rather than a traditional RPG. Like most Final Fantasy titles, Tactics’ story is wholly disconnected from the rest of the franchise, but has many of the same elements, like magic spells called Fire, Blizzard, and Thunder, or the existence of the giant bipedal birds called Chocobos. But what’s most notable about Tactics is that it created the world of Ivalice, a setting the series has returned to in multiple separate games ever since, including Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (2003) and Final Fantasy XII (2006).

The Ivalice Chronicles is a built-from-the-ground-up remaster of the original Final Fantasy Tactics, modernizing the strategy-sim classic with a host of new features and story elements. It’s a stunning reappraisal that integrally improves nearly everything about the gameplay experience, but much more important is how the game doesn’t just retain that core message, it hones it to a deadly sheen. 

Final Fantasy Tactics was created and written by Yasumi Matsuno — the mind behind other titles like Ogre Battle, Final Fantasy XII, and Vagrant Story. Matsuno originally attended Hosei University in Japan for foreign policy, but dropped out and worked as an economic reporter before his move into video games. His life experience has seeped into his work, earning him a reputation for creating stories that are highly political and topical. Nowhere is that more clear than with Final Fantasy Tactics. 

Tactic’s grand story kicks off right after the end of a brutal conflict known as the Fifty Years’ War. This lengthy conflict decimated the economy of Ivalice, and in its wake, power-hungry lords have split the land into a feudal society. Ramza is a kind-hearted young man who’s grown up  sheltered due to his noble family. This idea is particularly demonstrated through Ramza’s relationship with his best friend, a commoner named Delita. As these two men experience tragedy and trauma, they inexplicably alter the fate of Ivalice and get wrapped up in a continent-spanning war and a history-altering conspiracy by the world’s major religion, The Church of Glabados.

One of the main messages of Tactics truly is the effects of privilege, and how even the most well-intentioned of us can simply be blind to the truth. But even past that, Tactics is directly about how the rich and powerful view the poor and weak as almost subhuman, practically delighting in the squalor and suffering normal people go through.

When The Ivalice Chronicles remaster was announced earlier in 2025, Matsuno put out a message on how the game’s story was originally inspired by the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy, and how it prompted an “era when many were robbed of hope, when dreams were measured by their price tag.” 

It’s genuinely chilling how much that single sentence hits home right now. The rich oligarchs get richer, corporations now play tremendous roles in our government, and America’s economy sags under the effect of the Trump administration’s tariffs — and that’s before you even mention ICE abducting people off the streets, or the rise of religious nationalism.

I’ve played the original Final Fantasy Tactics, in its entirety, nearly 10 times in my life, but playing through The Ivalice Chronicles, in the state of the current world, made it feel remarkably different. In Tactics, the Church weaponizes religion to whip people into a frenzy, stirring up conflict by demonizing entire groups. Deaths are used by the powerful as leverage, a way to increase their power and twist the narrative to their advantage. And, more than anything, the game explicitly lays out its class war, constantly forcing Ramza to reckon with his place in society, as those driven to homelessness and starvation refuse to even negotiate with him, no matter how well-intentioned it actually is. 

For everything Final Fantasy Tactics does well, narrative is the game’s crowning achievement, and the thing that’s kept it talked about for decades. Wisely, Square Enix kept that narrative exactly intact for The Ivalice Chronicles, and vitally didn’t defang any of its societal criticisms. To the contrary, it actually feels like this version of the game leans into those ideas even harder — fitting for how much more relevant the game feels. 

In The Ivalice Chronicles, there are two different play modes to choose from: Classic and Enhanced. The Classic version is the original game recreated in as exact a format as possible. On top of that, this version uses the script from Tactics’ PSP version, War of the Lions (2007) — which has generally been beloved by fans because of its almost Shakespearean slant. 

The Enhanced version has a cavalcade of changes, the biggest of which is a brand new script written by Matsuno himself, which the creator has said was to accommodate voice acting. And this new script is actually one of the most fascinating pieces of The Ivalice Chronicles. There’s still an overall old English tone that keeps Tactics’ unique personality alive, but a ton of the game’s lines have been rewritten to feel clearer. The best comparison for this new tone is probably a Game of Thrones-esque prestige drama. But the biggest surprise is how integral the voice acting changes things, for the better. 

There are some genuinely impressive performances across the board, on par with what Square Enix has done in recent brand new games like Final Fantasy XVI. Particular standouts are Joe Pitts as Ramza and Gregg Lowe as Delita, the dual protagonists of the game. These two actors add incredible depth to their characters, subtly changing inflection as you go through the different time skips of the story — genuinely giving a sense of the characters growing older, more cynical. 

One of the more interesting aspects of Tactics’ story is the sheer scope of its continent-spanning war. There are dozens of characters, factions, events, gods, and pieces of lore to remember. To that end, the Enhanced version adds an extensive new codex to brush up on all that, on top of a State of the Realm feature, exactly like the one used in Final Fantasy XVI. It’s a fantastic addition for Tactics in particular, really fitting the political intrigue, providing an opportunity to dive even deeper into the game’s already complex story. This version of Tactics also includes four “sound novels” that were in the original Japanese version, but cut from the English releases — with each of these giving a fascinating look at the history of Ivalice.

The other great addition in the Enhanced version is battle dialogue, which lets story-centric characters interject in the middle of battle, with brand-new, never-before-seen lines. This helps make the world and characters feel even richer, giving you some vital looks into the relationships between key characters — like fleshing out the begrudging respect the ruthless mercenary Gafgarion feels for Ramza. 

But that’s actually just the tip of the iceberg of what’s new in The Ivalice Chronicles, as there are some pretty comprehensive tweaks to combat, menus, jobs, and more. The grid-based strategy of Tactics was directly inspired by Matsuno’s work on the Ogre Battle series. Essentially, each battle lets you deploy five different units, and you can equip over a dozen different jobs on each unit, mixing and matching skills as you see fit, as well as weapons and armor. 

Pre-battle planning is every bit as important as making those crucial decisions on the battlefield, and that’s a huge part of why Tactics was so influential to the tactical RPG genre. The sheer amount of strategic options at your fingertips is staggering, and alongside Fire Emblem (Nintendo’s beloved strategy RPG series, started in 1990 on the Nintendo Entertainment System), Final Fantasy Tactics helped establish so many staples of the genre — from diverse character classes, to attack accuracy changing depending on the way characters are facing. And perhaps more importantly, the strategic battles only help reinforce the grand scale of Tactics’ story.

But Tactics started to show its age at some point, and that’s something Square Enix directly addresses with the Enhanced version. The entire game’s interface has been reworked and redesigned to make battle both smoother to play, and easier to read — and there are literally dozens upon dozens of little tweaks. A turn order chart on the side of the screen now lets you plan moves ahead, and have a better idea of the battle’s flow. In the original, you couldn’t undo a character’s move after you’d confirmed it, but that’s been changed here. And there are now three difficulty options that can be changed at any time. If you were worried this would make Tactics easier, don’t be — the hardest difficulty, Tactician, is every bit as challenging as the original PS1 game, if not more so. 

There’s certainly a case where purists may not like some, or all, of these changes. But in that regard, Square Enix was smart to still provide the original experience through the Classic version. 

While there are truly too many changes to list, the point is that almost every little tweak and alteration feels there for a reason and has clear thought behind it. All of these little additions pile upon each other to make The Ivalice Chronicles feel remarkably modern, without changing the core of the experience. In a weird way, there are so many changes to this game that it’d be easy to call it a “remake,” despite the story staying unchanged.

And that’s what makes The Ivalice Chronicles such an impressive update, a clear understanding of the importance of this game and story in both its historical and modern context. Everything in the Enhanced version is tuned to elevate Tactics’ story or smartly streamline your experience of getting through it. 

More than anything, The Ivalice Chronicles is a stark reminder of how video games can reach higher, how they’re uniquely positioned to reflect our own reality and place in the world. The most important thing about Tactics is how it was a product of its time — how this experience was uniquely molded by the life of its creators, and the society that it was conceived within. Art and entertainment, including video games, are never made in a vacuum.

But, more importantly, is the fact that Tactics‘ message feels more applicable to life in America than any other game this year. Tactics isn’t just a story to enjoy; it wants you to remember that resistance in the face of oppression isn’t just possible, but vital. That each and every one of us has a role to play in standing up against authoritarian powers that want to exploit our differences for their own gain. 

Those same people would convince us it’s impossible to imagine a better world — for everyone. Final Fantasy Tactics spits on that idea, and proudly declares that fighting inequality is, in fact, what society is supposed to do. 

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles launches on Sept. 30 for Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.