We should appreciate modern updates to classic games, and FINAL FANTASY TACTICS – The Ivalice Chronicles is a good example. It’s a faithful recreation of the original that’s significantly improved by the addition of full voice acting, which greatly benefits the massive story. Importantly, Square Enix also included the original, untouched version of the game alongside the new one, giving all fans a choice of how they want to play.

The enhanced re-release of Final Fantasy Tactics successfully modernizes a classic tactical role-playing game (TRPG), offering a highly accessible experience for newcomers while providing a “Classic” mode for purists. The game’s complexity is well-documented within the game itself via the in-game chronicle, making it relatively simple to look up crucial information like recruiting secret characters such as Cloud from Final Fantasy 7, mastering hidden skills, and finding specific enemies to Poach for rare items.

Versions and Quality of Life Improvements

This release notably features two distinct versions: the Classic and the Enhanced version. The Classic version remains faithful to the original, with minimal changes like the addition of an Autosave feature and the updated War of the Lions English translation.

The Enhanced version, which is the main draw, contains the bulk of the updates. These include updated graphics, a revamped UI, better controller support, and dedicated keyboard support. Crucially, the entire script uses the War of the Lions translation and is now fully voiced. Additional quality of life features—such as the ability to speed up the game and the aforementioned autosaves—smooth out the gameplay flow, making it significantly more approachable than its original iteration.

Technical Performance and Difficulty

The game is run flawlessly on PC, a pleasant surprise for a rerelease of a decades-old title. The enhanced version introduces new difficulty settings: Easy (Squire), Normal (Knight), and Hard (Tactician). Normal mirrors the original game’s challenge. While the precise changes aren’t detailed in-game, difficulty seems primarily tied to increasing enemy damage. Importantly, players can freely change the difficulty at any time.

The game’s progression allows for extensive grinding, which can easily let a party outscale the main story. However, many random battles and certain story monsters scale with the player’s level. A welcome quality of life addition is the ability to flee random battles, allowing players to avoid unexpectedly difficult encounters caused by level-scaling.

Summary of The Story

The story is set in the land of Ivalice during its “Middle Ages,” shortly after the devastating 50-year war. The main conflict is narrated through a historical framing device, focusing on the untold story of the hero, Ramza Beoulve. Think of this as the bite-sized lore primer, covering the whole story. And since Ramza’s fate is already common knowledge, we won’t worry about spoiling the ending, right?

The story begins with Ramza, a disgraced noble turned mercenary, and his former friend Delita, a commoner, caught in the early stages of a brewing civil war—the War of the Lions.

Ramza, along with his mercenary group, initially aids Princess Ovelia, but she is soon kidnapped by Delita, who Ramza had thought dead for years. This shocking betrayal forces Ramza to reflect on their past. A year prior, they were best friends and cadets in the Northern Sky, but their lives were drastically changed by the Corpse Brigade’s uprising, a revolt of unpaid soldiers and peasants against the nobility.

The key turning point in their friendship and the inciting incident for the entire war stems from the tragic fate of Delita’s sister, Tietra. She is taken hostage by the Corpse Brigade, and despite a promise not to attack, Ramza’s brother, Zalbaag Beoulve, orders an assault on the fort where she is held. Zalbaag’s new soldier, the arrogant noble Argath Thadalfus, shoots and fatally wounds both Tietra and her captor. Witnessing his sister’s death at the hands of the nobility’s servants and his own comrades, Delita is shattered. He and Ramza kill Argath, but Tietra dies, and Delita is presumed killed in the subsequent explosion. Ramza then abandons his family and noble title to become a sellsword.

After Delita’s reappearance with Princess Ovelia, the plot rapidly escalates, revealing a deeper, more sinister conspiracy orchestrated by the Church of Glabados and its hidden Templar Knights, led by Cardinal Delacroix and Folmarv Tengille. They are manipulating the civil war—the War of the Lions—to seize power.

This plot involves the use of powerful, demonic artifacts known as Auracites (the Zodiac Stones) to summon Lucavi demons. Ramza, branded a heretic by the Church, becomes a fugitive. He acquires the Scriptures of Germonique, an ancient text that exposes the Church’s false history of its patron, Saint Ajora, linking the legend to the Lucavi.

Ramza spends the final chapters fighting the growing threat of the Lucavi, rescuing his kidnapped sister Alma, and attempting to expose the truth to his family and the world. He defeats several Lucavi, including the transformed forms of former allies and enemies like Wiegraf Folles, the Marquis Elmdore, and his own brothers, Dycedarg and a zombified Zalbaag. Meanwhile, Delita uses the war to his advantage, manipulating both the Northern and Southern Sky factions by exposing and murdering key leaders. He eventually becomes the supreme commander of the Southern Sky’s army, achieving his goal of ascending to power.

The final confrontation takes Ramza to the Necrohol of Mullonde, the Lucavi’s hidden base, where he defeats the ultimate demon, Ultima, the High Seraph, who had possessed his sister Alma. Ramza and Alma’s fate is left unknown, but their survival is later alluded to. However, Ramza’s heroic deeds remain hidden from history, and he is condemned as a heretic. The history of his achievements is preserved only in the Durai Papers, written by his ally Orran Durai, who is martyred for his work.

In the end, Delita, having achieved his political ambitions, is crowned King of Ivalice, but the cost of his rise is his soul and the life of his queen, Ovelia, whom he murders, leaving him with a hollow victory.

Levels, Jobs, and Gear

Progression involves four key elements: Levels, Jobs, Gear, and Recruits. These are the simple breakdowns:

Levels: Gained by performing successful actions in combat. Crucially, a character’s stat growth is determined by the Job they are in when they level up.

Jobs (JP): Job Points (JP) are earned alongside experience and are used to unlock skills within a specific Job. Mastering lower-tier Jobs unlocks higher-tier ones. Characters can equip abilities from their current Job, and one secondary set of abilities from any other mastered Job. Furthermore, they can select one Reaction, Support, and Movement ability from their entire learned pool, allowing for deep customization and “mix-and-match” builds.

Gear: Equipment options are heavily restricted by the character’s current Job and any equipped support abilities.

Recruits: New party members can be hired from the Warriors Guild or encountered as set characters. A key piece of advice is to keep the story character Mustadio alive and recruited, as he acts as the gatekeeper for triggering the side quests required to recruit all the secret characters, including Cloud.

Well, there are two missable abilities

Two powerful abilities are only learned by being hit by them in combat. Those are Ultima and Zodiac. Ultima is a spell that can only be learned by Ramza in his base job. And Zodiac is the secret final summon, learnable by any Summoner from the game’s superboss in the optional dungeon, Midlight’s Deep.

World Exploration and Side Activities

The world is traversed via the world map, moving between battlefields (potential random encounters) and settlements.

There are Outfitters, Taverns, and Poacher’s Den. Outfitters is a shops with location-specific gear, cataloged via the location list. Taverns is a place where players accept errands (passive side missions for unused party members) and pick up rumors/side quests. And the other is Poacher’s Den, a facility that processes poached monster carcasses into rare, unique items.

And for the end’s game activities, there is an optional, high-level dungeon. It is a series of dark, multi-level maps where players must fight enemies while simultaneously searching for the exit. It culminates in a fight against the superboss, who holds the secret Zodiac summon. After defeating him, the dungeon becomes a reliable spot for farming the best monsters for poaching.

Calendar System

A single day passes with every world map movement. While there is no strict timer, the calendar affects errand availability and dictates zodiac compatibility.

The Ivalician calendar uses the Zodiac signs as the names of its months. The current date is displayed on the world map, and one day passes every time the player moves between adjacent locations. Character birthdays determine their Zodiac sign, which in turn establishes their compatibility with other units in combat. A character’s age in years is listed in their Personae entry, allowing players to deduce the exact birthday by checking the entry daily.

Combat Mechanics and Depth

Combat is a turn-based, tactical affair. Turns are dictated by an initiative order, allowing each character one Move and one Action. These are simple breakdowns for Zodiac Signs, Bravery, and Faith.

• Zodiac Signs: A subtle, generally unnecessary mechanic for casual play. Compatibility between signs grants a modifier to both damage dealt/received (especially with spells) and percentage-based success rates (like stealing or healing). It only truly matters for min-maxing on the highest difficulty.

• Bravery (BRV): Affects certain special melee attacks and, most significantly, the chance of Reaction abilities triggering (e.g., Parry, Counter). Too low a BRV can cause a unit to abandon the party. If you want a hand in raising or lowering Bravery, in your own party or the enemy’s, then consider the following abilities: Shout (increases Bravery), Steel (increases Bravery) and Threaten (lowers Bravery).

• Faith (FTH): Directly increases a character’s Magic damage dealt but also the Magic damage received. High-Faith characters are powerful casters but are highly vulnerable to enemy magic.

There are also annoyance in combat mechanics. A major source of frustration is the risk of permanently losing or breaking equipment when facing enemies. This occurs because the Knights’ “Break” skills and the Thieves’ “Steal” skills allow them to permanently destroy or steal a character’s gear.

This loss is frustrating, especially for rare or unique items acquired through grinding or poaching, and often necessitates reloading a save.

Jobs and Unique Abilities

The Job System is the heart of combat, allowing for an incredibly diverse range of strategies. These are the summarize of Job or classes that have diverse and uniqe usability when you build them:

• Casting Delay: Most powerful actions have a cast time, measured in the initiative order. Players must account for the battlefield’s state when the action actually resolves. Targeting a Unit ensures the spell follows them, while targeting a Tile means the spell hits empty air if the unit moves.

• Arithmetician (Calculator): A potent endgame Job that bypasses cast time by setting up instantaneous attacks based on field conditions (Level, Elevation, etc., as a factor of 3, 4, 5, or Prime). A well-set up Arithmetician can annihilate entire battlefields instantly.
• Dragoon: Gains the powerful Jump ability, a delayed attack that is devastating but relies on the enemy staying in position until the Dragoon lands.
• Orator: Uses Speechcraft to permanently recruit human and monster enemies.
• Ninja: Innately uses Dual Wield (two weapons) and gains the Throw ability for ranged item attacks.
• Samurai: Uses Katanas for unique Spirit-based abilities.
• Beasts and Monsters: Can be recruited via Orator or Tame abilities. Chocobos can be mounted for massive movement bonuses. Some rare monsters, like those that drop the Ribbon (which grants immunity to all status effects), are only available through a breeding mechanic.

Conclusion and Final Verdict

Final Fantasy Tactics is hailed as one of the great TRPGs, and this enhanced version successfully brings it to a modern audience. The compelling story, the high degree of job customization, and the extensive quality of life features make it the most accessible way to experience the classic.

But it still leaves the room for the flaw.

Many players find the game’s permanent item loss mechanic to be extremely frustrating, and they criticize the Zodiac Sign/Calendar System for its complexity, arguing it’s too obscure to be useful to a typical player. Adding to these concerns, the game’s base edition is priced at $50 USD, which is widely considered a steep cost for a title originally from 1997.

Despite any perceived drawbacks, the sheer amount of work, including the inclusion of full voice acting and PC accessibility, makes this game worth recommending. We suggest purchasing it, particularly when its price inevitably drops during a sale.