Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles [Review]

Drama and Swashbuckling in the land of the Lions

With a larger than life story and memorable characters, I've left Final Fantasy Tactics speechless because of its narrative. Such a dramatic tale, with intense and complex dialogues embellished by a fantastic worldbuilding, even if too heavy on the reading.

The mysterious and bombastic opening with grand musical score sets the tone to an epic adventure that is surprisingly self-contained and character driven. In the beginning, there's a bit too much of the “damsel in distress” trope to move the story forward, but as the second (of four) chapter starts, this trope is less felt and characters are allowed to grow.

FFT is one of those games that takes special care to make almost every relevant character memorable. The cast is always defying expectations, with betrayals and unexpected allies that not only give a new perspective on the conflict at hand, but also achieves some kind of gameplay driven narrative: I was rewarded with context and dialogue if the right character was in my party at the moment, and everyone felt engaged and connected to the story and Ramza's journey.

The arenas are interesting with their visual obstructions, fixed angles and different terrains. The way that some weapons interact with the altitude is fun, and most enemies felt as strong as my party, so the feeling of challenge was almost always present to me, on Knight difficulty and permadeath. One downside to the gameplay loop, though, is the grindy feel of progression: keeping up with enemies levels requires some grinding. And while the autoplay and fast-forward mechanics help on it, sometimes, it feels that the game plays itself too much.

Getting a new job or acquiring a new unit can also frustrate from time to time, since they require dedicated grind to unlock new abilities and become good. Maybe some level up items or more rewarding battles could fix this problem – but also it may be an issue exclusive to this remake, since mandatory random encounters were removed entirely, so I can imagine that in the original release (or the first remake on the PSP) the feeling of grinding was less felt.

Between having mandatory random encounters or the somewhat grindy moments that exist is in the Ivalice Chronicles, I definitely choose the latter. So an improvement, even if not by much.

The job system is very nice, though, and most of the jobs plays different from one another and being able to mix 2 different jobs at the same time made me create units on the specific way I wanted, and it is hard to stumble on a unit that “doesn't work”. Some enemies also had two different jobs as well, so battles can get kinda unpredictable by the end of the game, in a good way. The gearing system is amazing, with different builds instead of “the new one is better than the last one” on the third and fourth chapters.

While the battle system is crisp and works well, there aren't many diverse mission objectives other than “kill the leader”, “kill everyone” or the rare “protect one person”. A good thing, though, is the amount of places to battle, with so many maps and monsters, the objectives may be samey, but the environments aren't.

I'm a die hard fan of this game concept art and character designs overall, with gorgeous portraits and very nice hand-drawn pictures. In the beginning, I wasn't that fond of the “chibi” units, but they grew on me, mostly because of their unexpected expressions and mannerisms. The voice acting in English is fantastic (and oddly Shakespearean), with Ramza and Delita being the stars.

The story is simple but set in a complex world, and the narrative insists in contextualizing most of its events with long dialogues. The codex does a good job of keeping everything tidy, so it is easy to re-read something or rewatch a cutscene. I wish the game had a system-wide log functionality, though. As the story progress, some later writing starts to insist in out of nowhere teleportations so not everything is perfect, but the overall narrative is great, and the growth that the main characters and relevant others go through is worthwhile.

The game doesn't have that many side activities to be performed, but the ones that are here are very nice, even if there's no real reward to them other than the worldbuilding, like in the fun (but silent) hidden visual novel adventures that are scattered throughout Ivalice.

In the end, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles made it available for me to play a game that so many people love so much. Finally, it is accessible, with great visuals, good technical performance, amazing music and voice acting. Yes, it is a bit too grindy. Yes, everyone starts to teleport out of nowhere near the end. Still, it is good, and it feels great to say that the tale of the “Zodiac Brave” is finally being told again.

8.5/10