Where has Final Fantasy Tactics been all my life?

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is the strategy RPG I have been waiting for. I’ve been a Final Fantasy girlie ever since I discovered Final Fantasy VIII on my brother’s PSX demo disk when I was a teenager. While I have loved, or found something to love, in every title since the original PlayStation era, this is my first time playing Tactics — a title widely considered among Final Fantasy diehards to be one of the franchise’s best. With this new remaster, I now understand why. In the game, you play as Ramza Beoulve, the idealist son of a noble house known for producing great leaders. Throughout the game, Ramza’s courage and ideals are tested as he struggles to do right by his people and his own heart. Final Fantasy Tactics has some of the most mature (if at times byzantine) storytelling I’ve seen in the series. It is a complicated tale of intrigue and political machinations, while also being a straightforward story about good versus evil and choosing to do the right thing in the face of overwhelming odds. My favorite kind of fantasy setting is where magic is spelled with a K and there’s an encyclopedia’s worth of proper nouns to learn in order to understand the plot. When I first started Tactics, a narrator started talking at me, explaining 50 years of backstory before I ever laid eyes on the main character. With the remake’s new fully voiced dialogue, I was awash in the manifold British accents using archaic, barely comprehensible turns of phrase straight out of a George R.R. Martin book. I love this shit. It should come as no surprise that Final Fantasy XII, with all its political drama, is my favorite in the franchise. That it shares the setting of Ivalice with Final Fantasy Tactics partly explains why I’ve enjoyed Tactics as much as I have. Do I have any idea what’s going on here? Barely. Am I still enjoying the story? Oh, absolutely. Image: Square Enix Author’s note: I regret to inform some of you that “Ivalice” is pronounced “ee-vah-lease,” with apologies to those who have always thought it was “eye-VAL-iss.” You were wrong. Though Tactics is new to me, its setting, story, and characters feel intimately familiar. In Final Fantasy XII, airships ruled the sky. In Tactics, they’re the defunct relics of an ancient past, creating a narrative thread linking past to present. With only 30 hours of playtime (this game is a long one, folks) I haven’t yet run into a location I recognize from XII. But I cheered aloud when I recruited Mustadio Bunansa because I’m very fond of one of his relatives, FFXII’s Ffamran “Balthier” Bunansa. At the end of the first chapter, when the Cardinal I turned to for help betrayed me, I gasped to see him transform into Cúchulainn — one of my least favorite bosses from XII. Playing Tactics feels as good as it does because it’s like meeting a good friend after a long time apart. They’re older and their face is different than you recall, but after a few moments together, you realize this is that same person you loved. Never been, never will be a min-maxer. Combat is the other reason Tactics is so good. It feels like the platonic ideal of a strategy game. Instead of party members being a designated class or “job,” you can make your units anything at any time, suited for any occasion. Once you assign a unit a particular job, you can further customize their loadout with a second set of action abilities from another job, a support ability, a reaction ability, and a movement ability. Tooling around with the numerous combinations the job system allows has been the highlight of my experience and where I’ve spent the most time. My healer Daimbert was crafted out of the abilities of four different classes. Not only can he heal with the potency of a white mage, he’ll never run out of mana and he can reliably and powerfully debuff enemies too. (Including bosses!!) It took hours of strategy, planning, and grinding to build him, and I enjoyed every single moment of it. Building a fun character is like weight training with your brain. Initially, I just assigned whatever character to whatever job and muddled along well enough. But in order to unlock the game’s true potential, I had to start considering things like individual character attributes and stat scaling, stuff I’ve never paid attention to in other RPGs. (Never been, never will be a min-maxer.) I even briefly considered starting all over, because when I was first assigning jobs on vibes, I had given the girl with the high physical attack power a magic-focused class. Rather than abandon her, though, I put in the work to make her better. She went from a geomancer dealing a pathetic amount of damage to a ninja / dragoon hybrid that is my hardest hitter behind Ramza. The hardest challenge in the game is dealing with the terrain and its varying elevation. Image: Square Enix When I’m hootin’ and hollerin’ at this game, it’s not because of the latest plot twist; it’s because I’ve unlocked a new class and am excited to see what new bullshit OP character I can cobble together. Tactics is “menus the game,” and you better have something else playing in the background, or not mind the musical stylings of Hitoshi Sakimoto, because that menu theme will become permanently lodged in your brain. Ask me how I know. The game does not lend itself well, though, to building out a big team of diverse jobs. Job progression comes through earning job points in combat, and they’re awarded pretty sparingly. When a job’s best ability costs 400–1,000 job points, and you only get 10–15 per action per fight, you’re looking at a lengthy stretch of grinding to get the abilities you want. Multiply that over the numerous characters you can recruit, and it’ll take a critically acclaimed MMORPG’s worth of time just to build up a solid team. I wanted to build a large, well-rounded group of fighters to choose from. Even with grinding out combat and errands — side missions where party members leave the group to level up a class on their own — my newer recruits were still too weak to participate in story fights. Rather than endlessly bounce between combat encounters on the same three battle maps to get them up to speed, I abandoned my goal in favor of focusing on a handful of high-performers. For the last couple of years, I’ve been itching to fill the strategy RPG-sized hole left behind by Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Fire Emblem Engage was everything but, the Advance Wars remakes couldn’t hold me. Triangle Strategy was fine but lacked any real narrative hook to keep me playing. But with this remake, my itch for some grid-based tactical action has finally been well and thoroughly scratched. Sometimes, it’s the old that can best satisfy a taste for something new. Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles launches on September 30th on PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, and PC.