After a tense exchange at the end of the first season of The Sopranos, Uncle Junior tells Tony, “Next time you come in, you come in heavy or not at all.” These words echoed through my brain throughout my time with Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, a top-down remake of the 1997 PlayStation game set to be released Sept. 30. Even before you set foot on the battlefield, preparation is key, and every choice matters. Forget to bring a healer? Ignore the turn order? You will be punished and made to look like a fool. But soon it will be you doling out the punishments.
I’ve played enough strategy RPGs over the years to suspect that if you’re only able to choose three allies to accompany you onto the field, you’re probably in for an easy fight. Plonked into a fan-favorite, second-chapter showdown set on a bridge spanning a massive waterfall, I ogled the HD-2D dioramas and soaked in the soothing British accents, lulled into a false sense of security. Ivalice Chronicles also offers a “classic mode” for purists, which hews closer to the game’s original pixel-art style and 4:3 aspect ratio, but I can’t imagine wanting to switch away from the sleek, magical dioramas served up in each battle map. The modern visuals really nail that feeling of “how you want to remember it,” while the classic style serves up retro charm while retaining latter-day conveniences like autosave.
Unlike similar games in the subgenre, your allies can scale walls and ascend cliffs with relative ease here, which opens up all sorts of potential — and potential headaches — for your offensive and defensive strategies. You can rotate the map horizontally using R1, but when terrain blocks your view, a new feature lets you get a quick top-down snapshot of the map by pressing R2. You have to transition back to the 3D map to actually move, and there were moments where it took a bit more fiddling with the camera to reach my desired space than I’d like. (I recently finished Donkey Kong Bananza, which has a very freeform 3D camera and probably made me more nitpicky about this than I would normally be.) Using the D-pad instead of the analog stick helps in these moments, and the R2 snapshot option is a welcome addition.
It only took a couple of turns for me to remember that the enemies in Final Fantasy Tactics hit hard, and that the enemy A.I. is surprisingly savvy, mercilessly targeting my fluffier party members and exploiting the high ground as effectively as Obi-Wan Kenobi. On autopilot, I’d been fast-forwarding through enemy turns — another new quality-of-life perk added for Ivalice Chronicles — but instead of saving time, I was just expediting the process of getting my ass handed to me. It was time to slow down, and think through each member of my squad’s moves more deliberately. It was time to come heavy, as Uncle Junior would say.
Led by director Kazutoyo Maehiro, the team at Square Enix has added three difficulty options — Squire, Knight, and Tactician — for Ivalice Chronicles, which can be swapped between at any time. The middle-of-the-road Knight setting is slightly dialed back from the base difficulty of the 1997 game. (The first few battles have also undergone separate tweaking by the dev team to make them less daunting.) Knight difficulty offered plenty of challenge for me, though I can see the potential fun of Tactician mode and appreciate the freedom to swap to Squire in frustrating moments.
Final Fantasy Tactics includes all kinds of mechanics that will reward players willing to pay attention, experiment, and learn from their mistakes. For instance, both healing and harmful spells can be single-target or AOE (for one tile and its four adjacent spaces). That means you can accidentally heal your enemies and damage your allies. But the reverse also applies: You can use the time it takes to charge spells to position your party for bonus buffs, or lure more enemies into peril.
There are more of these double-sided coins everywhere you look. Enemies can level up during fights, but you can also recruit many of them to join your army. Baddies can break your weapons and armor, but you can do the same to them. If one of your allies is K.O.ed, you’ll have three turns to revive them with a spell or a Phoenix Down before they’re gone forever, often leaving a treasure chest behind. (Just make sure you grab those goodies before your enemies do!)
With each attack, your party members will earn both base experience and job experience, which allows you to unlock specific skills for their current class. While I was expecting a Fire Emblem-ish array of melee-focused swordsmen, cavalry, tanks, and axe wielders, Final Fantasy Tactics foregrounds unique support roles and magic users, like Time Mage, Orator, and Geomancer. Over time, you can train your units in multiple roles and combine their skills in unique and unexpected ways. I didn’t get to delve too deeply into the job system, but what I did see left me eager to experiment with all the potential combinations. There is a whole lot of tasty meat on this bone, and I came away from my hour with The Ivalice Chronicles even hungrier than when I started.
Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles releases Sept. 30 for Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.