Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is set in the land of Ivalice, where players follow the adventures of Ramza Beoulve, a nobleman who abandoned his family and became a mercenary in the wake of a horrible tragedy that seemed to claim the life of his best friend Delita. Ramza is forced back into the spotlight of history when Delita reappears. Before long, Ramza is forced into a complex plot involving an underground organization that's seeking to manipulate the civil war that's been ravaging Ivalice. Ramza must learn the truth behind his friend's actions and the true cause of what would be eventually known as the War of the Lions.

The Ivalice Chronicles has a compelling plot that combines the fantasy and magic the franchise is known for with a more high-stakes political drama. Demons and monsters exist alongside oppression and class division, and the result is something that feels both grounded and fantastical. The Ivalice Chronicles has two versions of the story. One is the classic version that uses the War of the Lions script and translation, while the modern version uses a revised version of the script that uses the War of the Lions script as the basis but features a massive amount of new and adjusted dialogue. It is still the same game with the same story at heart.

There's a significant number of rewrites to the plot, but the changes are largely subtle. The main villains have had almost all of their dialogue redone. In the original games, a number of them were cackling, mindless bad guys, but in TIC, there is a greater attempt to provide the context for their behavior. This goes hand in hand with a significant increase in dialogue for everyone on the protagonist side. In the original game, anyone who joined Ramza's party functionally vanished from the plot, while in TIC, they continue to have major dialogue during the boss fights to convey information about the characters and their motivations and backstory. In particular, Agrias gets a lot more dialogue and now feels like a major character.

One character was served poorly by these changes: Delita. Whereas the original War of the Lions added some extra scenes and dialogue for the character, he's functionally identical in TIC to how he appears in the original Final Fantasy Tactics, which drastically stands out when everyone else around him has expanded, and this makes him feel like a bit player. There's also a small but significant change to the ending that I disliked, but that's more about personal preference, and it isn't enough to sour the experience.

In many ways, Final Fantasy Tactics is one of the most iconic strategy-RPG games on the market, and you've probably encountered a lot of its mechanics in games that came after it. It's a turn-based combat system where you and your enemies move around the battlefield, smacking one another until one side falls over. You can bring a small number of characters into battle — usually five at once — and there are rarely guest characters, so there are smaller skirmishes rather than big battles.

Perhaps the most distinct aspect of the combat system is how it functions using a Charge Time system. The battle's progress is measured by ticks, and every action you take costs a certain amount of charge time. More complex options take more time, while skipping your turn takes less time and means you get your next turn faster. Certain moves also require additional charge time between when they are used and when they go off. This includes things like magic spells, which require chanting time, and abilities like an archer's bow attack. Improper timing means your abilities can be interrupted or miss.

Final Fantasy Tactics features heavily customizable characters. Every character in the game can change to one of a variety of iconic Final Fantasy classes, each with their own skills and abilities. For example, knights are tanky and defensive classes that can break the equipment of their foes. Ninjas are fast and can throw items to damage enemies and use dual-wield swords. There are also potent classes like the arithmetician, a mage who uses mathematical calculations to target enemies and allies alike, based on specific formulas.

Each class is strong on their own but can also mix and match their skills, so every character can equip a skill set from another job — as well as passive and movement abilities. You can take one unit's ability to attack from a distance using geomancy and give it to your knight, and then you watch as they are suddenly able to fight near and far. You can invest in the Time Mage's ability to teleport so it's far easier to move on the map. There are also special "unique" jobs that are exclusive to the main plot characters, who have skills and abilities you can't get anywhere else. These replace the standard squire jobs.

Final Fantasy Tactics makes a number of balance changes both big and small, but the core mechanics feel fairly similar, and almost all of the extremely powerful combat strategies that worked in the original game continue to work. Various job requirements have been significantly changed, with some notably strong skills getting a massive increase. For example, the mainstay movement skill "teleport" went up to almost 3,000 job points, which changes it from a must-have to something you have to really invest in to get. There are also tweaks to make things easier for certain late game units. Final Fantasy VII cameo Cloud now begins with all the gear he needs and levels in Samurai and Geomancer, so you can hit the ground running if you want to use him.

The changes are going to be relatively minor to most people. The aforementioned teleport change is perhaps the most significant one in terms of how it will impact the gameplay, and that is simply because it adds more value to the other movement skills if you don't want to spend hours grinding. Final Fantasy Tactics is still a game where you can try to play it legitimately, or you can use the power of math magics and screaming loudly to shatter the game's difficulty curve. There are new harder difficulty options, but there's only so much you can do with some of the broken options available.

This isn't necessarily a negative. Final Fantasy Tactics is a game where you can approach fights as they come using the gear, items and characters available to you — or you can spend hours min-maxing to create the ultimate build and smash your way through the harder fights. That's one of its strengths. It's not a hard game, but it's a game that lets you play however you want. If you play without grinding up all of the strongest skills, the game becomes a lot spicier.

There is a little problem with The Ivalice Chronicles, and that is how the new dialogue all but demands that you only use the plot characters. This was already an issue, as some of the plot characters had insanely good personal jobs. As it stands, you should only deploy Agrias and Mustadio, or you'll miss out on some interesting dialogue and characterization. This is amplified when you recruit more characters. By the end, I felt like I only had room for the most plot-relevant characters, or I risked missing dialogue.

There are a number of smaller but significant mechanical changes. Random battles have been basically removed, so you can choose to fight or not fight. You can see the enemies you're facing before a map starts, and you can reconfigure and re-equip your characters based on the foes you're facing. You can also speed up battle animations, which is a blessing in situations where you're trying to grind up job points. There are also some new pieces of equipment, but they're pretty few and far between.

Sometimes, I don't think the developers went far enough. There are situations where I would've rather seen a significant adjustment to a fight or mechanic. For example, there's an infamous rooftop fight where an AI character can die before your characters can get an action, and there's a similarly infamous 1v1 fight against a powerful boss character. They are both functionally unchanged, aside from the latter allowing you to back out and grind instead of being potentially locked into it. They're two of the more memorable moments in the game, and I wouldn't have minded seeing improvements.

While the game offers both the remastered version and a classic version that doesn't contain the changes made to the original game, it does lack the additional classes from the War of the Lions game release. There's the disappointment of missing content, but the content is so late in the game and so limited in scope that there's not much to them except winning harder, and I didn't notice the absence.

The Ivalice Chronicles uses the same basic visual style as the original game, but it has a sort watercolor-like filter over everything to make it more closely resemble the animation of the game's few CG cut scenes. I'm a bit mixed on this, as I didn't like it at first, but it grew on me as time progressed. By the end, I found it to be perfectly fine (if not exceptional) as a visual upgrade. Some of the combat animations feel a tad jerky or laggy, but that is true in the game's original release as well. This is one area where the game could've been more smoothed out.

Of course, the music is excellent. Final Fantasy Tactics had one of the franchise's best soundtracks, and The Ivalice Chronicles captures that perfectly. The part of The Ivalice Chronicles I was most concerned about was the voice acting, but they knocked it out of the park. The bulk of the voice acting in Tactics is excellent, and it's clear they had strong voice direction that allowed the characters to fit into their roles and do so well. It elevated some of the characters to give them more personality in tone and voice in addition to the adjusted scripts. This is one of the cases where I think voice acting is a pure benefit to the game.

Overall, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is perhaps the best version of an already amazing game. All of its strengths are front and center, and any flaws were present in the original game, even if they're amplified in some cases. Even if you dislike the changes, the classic version is still makes it still an excellent way to experience the game, assuming you don't miss the War of the Lions bonus features. Final Fantasy Tactics remains a classic and a must-play for any fans of strategy RPGs or the Final Fantasy franchise.

Score: 9.0/10