Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles review – a historical great re-written and retold
The story of Ramza Beoulve is presented to you as a historical accord – an account of a tale recorded by one historian and told to you by another. It’s subjective, an interpretation of loose facts collected by an archivist with a notable bias: to celebrate the achievements of your protagonist, a man whose influences and inspirations have been concealed by the church. As such, different readings of this story can proffer different results. Historical records are spotty at best, and even when written by the victor, choose to omit often-important facts.
Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles reviewDeveloper: Square EnixPublisher: Square EnixPlatform: Played on PS5Availability: Out 30th September on PC (Steam), PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2.
At least, that’s my head canon going into Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles. By framing the story as a tale told from the annals of history, Square Enix has accidentally given itself carte blanche to release this as many times as it wants – how many essays, romantic novelisations, TV shows, or films do we get interpreting historical events, year after year? It’s par for the course with classic texts, and Ramza’s tale is about as classic as it gets for video games.
That’s why I don’t mind some of the liberties The Ivalice Chronicles takes with the 1997 classic. If I wanted the untouched, warts-and-all version of the PlayStation game, I’d go and play the PlayStation game (or the classic version that’s shipped more-or-less intact as part of The Ivalice Chronicles, pixel art and all). But I don’t. I’m keen to see this reinterpretation of the text, hungry for a reappraisal of the Japanese foundation some 28 years later.
Mechanically, Final Fantasy Tactics remains timeless. It may not have been the first ‘proper’ Tactics-style game out there, but it remains one of the best. There’s a simplicity to it that sequels and other franchises don’t seem to understand, a Zen minimalism to the choice of units on offer and the actions they can take. Thanks to the quirks in the levelling system, you can completely break the game in the first four hours, if you want. Standing in a field and shouting and pelting stones at your mates for a few days, it turns out, gives you the strength to kill gods. But maybe that reflects the bond you form when travelling with your allies, bedding down in mountain passes with them, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in defiance of the state with brothers-in-arms?
Or maybe that’s just the narrative I like to project onto these things. But having small party sizes (typically five or six units), and a core cast of well-written, well-realised characters, these little stories come naturally. Ramza, destined to be a knight in both narrative and because of his stats, often holds the frontline for me, whilst a no-name mercenary I picked up in the first town is now a legendary ninja, stalking the backlines and picking off healers and archers before anyone knows he’s even there. You’ve got the cavalier Mustadio shooting weapons out of hands or hobbling units so that they cannot flee, as they watch in horror as my Summoner calls Bahamut down to decimate an entire legion in one bright, horrible Mega Flare.
