Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.
In today’s climate RPGs are constantly under assail by parasitic dilettantes, solipsists, and voyeurs who perversely categorize games based solely on graphical fidelity, hyper-realistic art styles, and how relevant they can be made to fit into the 3×3 cube they call their own imaginations. Displaying their trophies like taxidermy and stalking their prey for sport with no consideration for the life or spirit of the thing, the genre has considerably stagnated and proliferated to the point of banality, with terminally online vocal-minorities pouring poison directly into the ears of developers and shareholders alike. The resulting indignant amalgamates are largely indistinguishable from one another, and like shooting fish in a barrel, only played nominally to carve another notch in player’s belts, and another platinum corpse to mount and let collect dust. Many western gamers have devolved into creative xenophobes, either actively or passively avoiding anything that breaks this mold, challenges their worldviews, their skillsets, or their critical-thinking skills (if any thread still lays bare). Tactical RPGs further still have found even fewer footholds in modern culture, outside of the embarrassingly jocular and ugly ‘Fire Emblem’, people can’t seem to be bothered with anything slow-paced, thoughtful, or beautiful.
But Final Fantasy Tactics, whether you’re playing one of it’s numerous past ports or the full-fledged remaster released this year, is different. Across all genres, across all types of gamers, writers, and developers, Tactics remains a deservedly beloved and adulated Tactical RPG and Final Fantasy spinoff that transcends those boundaries. Uniting many diffuse points of view, age ranges, and genres of choice – Tactics is a truly generational experience. One with more heart, nuance, and subtlety than anything either inspired or emulated by its spirit or otherwise.
Yasumi Matsuno’s ‘Ivalice’, the setting for Final Fantasy Tactics, Final Fantasy XII, and Vagrant Story – feels like one of the most bespoken and authentic representations of a high fantasy world – inspired both by real-world medieval and renaissance-era Europe AND the fantastical representations and parables in works like Shakespeare’s Richard III, King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and of course (especially true for Tactics) Biblical allegories and apocrphya. Matsuno isn’t and has never been shy of his inspirations, the man is absolutely obsessed with the English and Asian middle-ages, the renaissance, and the epic poems and stories that have proliferated our culture for centuries. It’s truly one of the most unique and engaging original worlds from Final Fantasy’s retinue, featuring many different races, creation myths, eras of it’s history, and languages – host to some of the most extensive and impressive localizations for any game series in the last 30 or so years. Matsuno often focuses on the duality of human nature, the capricious nature of man – and those who will do aught for gain, and those who pursue gain for naught. He teases out these complexities in agonizing detail and juxtaposition with his characters, breathing life into their stories, their triumphs, and their tragedies like the bards of old – and it is equal parts mystifying and enthralling for a man to so effortlessly bring such a world to life.
This review is based both on the Playstation original title released in 1998 and the HD remaster released for multiple platforms in 2025.
Narrative Design
Story, Themes, and Conflicts
This era of Ivalice is based heavily around the real-world War of the Roses, and echoes it’s main conflict – two houses Larg and Goltanna (Lancaster and York), vying for control of the throne of Ivalice (England), even down to the child royalty caught in the webs of their families bloodlust and scheming like Ovelia (Edward V) and the fabled Princes of the Towers (perhaps Orinas and Ovelia both). However unlike Shakespeare’s Richard III (a highly dramatized retelling of the War of the Roses from which Matsuno also draws inspiration) Tactics doesn’t focus primarily on the nobility or Kings and Queens-to be, instead choosing to frame it’s narrative mostly around the common people – us. Those who have been and forever will be the lighter crafts caught in the lists of the galleons. As Kings and Queens (or Presidents and Prime Ministers) callously hedge their bets with the blood of the countrymen that guild the very silver spoons they sup with, that give them the very power and wealth they use to tantalize and control us with. We watch as our spiritual dead ringers fight against these invisible currents – whether agonizing for an idealistic perception of justice or freedom, or to conspire from the oppression of their birth to become the oppressor, these fictional cousins of ours guide us through the inferno of their personal hells – step by agonizing step.
It’s difficult to call anyone a true protagonist or antagonist in Tactics, but Ramza Beoulve and Delita Hieral are our closest like. In Ivalice’s published, government-sanctioned-history, Delita is painted as a Saint and a paragon – the medieval world’s first self-made man, who rose up from obscurity and low birth to become the ruler of Ivalice post War of the Lions. And this was Delita’s ultimate goal – to prove Dycedarg Beoulve, Argath Thadolfus, and all of Ivalice wrong – that birth does not determine a man’s worth. In order to drive home how important this is – how ingrained in Ivalice their caste system was, Ramza and Delita are poised as equals in each other’s eyes in the prologue of the game. To them, and to Barbaneth – Ramza’s idealistic father, they are both just men. Ramza is only half high-born, and because Delita is his best friend and they see one another as equals, in a way Delita is as well. He doesn’t have the Beoulve name – but he has the Beoulve nature – that is, a sense of justice, social altruism, and idealism. However Delita isn’t as naive as Ramza is in the beginning. Delita sees how Dycedarg and Zalbaag treat him and his sister Tietra when Barbaneth and Ramza aren’t looking. And he knows how Ivalice at large treats him and his sister in comparison to how they treat the Beoluves. It isn’t until Tietra’s death at the hands of Zalbaag, Dycedarg, and Argath’s callous disregard for her low-born life (and Ramza’s passive naivety) that Delita fully sees the depth of the rift between himself and Ramza, and between Ivalice’s perception of the caste system – that just being born (much like original sin) decides the worth and projection of a man’s life. It is at this critical junction, that Delita and Ramza’s lives and motivations truly blossom. I said that Delita’s ultimate goal was to prove that birth does not determine a man’s worth – and this is still true. But from a psychological perception, and a truly great representation of how Matsuno weaves the delicate capriciousness of man’s mind and actions together, Delita’s motivations throughout the game center around Tietra. Delita makes of Ovelia – herself being a lowborn wretch who is only a turnkey in the greater machinations of those around her, a new Tietra. He raises Ovelia up to be the Queen of Ivalice, as he couldn’t do for Tietra, and in recompense to Tietra’s memory. His relationship with Ovelia is portrayed as platonic in many ways, nominal, and a means to an end – he doesn’t molest her, he doesn’t romance her, he keeps her as an ideal, and like so much of the bird-in-a-cage imagery around Ovelia, keeps her on a pedestal – the same one where he kept Tietra. But in the end, Delita still uses Ovelia. As anyone who wants power must use others – even if that power is a symbol, even if that power is a true good, somewhere in the cosmic push and pull of the universe, someone is taken advantage of. And this is a move of force that triggers a move in kind – and Delita dies, alone, tormented, angry with his own childlike helplessness and humanity, at the hands of the sister he protected and raised up from nothing, his hands likewise bloodied with hers. Delita acts as something of an antagonistic force throughout the game, in stark contrast to Ramza’s idealism. But just as villains are the only ones who move society forward, Delita wades through Ivalice’s filth to attain a betterment for mankind – a betterment for all of Ivalice, regardless of the enemies or friends he must fell in its pursuit. And this humanity-centered idealism, that low or high born, gentry or nobility, we all of us should have a say in how our world is governed and that we should all have a chance to pursue happiness and greatness, is starkly Cromwellian – events that took place in the real world some hundred or so years after the Tudor Wars. Matsuno loves a Cromwellian villlain – a man who has humanitarian objectives who conversely uses starkly inhumane methods to obtain such an ideal. Vayne Solidor and Dydedarg Beoulve are not just kratocrats, they are literal reflections of the contradictions of power and peace, and how one can not be obtained without the other. Villains are Heroes are both morally grey in Matsuno’s work, as they often art in life – in a genre (and often times artform) full of hyperbolic black and white thinking, Matsuno’s characters have an intriguing degree of verisimilitude to their thoughts and actions that help give them an authenticity not often found among it’s peers.
As Delita scales Ivalice’s steeples to raise up it’s lowborn and place his sister on the throne, Ramza dredge’s Ivalice’s undercurrent in pursuit of the more insidious, if not obviously fantastical, threat to life facing them all. Just as with Delita, the projection of Ramza’s life truly begins with Tietra’s death at Ziekden. Despite Argath’s transparent vitriol in exposing the way the Ivalice’s caste system and nobility views birth, and his brothers thinly-veiled promises to ensure Tietra’s safety, Ramza insists to himself just as much as Delita, that the Beoulves are different – that Delita and Tietra are just as much Beoulves as he is. Ramza’s idealism and naïveté can feel frustrating at times during the prologue, when constantly confronted with the reality of the world they live in, Ramza is quick to hold fast to his knighthood – the pride of which was both instilled into him by his far more knightly (than his brothers) father Barbaneth and carried on spiritually by Ramza after his death. His idealism is his fathers, and what made the Beoulve name what it is, that is – the proudest Knightly order in Ivalice. Barbaneth was equal parts warrior and philanthropist, an ideal Knight who is meant to be the embodiment of the Penecostal Oath from Sir Thomas Malory’s ‘The Death of Arthur’ where Arthur charges every Knight of the Round to uphold a set of altruistic ideals – never to murder, commit treason, be rageful or spiteful, and to always help those who deserve mercy, upon pain of death and forfeiture of their honor. Matsuno’s ideals of ‘Knighthood’ live in Barbaneth, Ramza, and Orlandeau – and are treated as solemn vows. Throughout his journey – Ramza doesn’t cast aside these ideals, in fact – he holds to them faster with every passing day. However, more importantly – what he learns is that men cannot live on valor alone. Honor and pride are something that people who are born lower than him are not afforded the luxury to uphold or pursue. And that even those who are afforded the luxury, often times sacrifice in pursuit of power and control. Ramza’s journey of self-discovery is about opening his eyes to the world and how it really works, and how he as Barbaneth’s legacy of a true knight gallant – must sacrifice and pursue the ideals of honor and chivalry so that one day, others may take up his example and do the same. Tietra’s death weighs heavy on Ramza for the entire narrative, pushing him to atone for his single-minded naivety and to work against the cycle of power and control in Ivalice that makes new Tietra for slaughter every day. Ramza willingly alienates himself from his brothers, so that he can infiltrate and experience the machinations of the higher-born first hand, relieve himself of his narrow-mindedness, and find a path forward for himself to make true change occur and forsake the allure of power. Delita and Ramza in many ways trade places – Ramza forsakes his name and his birth to become one of the unseen, one of the faceless millions that make up the world just like us, to strive to make change everyday in the lives of the people who really matter, living on his ideals and pursuing the freedom in that. Delita, in turn, does everything he can to rise through the hierarchy and attain the power the likes of which little few of us any will see – the power to shift the masses and mold the world, at the sacrifice of morality, ethics, and the self.
So that that cycle doesn’t continue to infect Ivalice and it’s people, Ramza must cauterize the wound at its unseen source, just as Delita works at the seen. In this, Ramza pursues the silvery thread of the Church of Glabados, Ivalice’s parallel to christianity and some elements of the Church of England. The Church is actively influencing the reign of Ivalice, just as the real-world Church of England. By pitting the two dukes Larg and Goltanna against one another, the Church is diminishing the loyalty to the crown, exacerbating social and economic conditions by prolonging war, and reigniting the faith of the church by actively reenacting the story of the Zodiac Braves. A legend passed down throughout Ivalice, it tells the story of a King summoning a demon to try and unite the Ivalice under one banner, losing control of the demon, and twelve brave knights appearing and driving back the demon, using stones etched with the Zodiac signs. This legend combines three myths, that is – the real-world myth of the great Judge-King Solomon and his demon-summoning signet, the story of Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and of course – Final Fantasy, and the heroes who crossed time and appeared, each with a stone in-hand. Based quite heavily on the life and death of our real-world Christ, In Ivalice, the myth has been coopted by the Church of Glabados to inspire fear and faith in its teachings, as its canon Saint Ajora (Jesus Christ) – was once one of the twelve braves who drove back the King’s demon. And his death, at the hand of his Pharist (Pharisees) detractors, brought calamity to Ivalice and sunk the Holy Ydoran Empire (Roman Empire) in a single night. However, Matsuno twists this myth and merges his Christ and Satan in one body – Ajora’s miracles and prophecies were in actuality the work of the Lucavi demon Ultima – who created a pact with Ajora through one of the Zodiac stones. Ajora and Ultima have merged, and after his execution by the Ydoran Empire, has worked with the rest of his Lucavi followers to resurrect himself and his followers through new human thralls and run rampant throughout the world of man. The goals of the Lucavi are not quite clear – aside from sowing chaos and resurrecting their leader. The Lucavi and the power of the auracite stones are drawn to man’s base desires – their lust and love. Just like the very nature of power itself, the stones represent the potential of power – that it is the person who wields it that determines its true form and nature. Those that lust for power are in turn merged with the soul of a Lucavi, their personalities fighting for control of a single flesh vessel, until the mind submits or merges. Those that think and act selflessly, for love or for hope, can enact miracles. People will often misread a lot of Matsuno’s work as supportive of war or those morally grey autocrats that callously wield power in pursuit of peace. But it is quite clear, the way that Matsuno positions the malleable nature of power – that the potential for using it to help the powerless, enact miracles, and bring people together in earnest conversation and debate, that he neither supports or condones the actions of his villains, but wants the player to truly engage and critically think about they way they view power – and the real-world effects their choices and support for individuals can have on people that you may never meet – but who are just as human and who’s lives are just as valuable as yours are.
Ramza uncovers the ‘Scripts of Germonique’ (Ajora’s Judas), that expose Ajora’s miracles as deceit, and incurs the pursuit of the Church and it’s Confessors as a ‘Heretic’. Someone who is actively degrading Glabados’ authority over Ivalice and spreading malicious counter-propaganda against their ideals. Ramza is further alienated from what remains of his family, as Zalbaag is a Knight Devout for Glabados, and Dycedarg himself eventually succumbs to the call of the stones. He is in-turn pursued by the Knights Templar, Glabados’ protectorate knights who are themselves host to the Lucavi, and actively working against the human pope to find a perfect vessel for Ajora and Ultima to resurrect through. Ramza meets countless people who are at the mercy of the tides of Ivalice and it’s power struggle, and does whatever he can to intervene and offer them aid in whatever way he can. Ramza both lives up to and embodies the ideals of chivalry, to never need a real reason to help people, and to purse the idealism of altruism, and self-sacrifice. He’s a beautifully written and flawed character that is as sympathetic as he is frustrating. Any lesser man would have succumbed to wealth, to power, to persuasion, to hedonism – but Ramza is written as a true knight. A true paragon of selflessness and righteousness, and mirrored with the immorality and cutthroat nature of the true world that both he and we as the players live in, and in the end, he becomes what he embodies – and what the knights and heroes of eld are – a legend. An ideal. Something to try and emulate, even if we stumble along the way.
Character Design
Design, Development, and Dialogue
Akihiko Yoshida, who I will loudly and consistently sing his praises every chance I can think of, heads the concept and character design of Tactics. He is a perfect pair with Matsuno’s work, pulling most of his influence from Netherlandish Renaissance masters like Bruegel. His work on Tactics is legendary, his character designs are simplistic but match their overworld sprites perfectly, giving a great sense of cohesion between the character portraits and sprites. They all look like little woodcuts, plucked straight out of reniassance-era Germany. The Ivalice Chronicles really shows off his work, displaying his full artwork for Jobs and Items in the various menus to great effect.
As strong as Tactic’s main cast is, it’s supporting cast is just as engaging and interesting. Alma is a particular standout. She embodies the post-renaissance era, an era marked with stagnation over women’s rights, marked by oppressive, patriarchal, and domestic attitudes towards women and their lives. Alma finds some autonomy through her spirituality, pursuing education and free thought while under the Monastery’s roof, and generally removed from the turmoil of Ivalice. She’s an important character – she helps Ramza realize that he isn’t alone, and that his single-minded determination to uphold his Knight’s values are just and honorable. There’s a dynamism played with in the narrative over Alma and her gender – she mentions several times that she feels helpless as a woman, that the era she finds herself in is unkind and full of common cruelties not just to the low-born, but to anyone born different or of the opposite gender. Interesting too is the foreshadowing here that she becomes so central to the Lucavi’s plot to resurrect their leader. Alma is a woman, but Ajora was a man, Ultima refers to herself as ‘she’. In many depictions Satan is illustrated as a beautiful androgynous hermaphrodite, and it’s interesting that Matsuno touches on the gender disparity between men and women here, making the Lucavi Leader’s ultimate form a truly ambivalent one. It would be speculation on my part, but it seems that Ultima might prefer the body of men as a host, and while Hashmal/Folmarv declare Alma to be the perfect vessel for Ultima, it isn’t until Hashmal makes a blood sacrifice of himself that Ultima descends, and then seemingly rejects Alma’s physical body.
I mentioned Dycedarg in passing before, but he is another somewhat compelling member of the cast that deserves some exposition. I don’t find Dycedarg as compelling as say Vayne Solidor from Final Fantasy XII, but they share a remarkable amount of similarities between them. Dycedarg is obsessed with power, and his house’s name – not in that it is a Knightly Order built on Justice, but that it has influence, prestige, and moderate wealth. Dycedarg like Vayne is a skilled confabulator and prestidigitator. Both are father-slayers, and assuage any guilt they might have with the word ‘necessity’, necessity to cut away the weak, and to do what must be done to thrive and survive. They also claim to ‘dirty their hands’ so that their families’ (what remains of them) may remain clean. It’s a strange sort of martyrdom they display, equal parts kratocrats and demiurges that justify every action and every subterfuge with flattery and circumlocution. They’re at heart narcissists and sociopaths, who have built a romantic perception of their own actions and how they might effect others – “I didn’t hit you, you were standing in the way of my hand”. Vayne in some way is somewhat more sympathetic, mainly in that his actions feel more mystifying and grandiose, as if he truly feels that what he’s doing will benefit mankind – more like Delita. Dycedarg is a heartless, pitiless, sort of character – he never betrays an ounce of sympathy for his family, or the ethics and morals of the world or those around him. He single-mindedly marches his house to destruction, and has assured himself that his every action is in service of himself and what he perceives his name to mean.
Wiegraf is also worth mentioning, in that he shares many of Ramza’s ideals about treaty-tables and raising himself above the base conceits and scheming of the high-born like Dycedarg. Wiegraf genuinely wants to meet eye-to-eye with the nobility and make advancements for the low born and those who have been betrayed and abandoned after the end of the war. He combines Ramza and Delita’s narrative evolutions in that after the death of his sister Milleuda, he realizes that his idealism is nothing without power, and spends the rest of the narrative pursuing the Church and the Templar’s ends, himself becoming thralled with the Lucavi Belias.
There is some interesting and sometimes tedious back and forth about the dialogue in Tactics. In Japanese, the Ivalice games are written in plain Japanese. No accents (outside of regional affectations of modern-day Japan), no archaic vocabulary, no prose, nothing. Matsuno and the Japanese fanbase are widely outspoken about the English localization, and how in general, superior it is to the Japanese. In general, Japanese games are written with anachronistic dialogue. That is, even narratives with settings that take place during or inspired by real-world eras, are always written to reflect modern tonality and vocabulary. It’s strange, but considering how insular Japan and it’s culture is, not exactly surprising – it’s likely an effort by publishers to not offend and appeal to as many people as possible, not risking out-of-ordinary time periods or prose alienating a consumer base. However even then, Matsuno still writes his characters, scenarios, and locations based on real-world English, German, and French renaissance stories, poems, religions, and ideas. When localized, great care is taken to take the plain Japanese dialogue and embellish it to create a unique Ivalice-specific dialogue and vocabulary, a sort of smattering of Jacobean, Victorian, and Anglo-Saxon vocabulary and grammar that creates a fantastic immersion into the world of Ivalice, and a unique dialogue that differentiates it from it’s real-world eras. Thematically, it’s a beautiful revolution of Matsuno’s influences and basis for Ivalice becoming fully fleshed-out with synchronistic dialogue that truly elevates the work into something greater than the sum of its parts. It’s truly beautiful localization work, fully realized in the English localization for Final Fantasy XII. Extra care and nuance is taken to fully complete the world of Ivalice, down to using iambic pentameter for the Lucavi’s dialogue patterns. And yet, there’s a vocal minority of people that seethe at the localization work. That petulantly stamp their feet and insist that the localization work ‘butchers’ the plain Japanese, as if anachronism is a feature instead of a flaw. If you’re using a work to learn Japanese, or to receive a unique window into how the Japanese speak to one another – there’s a million other translation and culture resources to use besides a narrative world based on Shakespeare and English history – and it’s frankly bizarre and out-of-touch to insist it remain that way even when it’s very roots are themselves English. Names like Wiegraf and Beoulve are literally pulled from works like Beowulf – and should be represented as such and given care to match some of the prose and dialogue they are pulled from. Matsuno is of course Japanese and has a unique view of these English works, but ‘Japan’ and ‘Japanese; culture is not the driving force behind Tactics narrative, and insisting a sub-par Japanese dialogue development choice be carried over to English is one of the most anti-art sentiments I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading.
Gameplay
Influence, Mechanics, and UI/UX
Tactics, unlike it’s cousin game Final Fantasy VII that released in the same year, lacks a large lineage in game form – instead as I’ve mentioned, taking the bulk of it’s inspiration from real-world history, biblical parables, plays, and epic poems of the Jacobean era and renaissance. However it would be remiss of me not to mention it’s (in many ways) spiritual progenitor series ‘Tactics Ogre’. Before Matsuno began work with Square, he developed a similar narrative and tonal structure with the Tactics Ogre series, featuring much more exaggerated and fantastical high-fantasy creation myths, Matsuno grounded many of it’s elements with the character-focused exposition that Tactics eventually became known for. It features a quarter-view isometric view field directly inspired from the puzzle game ‘Solstice’. It took a while for Tactics Ogre to take hold in North America, and to this day isn’t well known or regarded, but has always been well celebrated in Japan, and at least spiritually in the West through Tactics.
Tactics features a streamlined and simplified version of Tactics Ogre’s turn-based strategy gameplay, married with the class or ‘Job’ system from Final Fantasy V. There’s a great variety of jobs, many of which harken back to the Final Fantasy series’ roots – like the Arithmetician expanding upon the Level-based enemy and Blue Magic spells from Final Fantasy V, and including fan-favorite classes like Black Mage, White Mage, Time Mage, Ninja, and Samurai – all with passive and active abilities pulled from the Job’s various appearances across the series. There’s a great deal of variety and player-choice with your units, whether you decide to fully bespoke generics with careful job application and Orator manipulation, rely on Character Units’ high strength and utility like Orlandeau and Mustadio, or run a full team of (staggeringly powerful) beasts. Battles are tense, high-stakes, affairs that are meant to be mulled over and strategized to maximize enemy damage and minimize casualties. Battles play out like on a stage, with characters trading barbs, exposing secrets, and raking one another’s ideals and perceptions over the coals with excruciating wordplay. It’s a true evolution of the stage-like battles from Final Fantasy V and VI, and keeps the battles engaging and fresh, even when the enemy turns take a while to complete. Tactics is a shorter experience, but it is just as sweet playing it the 10th time as it playing it the first time.
Worth mentioning is the charming ‘errands’ system that allows players to send units off on little quests for a few in-game days to bring back storied and vaunted treasures and stories. The majority of the locations and rewards from these errands are references and allusions to other entries from the Final Fantasy series. Lugae and Calcabrina are both bosses from Final Fantasy IV, Baron and Mysidia are likewise mentioned several times. Various colors of materia are unearthed from Final Fantasy VII, the Orb of Minwu is named for Minwu from Final Fantasy II, and even the rat tail from Final Fantasy can be found. It’s a modest celebration of the games and narratives that precede Tactics, and it’s both endearing and worth delving into it to see what you’ll discover. Some obtainable artefacts are even based on real-world Chinese and Japanese mythology, like the Four-Deity Plate, Coin Blade, and Hanya Mask.
Ivalice Chronicles includes a bevy of quality-of-life improvements like speeding up the pace of battles, random battles being fully skippable, and generally everything moving and commencing far faster than previous versions. It also rehauls the magic-casting system, making running mages far more manageable and enjoyable than in previous iterations. It’s a great remaster, that keeps the spirit and energy of the original, without letting too many modern features ruin the atmosphere and tension. The UI/UX is vastly improved from the Playstation and PSP versions, giving a fuller understanding of enemy turn orders, move effects, mobility, and more. For newer players, they might be a little vexed by some of the camera limitations, but need to realize that it’s still a 30-Year-Old game, and that just like an old movie or novel, should be treated with a little grace. The UI in Ivalice Chronicles is overall pretty strong, but whoever in Creative Studio III or the Localization team is responsible for the horribly justified typesetting needs to pick up a book on typography – like ‘The Idiot’s Guide to Typesetting’. For the uninitiated, what I am referring to is the typography featuring massive gaps between words in every line whether it’s the journal or the move descriptions. This is caused by setting the typography to be ‘justified’ which creates a nice solid block of text (when properly kerned and adjusted), but without places massive holes and distracting gaps throughout the bodies of text that even the most junior of graphic designers know is one of the ugliest and most sophomoric way to treat typography. Final Fantasy XVI and now Tactics: Ivalice Chronicles both feature this horridly distracting faux pas, and someone has to put an end to it.
Ivalice Chronicles offers two ‘unique’ ways of playing Tactics, a ‘Classic’ mode that is as authentic to the War of the Lions PSP remaster as possible (which features a vastly improved script, additional jobs (absent in this version) and animated cutscenes), and the ‘Enhanced’ version which offers an expanded script, UI and UX, and various mechanical changes I’ve gone over. It’s strange that they tucked away the animated (and fully voiced, mind you) cutscenes in the Enhanced version into the journal section. You actually have to navigate through the journal in order to view them, after they’ve played out as-is in engine. It’s also strange that you can’t combine elements of both versions into a more tailored personal experience, in case want to keep the classic visuals and no voice acting through the main campaign AND the updated UI/UX elements. In trying to please two (distinctly different apparently) sets of people, Square Enix has as usual created a vast amount of players pleased by neither.
Sound Design
Acting, Soundtrack, and Effects
The biggest disappointment from the Ivalice Chronicles comes in the form of its voice cast. It’s a painfully messy production, with odd pronunciation choices and actors that run the gamut from being nearly perfect to being so bewilderingly cast it beggars belief. Joe Pitts and Gregg Lowe are good as Ramza and Delita, though their performances are often times too reserved and rarely reach the emotional heights of the character’s arcs. However this could also be purely poor voice direction. Ramza’s name being pronounced as ‘Ram-za’ in lieu of ‘Rham-za’ (as it had been in War of the Lions and Dissidia before this) is a baffling decision, along with ‘Al-ma’ instead of ‘All-ma’. It’s a very directly English pronunciation table, but decidedly modern. It’s a peculiar and frankly distracting choice, especially when Ramza’s name has been localized and pronounced ‘Rham-za’ for the better part of a decade. Ben Allen as Argath is particularly strong, he spits vitriol with the perfect disdain and conviction, Harry McEntire as Mustadio is well-cast and he brings a great brisk light-heartedness to the character, Peter Hannah as Zalbaag is very well done, Anthony O’Donnell as Elder Simon and Kevin McNally as Goltanna are perfectly executed, and Ben Starr as Dycedarg is fine for the most part, but a few of his lines feels rushed at the end as if he’s trying to convey Dycedarg’s curt and sangfroid manner, but it comes off the same was as actors who are rushing words to match lip movements. Emily Carey as Alma Beoulve is fairly strong, and probably the best female performance of the bunch.
Outside of those mentioned above, the rest of the supporting cast are (sadly) laughably out-of-place, and tonally jarring in a lot of locations. Lara Sawalha and Elham Ehsas as Rapha and Marach respectively sound displaced from another game set in another time period, Elham is particularly cartoony and misplaced, waffling between what sounds like disparate attempts to sound Spanish and Middle-Eastern at the same time. Paul Panting as Gaffgarion is painfully miscast, Goffard is a 50-Something-Year-Old Fell Knight who’s lived through two wars – and he’s played like a run-of-the-mill cockney in his 30’s, Panting lacks the grit, the gruff, and the bass to turn Gaffgarion into anything other than a caricature of a misinterpretation of the character. Scott Arthur as Messam Elmdore sounds like a child’s impression of Count Dracula, and Hannah Melbourn as Agrias and hell the entire female cast is wooden and inauthentic. Anyone else not mentioned frankly isn’t worth mentioning, and it’s sad – considering the wealth of dialogue and prose available to the cast that stronger performances (or casting) couldn’t be teased out of them. It was in general a cacophany, that frankly detracts from the strength of the writing. Few in the cast seem to understand the hyperbolic high-fantasy or the deep humanistic narrative that Ivalice represents and commands, and it leaves a majority of the performances feelings cheap and melodramatic.
There are two – two actors that seemed to fully understand who they were playing and the weight of the performances they were giving in the narrative. Stephen Hogan as Confessor Zalmour is spectacular – he chews every scene he’s in with absolute clarity and delivers every line from Zalmour as an accusation against Ramza as a heretic, and never misses a beat. It was bewildering to have played through so much of Tactics and alternating between being offended and amused from the vast majority of the cast to be absolutely gob-smacked at Hogan’s Zalmour. I was stunned, it felt like i had glimpsed something truly magical and worthy of the heights of Tactics. The other, is Alistair Petrie as Folmarv Tengille, who plays the character with a subdued sense of danger and underlying violence that perfectly encapsulates Folmarv and Hashmal, a deceitful patience and otherworldly calm that penetrates every word and action that I was constantly surprised by and excited to hear more. Two – relatively minor characters absolutely mog (pun intended) every other cast member in both form and function and it’s absolutely baffling that they represent the best of the entire cast.
Hitoshi Sakimoto”s soundtrack for Tactics is a masterclass of leitmotif and storytelling through instrumentation. And although it’s confusing why he wasn’t tapped to reorchestrate the soundtrack for Ivalice Chronicles, like he was in Final Fantasy XII, it frankly doesn’t need it. Sakimoto is always brought in by Matsuno for Ivalice and his orchestral arrangements bring an elegance and straightforwardness that marries perfectly with his narrative structures. Sakimoto’s compositions aren’t nearly as whimsical and genre-spanning as the likes of Uematsu, but the man knows his art, and his work is just as strong when properly applied. Using reeds, harps, drums, and violins to conjure a world at war, here are a just a few of his standouts:
Protagonist’s Theme (a.k.a. Hero’s Theme)
Ramza’s theme – like a newborn bird taking its first precocious steps into a dangerous world. Breathtakingly thoughtful and beautiful.
Antipyretic
Incorporating the main theme and the Hero’s Theme, these are the battles that decide the future of Ivalice, with a stunning mix of hope and fear and tension heralded with bells and fanfare. A fever-reducer, a solution to sickness.
Precipitous Combat
A thrilling and initially coquettish leap into battle, acting as a bolstering etude-like backdrop between many revelations and betrayals.
Ultima’s Transformation (a.k.a. Ultima the Ideal Vessel)
A masterful composition that perfectly weaves St. Ajora’s sinister leitmotif into a nauseating death march.
Last Judgement
Pros, Cons, and Verdict
There are few games that appear in our lifetimes with the ability to move the soul and connect to us in a truly gripping and human manner. An ephemeral dream brought to life by a true artist, a true student of human nature, poetry, and theatrics. Something that lays bare the cyclical nature of man – always rushing through too short lives to be able to fully grasp the agony of repeating our mistakes for eternity. Do yourself a favor, and do your loved ones a favor – play and recommend Final Fantasy Tactics to everyone you know.