Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles Review

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles

Release: September 30, 2025
Publisher: Square Enix
Developer: Square Enix
Genre: Switch Reviews
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Final Fantasy Tactics from the PlayStation 1 is an all-time classic game from Square Enix. Fans of the game have been wanting a remaster of the game for awhile now. The Ivalice Chronicles is here! Is any good? Does it live up to the legacy of the game? Here is our review of Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles for the Nintendo Switch 2.

In Final Fantasy Tactics, you play as Ramza Beoulve who lives in the land of Ivalice and comes from a well-known and powerful family in the land. Ramza gets pulled into the intrigue of a kidnapped princess, a war, and mysterious stones that the Church will do anything to get their hands on.

This classic story is the “War of the Lions” version from the PSP without all the extra content of that version. So the story is a lot like the original PS1 take on the game. If you’ve played the PS1 version, you’ll feel right at home with The Ivalice Chronicles. If you’ve never played this game before, you’re in for a treat. And as great as the story is, the gameplay is even better.

The gameplay in Final Fantasy Tactics The Ivalice Chronicles feels a lot like the original PS1 version with some notable and welcome changes.

Tactics is a strategy rpg, so you’ll be moving your characters across tiles, almost like a chessboard. You take your turns, the enemies takes their turns, and so on. This new version has improved how the tiles look, where you can see the turn order who goes next, and you can even un-do a move if you make a mistake. One of our favorite changes is the addition of speeding up story scenes and battle turns. This means you can get to your turn faster and even speed up spells and dialogue. Its a really great change. There is also a new fancy drawing and tiny animation when there are multi-battles in one place: it shows Ramza moving from one location to another. Pretty neat.

There are other changes to gameplay such a difficulty mode, so you can play on easy, normal or tough if you want. We played on normal mode since we’re pretty familiar with Final Fantasy Tactics. The game also has a wonderful redrawn world map to travel around on and you can skip random battles by fleeing them. There’s also an achievement system and lots of lore to look at in the menus. Final Fantasy Tactics runs really well on Nintendo Switch 2 with load times being a lot faster than they were on the PS1 and PSP. Having characters placed right on the field on battle instead of on titles before battles cuts down on the amount of screens you visit too.

The whole menu system has been redesigned, especially how you change jobs and it all looks great. The whole game looks really wonderful.

The graphics in Final Fantasy Tactics are better than ever. The character sprites have been redrawn and its likely the environments have had a bit of work too. The menus look fantastic too. And if you ever want to play the original version of Final Fantasy Tactics, that’s included with this game too. It still looks good! Of course not as good as The Ivalice Chronicles but if you want to see the classic look, its there and thats great.

There is also voice acting included with The Ivalice Chronicles. Most of the voice acting is during cutscenes but the characters will act our their spells during battles too. The voice acting is pretty good and its inclusion is very welcome and makes the game feel even more epic. Between the new graphics, find tuning of the gameplay, and the voice acting, Final Fantasy Tactics is better than ever.\

Square Enix did such a great job remastering Final Fantasy Tactics. The game looks better than ever and runs really well on Nintendo Switch. The new improvements make the game more user friendly for newbies and vets to the series alike. The Ivalice Chronicles is an absolute treat. Its wonderful to revisit this classic game with so many improvements. Its also great that we all can go back and play the original too. 

If you’ve never played Final Fantasy Tactics before, this is the version to play. If you have played it, now is definitely the time to revisit it. Final Fantasy Tactics is a true classic and this is the best version of the game ever.

Thank you to Square Enix for providing a digital code for this review. Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is out now.

Article By Daniel Fugate

Daniel Fugate has wanted to be a writer since he was seven years old. He has a bachelor's degree in English and he's a huge Animal Crossing fan. The Nintendo Switch and Xbox Series S are his favorite systems. His e-mail is [email protected]

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