‘Final Fantasy Tactics’ Remaster Fixes Its Biggest Narrative Flaw

Tactical RPGs are games all about characters, more often than not weaving grandiose tales of political intrigue. Because of the nature of tactical battles, however, you tend to have a much larger cast than your typical party-based RPG. But when you have over a dozen playable characters, it leads to an inherent problem: someone is going to get lost in the shuffle. Even the greats, like Final Fantasy Tactics, fall prey to this typical failing of tactical games. In a game that does nearly everything right, it’s a pretty visible flaw. Interestingly, the upcoming The Ivalice Chronicles remaster addresses that problem directly — and hopefully it makes one of the greatest video game stories of all time even better.

The Ivalice Chronicles director Kazutoyo Maehiro dives into some of the enhancements coming with the remaster — both in terms of narrative and gameplay in a new interview on the PlayStation Blog. Creating The Ivalice Chronicles sounds like it was a surprisingly rigorous process, as Square Enix lost the source code from the original game — development at the time simply didn’t have the same archival process.

The development team has previously said new story moments will be added, and the entire script of the game has been rewritten by Yasumi Matsuno (the original director and writer) to accommodate voice acting. But that complete refresh allowed the team to add even more, including putting more development onto critical characters after their role in the main narrative ended.

Maehiro notes that one of the things cut in the original Final Fantasy Tactics was character dialogue, but The Ivalice Chronicles presented an opportunity to add that back in. For anyone who’s played the original Tactics, you’ll know that characters like Mustadio play a prominent role in the story at a certain point, but when their “arc” is over, they simply join your party and hardly ever say another word.

Again, this isn’t something uncommon to the genre. Games like Disgaea do the same thing, and even older Fire Emblem games only give you little bits of dialogue if you build bonds between characters. Fire Emblem: Three Houses managed to smartly overcome this by integrating a Persona-esque social link system, giving players a justification to keep talking to characters across the entire narrative.

But The Ivalice Chronicles is taking a different approach to tackling that problem — by integrating brand new dialogue.

“For example, in the original game, certain characters rarely spoke once they were recruited, but here we added conversations that play during battles. When sending them into specific battles, characters like Agrias, Cid, and Mustadio speak considerably more,” says Maehiro, “Some of these dialogues aren’t just exchanges between characters, but also complement the narrative, or touch on the heart of the story, such as why war veteran Marquis Elmdore chose the path he did.”

Integrating these new story elements specifically as battle dialogue is genuinely a really smart way to fix the lack of character development, because it lets characters that different players love flourish. If you have a certain affinity for Mustadio and bring him into every battle, you’re going to be rewarded through that with more insight into his character and the relationship he has in this world.

It’s a smart way to rectify some of the narrative gaps that pop up in Tactics, but also shows a willingness on the development team’s part to go back and reassess the original game, see it for what it is. The core identity of the game isn’t being changed, but iterated upon.

You can see this through additional elements like the State of the Realm feature, something Maehiro also talks about, saying,

“We wanted to give a way for players to appreciate the story further, however we made it so this information can be viewed chronologically according to the protagonist’s actions. So if you want to check the broader flow of the story, you can through the State of the Realm, whereas if you want to learn even more details, you can through rumors in the taverns or from the other features.”

It’s easy to see an outcome where a Final Fantasy Tactics remaster was just a straight upgrade, not changing anything about the experience. But, in my mind, seeing Matusno and Maehiro have the chance to go back to the drawing board and tweak elements of the game they might not have been happy with is vastly preferable. The chance for an original creator to enhance a seminal, defining game is priceless.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles launches on September 30 for PS5, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.