Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, a retrospective

As near as I can tell, by doing some archaeology on my computer, is that I played Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lion, a remake of the game for handheld game machines, a few years back. I replayed the original, on an emulator, about ten years ago. And I know I played it at least twice through on the original PSX hardware.

I’m not counting all the sequels. With the playthrough of the remake, I’ve completed at least my fifth playthrough — this time in 21 hours, 13 minutes, and 1 second. That’s with doing things I didn’t bother with in any of my previous playthroughs, too.

The Ivalice Chronicles is a remake of the original FFT — it is missing the Onion Knight and the Dark Knight from the War of the Lions version. The English translation seems largely based on that done for WotL, but they left a few callbacks to the original translation for the real fans.

I really wanted them to do the “I had a good feeling!” message from completing an errand well 🙂 But that one was gone.

I could go over what Final Fantasy Tactics is, and what makes it special, but I’m not going to. This post is going to go over my thoughts about my playthrough, based on the trophies I’ve received. FFT is a long and storied game, and there’s a thousand people who have written about it better than I ever could.

I do want to point out, though, that this is my first playthrough without slavishly referring to GameFaqs all the time. I’ve played this enough that I don’t really need to, is one reason. Another reason is that the game is far more helpful than I felt it was in the past. And lastly, The Ivalice Chronicles is just different enough from the original and WotL versions that it’s not all that helpful. It’s a little bit helpful.

The first five trophies (on the PS5, though they are also listed in game) were for completing the prologue and the four chapters of the game, ending with “In the Name of Love”, a very rare trophy that only 12.2% of players have earned. So about one out of eight people who have started the remake have finished it so far.

Next is Dependable Fighters, the trophy you get when five of your party members have reached level 30. I’d consider this far more impressive if you didn’t have this trophy, but still finished the game. That would be hard mode. Oh, yeah, I played the game on standard mode. Not the easy story mode, not the punishing Tactical mode. Just the normal, usual one.

Proven Veterans is awarded for reaching level 40 with five party members, and Seasoned Warrior happens when Ramza hits level 50. I ended the game with all my main party in the 70s and 80s, aside from Orlandeau, whom I brought in to replace Cloud. I had promised myself I wouldn’t use Orlandeau, since he’d been making the game easy mode every time I played it, but I was having real trouble getting through the Ultima fight, and so I caved.

Master Treasure Hunter, Master Adventurer, and Knight Errand of Ivalice are awarded for errands; successfully finding treasure, ruins, and finding perfection in all of them, respectively. Errands aren’t hard; you just need enough people and to spend the maximum number of days at them.

I just kept recruiting more level ones from the Warrior Guild as I needed them, and that ties into the next trophy, Great Expectations, for recruiting a party member from the guild. I recruited a ton of warriors, never leveled them up, only ever did errands, and got great success, every one. So you don’t need to try to level them up. Not in this version, anyway.

Welcome, Poacher and Rare Wares are rewards for using the Poach Thief passive ability to grab a creature’s corpse when killed by a standard Attack action by a character with this ability. I gave it to my Chemist once guns opened up, and they’d plink away when they had nothing else to do and occasionally got some warm bodies for the Poachers’ Den. I didn’t get the Rare Wares trophy, though.

Foundational Learning, Practical Application and Expert in One Field are given for learning abilities, the last for a character mastering any particular job. The last, hidden one, is for one character mastering every job. I didn’t get that one.

The next several trophies are freebies when you give a character a specific job and then they use that job’s abiltiies. I would be prouder of getting Direct Imitation, using the key ability of the hidden Mime job, if it weren’t more common than getting the trophies for the less-secretive Bard and Dancer jobs. I guess people don’t like those jobs BECAUSE THEY ARE SO SLOW and aren’t as OP as the Arithmetician. Arithmetiks was a real slog. I had to pile speed gear on it and cast Haste besides to get it to act more than once in a battle.

My Feathered Friend gets awarded when you mount a chocobo. If you have a friendly chocobo on the field, you can move onto them and then ride them around. Sounds nice, except you have to replace a useful job with a chocobo. Who are annoying — they breed like, well, like chocobos and take up every free slot in your roster. At least they don’t plead for their lives when you kick them out. I so, so, SO much wanted to poach them all. Sure, that sounds cruel, but only if you haven’t recruited one.

There are certain battles where a friendly chocobo joins the battle; those are the ones worth riding.

The Chronicle lists all the lore of the game; who everyone is, what you know about them at that time, where everything is — all the lore, and there’s a LOT of it. There’s secret scenes you aren’t normally shown that show background for events for which you were not present. There’s books which are actually mini-games in their own rights (which are super cool, by the way). Amateur Historian, The Scriptures of Germonique, A Thickening of the Plot and Secrets Beneath Goug are all for reading the Chronicles.

Ruler of the Abyss lets the world know that you have completed all ten levels of Midlight’s Deep, a dungeon that opens up toward the end of the game. Midlight’s Deep contains some of the best items in the entire game. I don’t usually do it because it’s annoying (no light, wild changes in heights make it difficult to move in, lots of traps), but I paid for the whole game and dagnabbit I was going to play the whole game. There’s a Zodiac stone at the bottom which a completionist would want. I wanted. I got. It wasn’t easy. Almost every floor required changing classes and gear around. I’d go there, see what I was up against, then restart after I’d moved jobs and gear around.

I think I would need to poach some of the critters in this dungeon to get the rare poaching trophy. But, I was struggling enough as it was.

I spent the first few hours just autobattling in the first battlefield, trying to get the jobs and abilities I felt I should really not leave home without. I like getting Ramza to Monk as swiftly as I can, as the Monk job is strong close, at range, and can provide necessary support. The Martial Arts skill is probably the second most useful secondary job, after Items.

I started the plot because I wanted Agrias and Mustadio in the party before I’d leveled up so much that they became irrelevant. I wanted Agrias to be in my party this time through. I also wanted secret character Cloud to be in my party, especially since The Ivalice Chronicles changed his quest to deliver him earlier, and easier, and with big honking blue arrows leading you through the quest so that you would have to have really opaque blinders on to miss his quest.

I usually do level Mustadio up, but I only really had the opportunity to get one of he and Agrias up, and since they come in together, he was the one chosen to be left behind. Even though his ability to Disable units everyone on the battlefield is really super useful. I wanted Agrias.

In the screenshot above, Allyson (named after my daughter) is a White Mage. She’s actually a melee; her Faith is so low that her healing is terrible and corpses often resist being raised. She’d been shadowing Ramza, choosing the same jobs, so that they would boost each other’s experience a little bit, but once Cloud joined the team, we had too many physical attackers and too few healers. She actually spent most of the time as a Chemist, a job for which she was very well suited; I swapped her to WHM just to get a few more spells before the final battles.

I did have a very good healer, Katherine (named after my granddaughter), but Allyson had that super useful Monk job mastered, so…

Even with the early grinding, I still had my fair share of problem fights. If you’re following along in GameFaqs, they’ll tell you the perfect jobs, abilities, gear and tactics for every fight. Since I was doing this without all that, with nothing more than memory, I mostly just brought along whatever I had at the time to each fight. Most of the time, that was sufficient. Some of the time, I ended the fight, but one or more of my characters were gone forever and had to restart. And sometimes I just got totally wiped. I didn’t mind, though. If I wanted an easy playthrough, they had the story mode. I wanted to lose… some of the time. And so I did, some of the time.

TIC is much better than its predecessors in letting you save and play around with your gear and abilities between each fight in a continuous battle, those end-of-chapter battles where you have to have three or four battles in a row. There’s no getting stuck, unable to proceed, any more.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is without a doubt the best version of Final Fantasy Tactics. I miss the War of the Lions extra classes, and the original’s wonky translations, but I feel this is the version of FFT that the developers probably wanted to release thirty years ago. Three decades on, it’s still as fresh, exciting and tactical as ever. There’s a reason this game is still so revered after so much time; it earns it.