FINAL FANTASY TACTICS - The Ivalice Chronicles

The pitch

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is Square Enix's modern remaster of the 1997 PlayStation classic — the same isometric, job-class tactical combat and the Ramza Beoulve political-intrigue story that helped define the tactical RPG genre, rebuilt with fully voiced dialogue and enhanced visuals. It draws partly on 2007's PSP version, War of the Lions, without fully replacing it as the definitive edition, which is a large part of what its own longtime fans argue about.

The game itself: still exactly as good as everyone remembers

This is, by a wide margin, the least contentious part of the review corpus. One 449-vote review sums up the appeal without qualification: "You do not know peak gameplay until you have 5 characters standing in a circle throwing rocks at one another to level. I've so missed this game. 10/10." Another, from a player who owns the original disc and made a personal backup years ago to keep playing it, calls it simply "the best game ever made" and says "nothing has surpassed it still." The writing and job-class depth hold up well enough that the game was nominated for Outstanding Story-Rich Game at The Game Awards in November 2025, two months after launch. None of that is this reviewer's opinion manufactured for the occasion — it's the shape of a review corpus that, whatever else it argues about, does not argue about whether the underlying game is good.

The actual controversy has nothing to do with the game

Set the 4,979 English reviews side by side and one fact stands out: the single most-upvoted review on the entire page — 1,228 votes, more than double the next-highest — is not about combat balance, story pacing or missing content. It's about Denuvo. "Absolutely unacceptable that Denuvo DRM requires me to be online to play a game I already purchased," it reads, and it's dated 5 June 2026, eight months after the game's 30 September 2025 launch. This isn't a launch-week overreaction that faded — Denuvo complaints appear steadily from launch day through mid-2026, including a 420-vote review describing being locked out entirely on Linux via Proton, and a 253-vote review from 17 June 2026 calling it out again by name. Square Enix shipped four update announcements between the launch and this review (versions 1.3.0 through 1.5.2, the most recent on 23 July 2026), and none of their patch notes mention Denuvo or an online-check change. This is squarely the pattern this library has flagged before on other 2025–26 releases: the loudest complaint on the page is a publisher decision layered on top of the game, not a verdict on the game itself, and it deserves to be reported as its own fact rather than folded into "some players didn't like it."

The War of the Lions question

The second recurring thread is more of an internal franchise argument than a controversy. Several detailed reviews from players who've owned the game across multiple platforms — the original PS1 release and the 2007 PSP remaster War of the Lions — note that this version doesn't carry over everything WOTL added, the Dark Knight job class being the most-cited example. One 257-vote review titled "Great game, not worth $50" puts it plainly: "play the WOTL version for now." This isn't a complaint about quality so much as a complaint about completeness from an audience that has been waiting a long time for a definitive edition and doesn't feel it fully got one. Worth noting: even players making this complaint are, in the same reviews, calling the underlying game excellent — this is a dispute about what should have been included, not whether what's here is good.

Price and polish

At NZ$79.95 full price (currently discounted 30% to NZ$55.96), value is where this review's score takes its second hit. Multiple detailed negative reviews independently land on the same advice — wait for a real sale — and one bluntly calls it "a cheap cash grab port that only gets love because SRPG fans are absolutely STARVING for Square to do something with the Ogre Battle and FFT IPs." That's a harsher read than the 91.2% score supports, but the underlying price complaint is legitimate for a remaster of a game this old. Polish complaints are smaller in scale but real: a persistent mouse-control bug on the equipment and abilities screens needed a dedicated hotfix in July 2026, nine months after launch.

Recent sentiment and how far people get

Recent English reviews (the 100 most recent, spanning 9 July to 10 August 2026) run 90% positive — essentially identical to the 91.2% lifetime figure, so there's no sign of a building revolt over Denuvo or price; most buyers are still recommending it despite both complaints. Achievement data shows a healthy spread for a full RPG: the highest-earned sit above 90%, the median across 50 achievements is 27.9%, and the deepest post-game content sits in the low single digits — the normal shape of a long tactical RPG rather than anything alarming.

Verdict

Judged purely as a way to play one of the best tactical RPGs ever made, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles earns the 91% of its audience that recommends it — the job-class combat, the story and the production values are all still exactly what fans have been asking Square Enix to revisit for years. Judged as a NZ$79.95 product with Denuvo DRM that keeps drawing complaints eight months after launch and content some fans feel is still missing from the definitive PSP version, it's harder to call an unqualified buy at full price. Get it on sale, and if an always-online requirement for a single-player game is a dealbreaker for you, know that going in — patch v1.5.2 hasn't changed it.