FINAL FANTASY TACTICS - The Ivalice Chronicles

This game's a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ classic, but for both good and bad. Despite how much I like it, I shall try to be as fair and unbiased as I can with this. And as I usually do with reviews, I'll begin with the bad. It's infamous at this point that the original Final Fantasy Tactics was brutal in difficulty, and the PSP remake followed suit on that. When I saw that the game was getting another remake, I had expected that some of the more egregious difficulty spikes that border on gamebreaking would be balanced out, but... No? This game is still just as brutal, it just has an actual option to get back to the world map if you get stuck on an unbeatable situation, which the PS1 and PSP versions did not. I'm gonna be honest here, as much as I love challenges, there's more than just a handful of bosses here that are unbeatable unless you cheese them in some way - and definitely not beatable if you go in blind. Sure, it's cool that retrying a boss is faster now, but bashing your head against a wall until you get lucky enough to find the one strategy that works doesn't sound like a strategy game to me, but a puzzle game instead. Enemies in the lategame also tend to have hyper inflation running in their healthbars, everyone's a gigatank with twice the HP you could realistically get. The other only negative is, honestly, the weird decisions between the previous two editions. When it was announced that this game would use the base game first and only add things from War of the Lions - the PSP one - when necessary, it felt wrong. Sure, the extra cameo characters in the PSP are lore-breaking and should go, but the classes as well? Mime, Dark Knight, all of 'em gone. The cutscenes from War of the Lion, which looked so damn gorgeous? War of the Lions had about 25 minutes of cutscenes, this version only keeps like 3 of them. It feels wrong to take only a couple things and leave so much of the good ♥♥♥♥ behind. And I guess the Final Fantasy VII cameos feel as handfisted as they did back in the day, no fixing that. But leaving those two complains, what's left in here? An honestly amazing turn-based RPG/Strategy game, from start to finish. This game's a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ classic and deservingly so. Gameplay-wise, while the game is challenging, it does give a massive amount of freedom to the player. Sure, I'd love to field up to six units rather than five, I'd love to have more classes, but with the amount already there you can go and build whatever nonsense you want. Lots of equipment, lots of accessories, tons of skills to learn. Many reviews skip on the audio department, but I don't: the music is amazing, and props go to the new voice-actors. The War of the Lions version only had voices in cutscenes, but here? Everyone's voiced, and nobody sounds out of place. I'm sure glad the graphics have kept their style. From up-close and with a big monitor, some of the sprites do look like they're hand-made drawings more than videogame sprites, if that makes any sense, but I'm sure as f#ck glad the audio synching issues from War of the Lions are fixed in here - back then, the effects from spells and such tanked performance for a second, leaving the audio running at normal speed. Lastly, the new quality of life additions in here? Great, f#cking love 'em. Skipping random encounters, speeding up stuff, going back to the world map to retry stuff, surprised the PSP one did not have any of that stuff. If only this version would let us kill Argath a couple more times, I don't think he's learned his lesson yet. Overall, do I recommend it? Hell yeah! But wait for a sale, the base price is a bit steep. While the game has a slow start, it really picks up. Hope ya enjoy medieval politics. TL:DR Edition: A very faithful remake of the original PS1 game, borrowing very little from the old PSP remake. Game is brutal in difficulty and enemies have way too much health in the lategame, but overall? A ton of fun.