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.
