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Final Fantasy Tactics remains one of the most influential and beloved entries in the strategy RPG genre, which is why we’re already desperate to play the upcoming remake, The Ivalice Chronicles. Thankfully, I didn’t have to wait because I got my hands on the Final Fantasy Tactics remake at PAX West, and I can happily report that it gives just the right balance between recreating the original game and one of the most breathtakingly beautiful openings in Final Fantasy history, and I’m not even kidding.

The idea that a Final Fantasy game could be beautiful is not a radical one, but this isn’t a normal Final Fantasy game. So much has been said about how the developers wanted to keep the game as close to the original as possible that I expected that to extend to the opening cutscene. So there was some surprise for me when the game started up.

Okay, that is a slight understatement. My exact reaction was muttering “Holy shit,” under my breath and hoping that no one heard me, lest my aura of professionalism be broken. I didn’t get tossed out of the demo, which was attended by games journalists far from the crowds of PAX West, so presumably I was successful.

What caught me off guard was how beautifully stylized the cutscene was. This wasn’t an attempt at realistic graphics like we’ve seen in recent Final Fantasy games; instead, it was like a sketch in a history book come to life. Richly shaded character models that have a hand-drawn feel to them made their way across ruins. These aren’t just characters in a video game but figures in a chronicle that is being recalled by the world. The stylization doesn’t go quite as far as Valkyria Chronicles did with this technique, but it was enough to make me stop taking notes and just watch the scene unfold before me with apt appreciation.

It isn’t just that the art is beautiful that makes me love this opening more than I expected to. It fits in perfectly with the rest of the game, which is framed as the telling of a story that history has overlooked or forgotten. The hand-drawn feeling is the perfect way to draw you into the world of Ivalice, where history is being written before your very eyes. It takes the style of the War of the Lions opening and makes it bigger, grander, and sharper.

Then, as soon as the cutscene ends, you’re thrust into the classic look of Final Fantasy Tactics, where even the enhanced graphics are scaled back and retro-feeling by today’s standards. Square Enix has made it clear from the start that the intention has always been to make Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chronicles as close to the original game as possible, even if they had to recreate the source code for it from scratch because it had been lost to time. 

Maybe that is why I adored that opening scene so much; I certainly didn’t expect it, but it showed a level of restraint from the developers. They could have made the whole game look like that and it would have felt perfectly reasonable. Square Enix had to completely remake the whole game anyway, so why not go wild? But they had a vision they wanted to achieve, a celebration of a classic game in the form it was meant to be enjoyed in. The opening cutscene of the Final Fantasy Tactics remake is a flex of their power, a glimpse of what could be, before they return to the game they really wanted to make. 

Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chronicles is out on September 30, 2025.

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