Square Enix treated the original script and score with real respect, and the tactics underneath still hold up almost thirty years later.
Final Fantasy Tactics was already one of the best tactical RPGs ever made back in 1997, and I played that PS1 version at least four times as a teenager, which is the only reason I bought this the week it came out. The core loop is untouched, so you build a squad of knights, mages, dragoons and whatever strange job you've unlocked this week, then fight across isometric grids where height and flanking and turn order matter more than raw stats do.
The script is the reason to come back to it. Alexander O. Smith's English translation got mangled by a rushed PS1 localization that made half the plot hard to parse, and this version restores his intended text and then puts a full voice cast on top of that. Ramza's slide from naive nobleman to disillusioned rebel finally lands where it was always supposed to, and Delita's cold maneuvering reads as tragedy instead of confusion. I understood the War of the Lions as a piece of political writing for the first time this month, twenty-odd years and four playthroughs after I first saw it, and hearing lines I'd only ever read on a screen, delivered well, did more for this story than any graphical upgrade was ever going to.
“Ramza's story finally lands the way it was always supposed to, script restored and all.”
Hitoshi Sakimoto's score got a full orchestral rerecording, and you can toggle back to the original at any point. I tried the orchestra for about an hour, appreciated it properly, and then switched back to the 1997 soundtrack for the rest of the run, because some part of my brain only accepts Tactics through a PlayStation sound chip. Quality-of-life work is real but restrained, with fast battle speed, a bestiary, a job tree viewer and three named difficulties, Squire and Knight and Tactician, that let newcomers under the original's brutal spikes. Wiegraf's second phase on Knight is exactly as mean as everybody remembers, and I lost to him twice on this run.
The job system is still the reason nobody ever shuts up about this game. Skills carry across classes when a unit reclasses, so a Squire with Counter Tackle can become a Black Mage who punches back, and the room for genuinely broken squads is enormous. I promised myself a no-Calculator run this time, a solemn vow not to solve every battle before it had started, and I lasted until Chapter Three before quietly breaking it, because a Calculator sniping the entire enemy team with one math-targeted spell is a power fantasy I apparently don't have the discipline to refuse.
The War of the Lions content from the PSP version, Balthier and Luso's guest appearances, the Onion Knight job and the multiplayer battles, didn't make it across, and an edition with Chronicles in the title has no business shipping with less in it than the 2007 release did. I never used the Onion Knight once in my life and I definately still notice the hole. Random encounters still eat twenty minutes when turn order goes sideways, the camera on tall 3D terrain is only slightly less stubborn than it was in 1997, and I finished my replay in about thirty-five hours before immediately starting a second file built around Mystics and Time Mages.