Final Fantasy Tactics is an ambitious, literary video game

Final Fantasy Tactics, an ambitious, literary strategy game first published in Japan in 1997 and now revived and polished for modern technology, offers a convincing counterpoint – not that you’d expect as much from a glance at its squat, cartoonish characters. Written and directed by Yasumi Matsuno, a Japanese game-maker obsessed with medieval European literature, it takes its name from the well-known, high-fantasy role-playing game that is in its 16th iteration.

Unlike those games, however, which tell tall tales of gods and monsters, Tactics is a more grounded story: a machiavellian regal drama disguised as a chess-like wargame, in which you manoeuvre your team of young soldiers and medics around battlefields while being drawn inexorably into a world corroded by class, faith and the slow, grinding logic of power.

Set in the kingdom of Ivalice, a land of ruined cathedrals, dying nobles and mercenaries for hire, it begins as a familiar fantasy tale of knighthood and honour, only to reveal a world stripped of both. You follow Ramza Beoulve, a young nobleman who, through a series of small, devastating disillusionments, comes to see the hollowness of the order he was born to serve. Around him, dukes and cardinals stage a succession war, invoking divine power and relics as pretexts for domination. Religion becomes politics, while politics become blasphemy, and the game’s turn-based battles staged on chessboards of blood and mud play out like moral arguments.

That story is told through austere text boxes, in a quasi-Shakespearean tone that occasionally tips  into purple prose. In the hands, however, the game is poised and irresistible. You have rare freedom to shape your company of fighters, choosing their specialisms and mixing class-based skills to create a war machine that feels entirely of your own design – and responsibility. And while many of the battles unfold in swamps or on hinterland rooftops, the grand score and all-new voice acting infuse each encounter with drama and consequence.

Hundreds of video games have attempted to turn the art of war into play (board games too, ever since the Prussian military began designing grid-based wargames to refine battlefield tactics in the early 19th century). But few have interwoven story and strategy with such conviction. Tactics is a game about the cruelty of institutions, and both the futility and necessity of moral purity. Nearly three decades on, it remains the secret masterpiece of the series: a work of political tragedy rendered in pixels, where every battle feels like a tactical puzzle and a reckoning with the human condition.

It provides a meditation on the fragility of truth in the hands of myth-makers. Beoulve fights for truth and the world erases him for it. By the time the credits roll, the player has witnessed the making and unmaking of a legend, and its quiet revision by victors who prefer their heroes dead and their stories simple – a cautionary tale, indeed, for times such as ours.

Final Fantasy Tactics is available on Square Enix; PC, PS5, Xbox

Photograph by Square Enix