Here’s why Balthier and Luso are absent from Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles - and why the Sound Novels made it in at last

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is shaping up to be the definitive version of a classic - but it won’t actually feature all content from previous versions of the game. 

This new version of the game is in fact a bit of a fascinating mash-up. With the source code for the original game lost, the developers essentially had to start from scratch this time - and so a conscious decision was made to combine elements from previous versions, but always use the PlayStation original as the main base. 

Previously, The The Ivalice Chronicles director Kazutoyo Maehiro noted that the original game was so complete in story and gameplay terms that it’d be a “loss” to upset that balance - but he’s now gone into slightly more detail.

“We obviously did have the discussion of what we wanted to put in from War of the Lions,” Maehiro explained to RPG Site, referencing the 2007 PSP version of FF Tactics that was later released on smartphones. “It really wasn’t a very easy decision - we had a lot of thought about it.”

“Specifically, in War of the Lions we had certain things like the additional characters of Balthier and Luso, who were of course from Final Fantasy XII and Tactics Advance 2. At the time those games were in the same time frame, releasing at that time, so it made sense - fans would understand why they were being added.

“When we think about the here and now, making Ivalice Chronicles, those character implementations maybe don’t make quite as much sense as they did before.”

On the flip side, other things from those versions of the game made sense to include. War of the Lions included a much more lavish and thoughtful English-language localization than the 1997 original, and so that localization has been used as a basis for the script of this game - though it has also been extensively edited, in part to accommodate for full voiceover recording, which is also new.

The Kamikaze Studio videos that were added in The War of the Lions also return in an upscaled and improved format. 

If you want to get into the definitive version debate, in the West there is also one more wrinkle: the Sound Novels from the original version, several of which were absent from every non-Japanese release of FFT to date.

“So, I think outside of the Scriptures of Germonique, none of the other novels were translated and put into the original game. But in good news we do have the remaining four books or novels in this version,” Maehiro reveals. “We wanted to make sure that we were bringing as much as possible for the original fans, and for new players as well. So, we did what we could to get them in.”

For Maehrio, this will be an important moment - for some of those previously-untranslated novels, which flesh out FFT’s world, were written by him in some of his first work in the games industry.

“Nothing has really changed in terms of the content for those novels,” he notes. “They're just kind of been implemented as they are, but when I think about it's something that I wrote 30 years ago, it’s something that I’m maybe a little bit more embarrassed about!

“But with that said, I still wanted to bring it to people so that they could experience it and enjoy it. So I really hope people can make use of that feature.

Like the Occuria gods of Ivalice itself, the developers of Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles have carefully shaped what they now present. It’s not a kitchen sink approach - rather, it’s something more carefully thought through. And even if it is likely to provoke intense online debate about which version is definitive, as with the FF Pixel Remasters, Maehiro at least believes he and his team have crafted something definitive.

“So far in the history of Final Fantasy Tactics, we’ve had the original come out on PS1, then we’ve gone to PSP and had War of the Lions, and then we’ve had the smartphone version. When it comes to The Ivalice Chronicles, from my perspective we’ll be very happy if people consider this the definitive version,” he concludes.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is coming to PS4, PS5, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on September 30.