RPGamer 2025 Awards – Best Strategy RPG

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Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is a resounding success for Square Enix, bringing one of the most lauded strategy RPGs of all time to modern audiences, with a few tweaks, bells, and whistles to polish it up to modern standards. While much of the core gameplay remains untouched from the PlayStation original, seeing how solidly they hold up almost thirty years later is a testament to how well-constructed its job system and battlefield mechanics were. Every single advance is crucial, and one single tactical error can quickly spell doom. There is an absolutely harrowing sense of tension and stakes, which is sustained by its exemplary character writing and fleshed-out lore and world design.

The political maneuvering of its cast and the surrounding world of Ivalice is what helps elevate Tactics from a strong strategy RPG to a true masterpiece, and The Ivalice Chronicles realizes this in an optimal format, updating the original PlayStation’s less-than-ideal (but impressive for its time) script. Ivalice feels and even sounds more alive than ever, due in part to some truly stellar voice acting, which helps significantly elucidate and amplify the game’s incredibly prescient themes of class struggle, cyclical violence, and institutional decay, with the plot feeling more relevant now than upon its original 1997 release. For any RPGamers looking for an ideal way to play this classic gem, look no further.

 

 

Coming from the minds of Too Kyo Games’s Kazutaka Kodaka (Danganronpa) and Kotaro Uchikoshi (Zero Escape and AI: The Somnium Files), it would’ve been understandable if the tactical parts of The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- took more of a backseat over its ambitious narrative elements. Fortunately, the expertise of co-developer Media.Vision proved beneficial to the title’s strategic aspects. Battles offer various situations and objectives to keep the experience fresh, the use of the strongest characters and skills come with drawbacks, and each character has their own play style. Strategy RPG enthusiasts are further taken care with its post-launch extra difficulty, “Extreme & Despair”, which discourages player’s reliance on their strongest assets: special attacks and last resort skills. With its fascinating narrative approach that offers a huge amount of replayability, The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- has plenty to offer all sorts of players.

Tactical RPGs have long been about big grids where movement is slow-paced and higher levels, stronger weapons, and more powerful abilities win the day. Demonschool takes that idea and throws it out the window, instead focusing on movement and strategy wherein the party’s entire turn can be mapped out before playing out in a cacophony of fountains of blood. The key to making this work is the strong cast of characters, each of whom play a different role within this thoughtful and fast-paced combat system, and without level-ups to evolve them, each character works the same from the game’s beginning to its end. Yet, the nuance with how the combat system is utilized never fails to impress as it consistently offers new wrinkles to make players think. A charming cast, oddball horror comedy story, and wonderfully retro visuals round out this winning recipe for a great game.

 

by Jordan McClain, Mohamed Lamine Coulibaly, and Ryan Costa