Final Fantasy Tactics Remake - UI Breakdown

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Final Fantasy Tactics has been my favourite game for almost 30 years now. I’ve completed the game dozens of times, with playthroughs on every platform where FFT can be purchased. I’ve done challenge runs, romhacks, and even built a team randomizer at one point! 

So when the Nvidia leak of 2021 sparked rumors of a remake, you could say I was interested.

On one hand, FFT is a game that has never really had a definitive version - previous ports and remasters have all suffered from things like slowdown or missing content. Fingers crossed Square Enix doesn’t let us down in that regard…

More to the point though, Tactics is also a game that has a lot of room to improve when it comes to explaining itself. There are a lot of hidden mechanics, obfuscated information layers, and even the plot itself can be somewhat inscrutable. The last time the script was re-translated for War of the Lions, English audiences actually gained a lot of clarity on the cast’s actions and motivations. I’m curious, what more we will learn this time?

A Job tree, new for The Ivalice Chronicles, will help players understand how each Job is unlocked.

Now that The Ivalice Chronicles has finally been announced for real, it looks like it contains some tantalizing new features and modernizations - which seem like they could do a lot to ease the aforementioned communication issues. Series creator Yasumi Matsuno continues to show a deep love and understanding of his creations, and has chosen some very savvy places to add features and information that modern audiences will expect.

In some cases, like the new Job Tree screen, it's information that has never been available directly in-game before. In some cases, like the turn order display, it’s high-priority information that required some digging to get to before. Other things, like the way the new map communicates the party’s narrative progression, simply represent a clearer way of portraying things that were easy to miss or forget before.

But perhaps most interesting to me, is the fully modernised UI the Remake proffers.

UI is also a big part of how a game communicates itself, and while all the shiny new features are exciting, it’s pretty clear that Remake’s UI has suffered in the transition to HD.

So let’s dig into it…

Immediate impression? It looks alright, but there are some strange choices here.

Looking at the battle screen, I think we can pretty quickly see what I mean:

Every single person who plays this game will appreciate and get a ton of value out of things like the Combat Timeline, units numbered by turn order in-game, and the overhead healthbars.

But it’s also pretty clear that, there is just a lot more stuff on screen now. Some of it is useful, but the layout feels a lot more cluttered than before. It’s understandably hard to translate an almost-square 256x240 UI to modern widescreen displays - but there’s a lot of “we need to put something here” energy, and the layout suffers.

We’ll dig more into that later…

Beyond the layout issues though, I’m also not crazy about some of the visual design choices. The glowing tiles not being contiguous in this version really adds to the visual clutter. Also, the “glow” look in general feels at odds with FFT’s typical parchment aesthetic. Especially when it comes to text, it looks more like something that belons in Final Fantasy XIV.

And what is going on with the bars? Some of them look better than others, but the number of variations and different ways they are used feels like it’s adding to how hard it is to read the screen.

A look at the new Battle Menu, which seems to be firmly planted on the right side of the screen.

One of the more confusing things for me though, is the decision to anchor the Battle Menu on the right side of the screen. While it’s true that the original would sometimes do this depending on the camera, it would generally prefer being on the left. 

What’s more, while the new tooltip display is exciting, I find the decision to place it diagonally above the Battle Menu to be pretty puzzling. It’s located in the opposite direction your eye will move while reading the menu. The opposite of the direction the eye moves when assessing the battlefield. The panel is also enormous, and it’s sheer size moves the actual information even further away from where the eye wants to be. I bet it has to be this large to support localization, but that doesn’t really make it any better. 

I think the new menu also represents another example of the game losing a small piece of its identity. I think moving more towards icons is a good direction for FFT, but these new menus feel overly clean, overly large, and once again take a bit too directly from FFXIV for my taste. No hate against FFXIV, and of course I can appreciate that FFXIV and the Ivalice games are closely connected, so it’s kind of cool to see similar visual elements across the games - but it feels to me like Matsuno’s Tactics Ogre remakes were more successful in maintaining their predecessors’ visual identity.

Having tooltip information so available in the Remake will be a great upgrade from the base game, but I’m already fatigued from scanning this screen. 

We can see how the enemy unit is generally located on the right side of the screen, exactly where the Battle Menu now lives.

Of course it’s possible that just as before, the menu will switch sides contextually. But I doubt it. It feels like the devs were very attached to the idea that the current unit (#1 in the turn order) displays at the bottom left, with the Combat Timeline extending away from them.

We can also see that unlike before, the Remake’s menu is now anchored opposite the unit display, rather than above it. The new menu is much more firmly rooted in its place in the layout, and can’t just be flipped to the left side - without flipping the unit display/timeline as well… Which would just wreak all kinds of chaos on how the player understands the context of those widgets.

If anything, placing the menu in the bottom right already causes context problems. We can see that the bottom right is generally where enemy units are displayed in the layout, which makes it a pretty confusing place to display the player’s list of options. Hmm…

Honestly, as I pondered this - the only thing that makes sense to me is that this was done with mobile in mind. If the user is playing with their right thumb, this bottom-right orientation would be a great way to make the menu accessible for touch. And on a phone, placing the tooltip above the thumb almost becomes ideal. Especially as modern phones have become taller and taller, I’ve personally found the left-side menu to be one of the more annoying aspects of playing FFT on a touch display.

The website does not list Android or iOS as launch platforms, but I’m convinced we’ll see them soon enough.

A comparison of the Attack Preview screen, screenshots directly from Square Enix’s website.

I think what we’re all here for though, is the Attack Preview. Earlier I aluded to how the move to HD created clutter, and here is your shining example.

(Except for the prominent central damage display, I will defend him to the death, he is my son)

Looking at the two side-by-side, what I appreciate about the original game is how effortlessly scannable the Unit Display is. It’s just three stacked bars, and so each row of information is purely dedicated to communicating one thing. Much of the time you don’t even need to read the numbers, and can stop scanning that row early. You can find what you need so fast, there’s never a risk of your eye getting lost in the layout.

The remake however, chose to go with a 4x5 grid of information. It’s denser, more broken up, and offers way more opportunities to get lost finding your information.

HP and MP are no longer stacked vertically, meaning you need to choose left or right. And with the number value placed above, it’s hard to interpret the current value without considering both the bar and the number values.

We already discussed how lots of bar variations can make things harder to parse, and here we see the CT bar has a completely different presentation to the other bars. It doesn’t really fit in this layout, but they just had to cram it in there. Arguably, if the player can see the turn order at all times, their CT value isn’t even relevant any more! (except for the Calculator job , I suppose…)

A comparison of the old layout, with the Situational Stats panel, and the new layout, with everything condensed into the Unit Display.

And that’s kind of the theme here. Things feel crammed into the layout irrespective of their importance. It’s sort of handy to have constant visibility on things like a unit’s Brave/Faith or JP values… But like, not really.

Most players will complete the game having no idea what Brave/Faith even does, and these are values that never change outside of very specific strategies. It would be amazing if the Remake explained these mechanics better than the original, but as it stands, they are just a distraction in the road to important information.

As for the Job display, well… The original game had its own way of communicating Job progression, which didn’t require taking up screenspace at all times. Sure it’s nice to know if one is 200 JP away vs 1000, but this isn’t information that changes your choices turn-by-turn. If anything, it’s fatiguing to considering your progression every single turn - you can’t act on it until after battle anyways. Rather than fret about when you can move on to the next progression point, I’d rather focus on celebrating milestones and using the tools infront of you.

Personally, one of my favourite parts of the game is the joy of checking all my characters after battle to see what new things I can learn. That thrill is cheapened a bit if you are constantly monitoring JP.

These values just don’t need to be so prominent. While their presence adds some value, they are primarily here to fill out the layout.

We can see a similar fate has befallen the Inventory screen, where unit stats are squished beside the Unit Display, in the space where situational information would normally go.

And it’s not like this stuff wasn’t available before, the base game just had some of the more situational information displayed on a side panel. It appeared beside the Unit Display, but only when focus was directly on said Unit. It appeared on the right side, which would put it… Uhh oh yeah, right where the new menu is, ok I see how we got here.

The Situational Stats panel was also a pattern that carried through to the Inventory, which was pretty cool! But we can see that in the Remake, the new Inventory Screen makes similar decisions to the new Battle Screen. With the Remake having moved these situational stats over to the main Unit Display, it uses the newfound screenspace to cram the Primary Stat Display in there instead. Getting a little cozy with the edge of the screen safe area, are we?

But I think here I’m a bit more open to the idea. We don't usually need every single stat while scrolling through units, but all the same, having the Primary Stat Display here will reduce the need to go in-and-out of menus somewhat. The original already has a lot of room to improve in terms of its stats display, and so as dense as this space looks in the Remake, it still feels like an improvement. Leaning on icons feels like a good direction, and these icons feel a lot more at-home in FFT’s visual language than the icons seen in the Battle Menu.

Also, establishing this pattern from the root menu removes the need to build the stat display into the Equip Screen, freeing up a lot of space. We don’t yet know what the Equip Screen will look like in the Remake, but I’m hopeful that with lots of room to play with, it’ll be able to put together something that does a better job of explaining the convoluted way FFT’s stats work. Only time will tell.

Let’s be real though, watching Wiegraf stab Gustav in HD still brought a tear to my eye.

And I think that’s basically my outlook on the game, as it stands. I’ve been pretty critical about some of the changes we’ve seen so far, but the criticisms are almost exclusively UI issues.

As a lifelong fan of the game, I remain very enthusiastic about all the actual feature updates on offer. We haven’t even touched on things like Fast Forward, difficulty settings, voice acting, or animated portraits - all things that will add a lot to the overall play experience. (I’ll miss the old names though… He’ll always be Vormav to me)

And that new soundtrack? Yeah, looking forward to that. They haven’t said anything about it yet, but it sure sounds like there are some updated tracks to me. This might be an area where that tight connection to FFXIV really pays off.

Even if we don’t get all the wishlist content items, I think this promises to be the best version of Final Fantasy Tactics to play going forward - by a long stretch. As someone who does so with great regularity, that means a lot to me.

I’m still hopeful that the Remake has more tricks up it’s sleeve to explain some of it’s more esoteric mechanics more clearly. But based on what we’ve seen so far, I’m pretty eager to say:

Give it to me now.

Please.