While all Final Fantasy games require a level of strategy, none more so than this magical re-release from Square.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is brilliant and really captures the spirit of the franchise with a compelling tale but with a deeper focus on combat.

And with that comes the need for expert positioning, balancing the right units and understanding the attacks of your enemies. Here’s a few tips to get you started…

Find optimal positioning

The first thing to learn about Final Fantasy Tactics is that positioning is everything. Before you start each skirmish, carefully study your environment.

Look at the positioning of your enemies, the distance between you, the landscape and how it’s made up, individual tilesets, building types and even how many units can be placed. It’s all incredibly relevant and, in fact, a battle can be won just by paying attention at this point without a single hit being made.

You’ll also need to ensure that there is the correct unit choice in both the front and back lines, which links into the next point..

Choose your units carefully

It’s all well and good having an all out melee assault, sure, but if you don’t have someone in your party to heal you, or anyone who is effective at ranged attacks, then you could be seriously hampering yourself.

Having a decent spread of fighters in your party is often the key to victory. When you start the game you often find a group of squires but you can actually gain more effective allies that can help in different ways.

White Mages, for instance focus on White Magic, which can also account for protection and purification spells. Then there’s Black Mages who use powerful elemental magic that deals massive damage.

Knights are also extremely sturdy, reliable melee fighters that can be brought into battle to maintain a front line, then just behind them having an army of arches aiming and firing at incoming troops can be really effective. Especially if you’ve managed to position them so they’ve got a height advantage.

Again, you’ll quickly learn a lot of the conditions for victory lie in the preparation.

Scour the battlefield

You’ll notice that upon being defeated, enemies drop items that can be collected and while the core aim, more often than not, is to wipe out every enemy on the map, sometimes it’s worth taking a brief detour to gather what’s left behind.

This can sometimes come in the form of a chest which is filled with key items and equipment, but it also be a gemstone which can do various different things, like reward you a new ability or even fully heal your HP/MP. If you’re in a particularly tough battle, these moments can really make all the difference.

And if you’re particularly lucky, you can even find hidden items and dig them up if you land on a particular tile at the far corners!

Make use of shops

During periods of rest, you can actually head to a local shop and get new equipment for your characters – you should absolutely do that. While as mentioned above you can find some equipment on the battlefield, you should definitely make time to look at what’s available and spend the gold you earn.

Different weapons can only be used by certain Job types and so you should make sure you’re assigning the correct weapon to your character. Some can also wear bucklers and shields to really make them perfect front-line defenders, but always look at the impact each equipment change can have on stats, as sometimes it benefits one area but detracts from another.

Get a job

As mentioned at the beginning, you’ll often start out with Squires but the good news is, once you’ve levelled them up, they can take on all new duties.

Final Fantasy Tactics has various different jobs and each serves different purposes and will only help you the deeper into the game you go. There’s a massive 38 jobs to choose from and each serves something a bit different. Eventually you’ll come to discover that you’ll need a certain job in a particular mission and some jobs are more effective than others as counters.

Of course, units do fall and some perish permanently if they’re not integral to the core story, but you can always recruit more, level them up in respective disciplines and assign new jobs that you find.

It’s the best way to stay ahead! In fact, you should even experiment with secondary jobs so you can always have a backup.

Make sure enemies stay dead

Something you’ll also learn is that enemies can be brought back from the brink and if you don’t land a killing blow, you could be getting yourself into trouble.

If an enemy is severely injured, you’ll be able to see by the way they scurry and carry themselves, and while they can still land a strike on you, they’ll often try to crawl away to get out of dodge, then likely try and sneak a potion from an ally or get a healing spell to get them right back in the mix.

Don’t give them the chance!