The forthcoming remake of Final Fantasy Tactics has been developed “by sheer force” as the source code of the original PS1 game no longer exists.
The long-requested remake was announced at PlayStation’s recent State of Play, titled The Ivalice Chronicles, and in a new interview with Square Enix, remake director Kazutoyo Maehiro discussed development challenges.
“There were a number of major challenges, but all of them stemmed from the fact that the master data and source code from the original game no longer existed,” he said.
The data itself wasn’t “mishandled or poorly managed”, he added, but keeping it “wasn’t a normal thing to do at the time”. What’s more, production began on the Japanese version but was then overwritten by the data of other languages.
To solve this problem, the remake was developed “by sheer force”, said Maehiro.
The director confirmed that newer content from the 2007 War of the Lions PSP re-release won’t be included, to “pay respect to the original game’s experience”.
So while The Ivalice Chronicles does utilise the improved English translation from the PSP game, it won’t include its additional characters and jobs – namely the likes of Balthier, Luso, and the Onion Knight and Dark Knight jobs.
Maehiro described the original Final Fantasy Tactics as “a very complete game both from a game design and story perspective”, and if the team “were to make major changes, it would only be a loss for not only fans of the original game, but also those new to the title.”
This also explains why this remake will include a classic version without modern embellishments, although this will still include some quality of life features like autosave and fixed bugs.
“Among fans of the original game, there will be those who believe that the game doesn’t need a lot of embellishment. To be honest, I’ve felt this way about a number of remastered titles in the past,” said Maehiro.
“So, there was no doubt in our minds that alongside the enhanced version, which is more in-line with the current era and more accessible to newcomers, we should also include a classic version that is based on the original build of the game.”
As for the modern version of the game, having it fully voiced “was a necessity”, said Maehiro. “On the other hand, the dialogue in the original game was written to be read by the player, so just having it be read out by a voice actor as-is would have felt quite unnatural,” he added. “So, with help from Yasumi Matsuno, who wrote the script for the original game, we tweaked the dialogue to make it better suited for voice.”