It’s rare to get a do-over in life. It’s rarer still to get a do-over for something that happened nearly 30 years ago. That’s the unique position Square Enix’s Kazutoyo Maehiro finds himself in with the upcoming release of Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles. The original Final Fantasy Tactics was released in 1997 for the PlayStation, and has since garnered a sterling reputation within the strategy role-playing subgenre. It’s also beloved for its intricate and politically charged story, which touches on themes of class struggle and social division.
Maehiro worked as an event planner on Final Fantasy Tactics 28 years ago. Now he’s returning to this beloved game as the director of a top-down remake. Back then, he was ticking boxes. Now, the stakes are higher.
“I was a very, very new game designer at the time,” Maehiro tells Polygon. “I was really just having to focus on making sure I’m doing each of the tasks at hand. Now that I’m revisiting this game 30 years later as the director, when I think back to myself back then, there is a feeling that I don’t want to lose in terms of the determination that person had. And I also felt that if this project would be a failure, that would be a huge disrespect to the original development team that I was part of. So in that sense, I did feel a large pressure about it. That said, I was very, very blessed and fortunate to be able to work with such a wonderful team for this project as well. I do feel that the final product we’re putting out is very polished and refined. I’m very, very proud of it — almost on the same level of pride that I feel having been involved with the original.”
Starting from scratch
Back in the ‘90s, it wasn’t common practice for studios to retain the original source code for their games. As such, many remakes of games from that period rely on emulated versions of later ports. But that wasn’t the direction Maehiro wanted to go. Instead, he and his team recreated the game from the ground up by replaying the PlayStation and PlayStation Portable releases of the game, a process that was far more time-consuming, but also presented a far greater opportunity to refine the experience for players.
“The work involved with analyzing all those various iterations to recreate that source code certainly was very labor-intensive. But by doing that, we were actually able to make adjustments that would not have been able to be done through an emulator,” Maehiro explains. “One of the things I’m referring to is implementing the auto-save feature in classic mode. These kinds of features have been added that help make the game that much more comfortable and accessible to play, and that’s something that we were able to do through the analysis process.”
Another new feature that Maehiro and the team added to Final Fantasy Tactics is State of the Realm, which players of Final Fantasy 16 will remember as a codex for keeping track of the story’s events and characters, whether it’s just for a refresher between battles or after taking a break from the game for a while. The team also brought the slick Final Fantasy 16 user interface into The Ivalice Chronicles, so if those modern menus look rather familiar, that’s why.
Meeting the challenge
A spiffed-up UI wasn’t the only way Maehiro and his team sought to improve the FFT experience. The Ivalice Chronicles also features three difficulty settings that players can swap between at any time — Squire, Knight, and Tactician, from easiest to most challenging. “When the original game launched, we heard some fans wanted to play the game but couldn’t because of the difficulty,” Maehiro explains.
The team also adjusted a few early-game battles to make them more approachable, and Maehiro says the middle-ground Knight difficulty is actually slightly easier than the 1997 game. But the director and his team have no intention of neglecting the experienced players who are looking for even tougher fights.
“When it comes to the highest difficulty, which is called Tactical in Japanese and Tactician in English, that’s something that we made for those veteran players who played Final Fantasy Tactics previously. We wanted to be able to provide a challenging experience for them as well, so we hope people look forward to that,” he explains.
A timeless tale
Final Fantasy Tactics hasn’t stayed in players’ hearts for nearly three decades just because it’s fun to play. Its captivating story and memorable characters are key elements of that enviable endurance, and the original game’s writer and director, Yasumi Matsuno, has spoken passionately in recent months about how economic inequality, social division, and global wars shaped the story. While Maehiro notes that the story has deep ties to unrest that roiled Japanese society in the mid-’90s, he adds, with a rueful chuckle, that the world of today doesn’t seem all that different.
“Even though it has been 30 years, in a way, it almost feels as if there hasn’t been much change in terms of the state of the world. But at the same time, you can also think about this story as one that is simply about the two characters’ problems and what they go through, the decisions they make. And in addition to that, these characters are affected differently by things like the class hierarchy that exists within society. So I feel as though that kind of story is certainly one that would resonate, even with the modern audience,” Maehiro says.
But even though Final Fantasy Tactics’ story is inherently political in its subject matter, Maehiro says the goal is not to nudge players toward a specific point of view. “Some stories touch on political themes, others may not. The pursuit of trying to create something that is compelling, something that really draws people in… that isn’t necessarily a feeling of wanting to push some sort of ideology. The goal is to be able to provide something good, and that people will be able to enjoy this game,” he explains.
Back to Ivalice
This tale of political intrigue, betrayal, and friendship takes place in a shared setting that spans several Square Enix games, including Final Fantasy 12 and Vagrant Story. It’s also the centerpiece of a raid in Final Fantasy 14’s Stormblood expansion. Alternately used to describe a kingdom, a region, and a world, Ivalice is a medieval-inspired place where magic and machinery coexist. (In other words, it’s the stuff of quintessential Final Fantasy.)
For Maehiro, having explored Ivalice through Final Fantasy Tactics early in his career at Square Enix, it’s something of a homecoming. “This project was the first time in a while that I was able to touch the world of Ivalice again. Through that, I really did feel as though the world is just so deep and so broad,” he explains. “This is something that I felt during Gamescom as well. I do know and feel that there’s such enduring popularity when it comes to Vagrant Story. So as someone who was involved in that project too, one day, I do truly hope that we do have a chance to be able to bring that game back as well.”
Naturally, Maehiro doesn’t have control over what games Square Enix decides to make in the future. Right now, the company doesn’t have any plans to return to Ivalice again, whether in the form of another remake or a new game. But if such a thing were to happen down the line, it sounds like he’d be game.
“So I, myself, definitely do have a hope of wanting to explore expanding the world of Ivalice. But at this time, unfortunately, that’s purely personal.”
