Square Enix has acknowledged that the remaster was made possible thanks to the dedication of fans!

In June, Maehiro Kazutoyo, director of Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, explained why it took more than a decade for the game to return to modern platforms: Square Enix had lost the original source code. During a PAX West panel on August 30, Maehiro revealed more details about how the developers built a replacement for the lost code and emphasized the role of fan archives that made the remaster possible.

“It’s true that we didn’t have the source code. The reason lies in our work methods at the time. Nowadays, Square Enix has robust resource management tools that archive a new version of a game’s code every minute and update it daily. But back when Final Fantasy Tactics was developed, the protocols were much looser. We would take the data from the Japanese version and overwrite the English data. If we wanted to add another language, we would just stack data on top and overwrite it again and again. Because of that constant overwriting, the original version no longer existed.

We used every resource available to us. We analyzed all the different versions to reconstruct what we considered the original. We also searched fan-made websites for data, knowing how diligently you keep those archives updated. I want to thank all the fans for their help in preserving this information. With all that, I believe we created a version that truly honors the original,” Maehiro said.

Although Square Enix didn’t have to start entirely from scratch, Maehiro admitted it was challenging to piece together the genuine version of Final Fantasy Tactics from the PlayStation 1 release and the PSP and mobile ports. In the end, they turned to the ultimate archive: the dedicated communities on Final Fantasy fan sites. And it worked.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is scheduled to launch on September 30 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch 2, PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch.

Source: PCGamer