Two months before Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles launches, PlayStation released new information regarding the challenging development.
In a new post on the PlayStation Blog (discovered by VGC), the development team behind the upcoming remake, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, detailed some of the additions they made to the remake to deliver a fresh experience to both new and returning fans of the series. The Game Director, Kazutoyo Maehiro, served as an Event Planner on the original title, and nearly 30 years later, he has returned as director.
Aside from retaining staff from the original title to maintain fidelity to the original, the development team encountered a few issues when attempting to utilize the original development materials from the 1997 release. While Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles offers fans the option to play the original or the remake from the menu (a good choice for purist players), the director notes that he couldn’t develop from the original source code, as it no longer exists.
Maehiro said, ”We didn’t have the kinds of effective resource management tools available today, and we developed games by essentially overwriting the previous code each time we fixed a bug or added a new language,” saying that it was “simply the norm at the time.” So while development proceeded on Ivalice Chronicles, the original source code for 1997 release had to be rebuilt to encapsulate the spirit of the original.
While Maehiro claims the team did have the option to use emulation to make things more streamlined, they elected to do the rebuild anyway. This was so the development team can make “granular refinements” as development continued, and although the remake is intended to be a remake, the team went this route to make it a better experience overall.
These granular refinements were achieved by adding quality-of-life improvements, such as Auto Save functionality, and by bringing back character dialogue that had to be cut from the original, which Maehiro had lamented for all these years. He said that this time, the development team added dialogues to the narrative to flesh out the experience as intended, another granular refinement for the fans.
Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles appears to be a labour of love for the development team, a labour that will land in stores on September 30.
