There’s something special about Final Fantasy Tactics. It’s one of games where it’s difficult to ascertain and harder to elucidate, but it just has… . An X-Factor. A . I have vaguely fond memories of the game in general, but sitting down to play just 45 minutes of upcoming remaster The Ivalice Chronicles, it doesn’t take long for that secret sauce to sink its claws into me. I should play this whole thing, I think. I hadn’t really planned to play it in full again. But 45 minutes later, there I was – mentally rejigging my October weekend plans.
The key developers behind the remaster know what I mean. Both were too young to play a major role in the original version of the game, but both inherently understand. Remaster co-director Ayako Yokoyama wasn’t in the industry when the original arrived in 1997, while director Kazutoyo Maehiro was directly involved in the original, but only on a small piece of side content that actually wasn’t included in the English-language version.
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Fresh off work on Final Fantasy 16, which Square Enix public relations gurus strangely marked out as an off-limits topic of conversation in our sit-down, the two are now tasked with stewarding this remaster. Despite it being unmentionable, putting folk from FF16 onto Tactics makes an enormous amount of sense: the earthy tone of FF16 owes as much to the tales of the land of Ivalice as it does to Game of Thrones, to which it was more oft-compared. And in many ways, Final Fantasy Tactics’ hard-headed, heavy-hitting narrative lands better now than it did in 1997 – be that because of the serious issue of wild inequity in the world, paralleling Ivalice, or the more whimsical surging public interest in starchy medieval fantasy.
“Obviously, this game came out 28 years ago,” says co-director Ayako Yokoyama. “But the story is amazing, and I think that’s something we want people to experience. At the same time it is a strategy RPG, and maybe for more casual players that’s a little bit of a hurdle. It can even be hard for people who aren’t used to that type of game, but do like story-based RPGs.”