Back in June, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles director Kazutoyo Maehiro offered something of an explanation for why it's been more than a decade since FF Tactics has been playable on current platforms: Square Enix had lost the game's original source code.
At a recent PAX West 2025 panel on August 30, Maehiro offered additional details on how the devs of the Ivalice Chronicles remaster stitched together a replacement for the original FF tactics source code, and how we should all thank fan archivists for their contributions to that effort.
"It's true that we didn't have the source code," Maehiro said via translator. "The reason we didn't have that has to do with how we managed things at the time."
Today, Maehiro said, Square Enix has "some really nice resource management tools" that archive a new version of a game's code with every minute, daily update. But during the original development of Final Fantasy Tactics, the protocols were… a bit more lax, particularly while localizing the game in different languages.
"We would take the data from the Japanese version and overwrite the English data on it. And then if we wanted to do another language, we would just keep stacking data on top and overwriting and overwriting," Maehiro said. "Basically, because we kept doing all that overwriting, the true original ceased to exist."
That sound you hear is the collective shuddering of all the world's programmers.
While Square Enix didn't have to start from scratch for The Ivalice Chronicles, Maehiro said it was "difficult" to reassemble "the true original" of Final Fantasy Tactics from its PS1 release and its ports on PSP and mobile. Eventually, the Square Enix devs turned to the ultimate archival authority: the devoted sickos on Final Fantasy fan sites.
"We were using whatever resources we had available to us. We analyzed all those different versions to try and find what we felt was the original," Maehiro said. "On top of that, we actually went to different websites made by fans and looked for data there, because we know you guys do such a good job of keeping that all up to date."
After acknowledging the efforts of the "really good" engineering team that analyzed the various versions to reconstruct the ur-Final Fantasy Tactics, Maehiro offered his gratitude for fan archivists and game preservationists.
"I do want to thank all of the fans for all of their help in keeping that information archived like you do," Maehiro said. "I think with all of that put together, we were able to make a very good version of the game that is true to the original."
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