Square Enix recently confirmed the release of Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles. The remastered version of the acclaimed 1997 tactical RPG is set to launch on September 30 across major platforms. Ahead of launch, Final Fantasy Tactics’ original dev team shared some interesting insights about how the game was formed by the technical constraints of its era – as well as features the devs desperately refused to compromise on.
Speaking to Denfaminicogamer, FFT art director Hiroshi Minagawa says that he was fixated, if not obsessed, with the idea of getting the game to run at 60 frames per second. At the time, Square was developing multiple projects in parallel – one of which was Tobal No 1. Apparently, Tobal No 1.’s smooth 60 fps visuals struck Minagawa to the point that he decided he had to achieve the same in Final Fantasy Tactics.
From there, the team basically started “working backwards from their goal,” figuring out how to get by the limitations of the PlayStation. These efforts shaped both FFT’s visuals and gameplay – for example, to cut down their polygon count, they designed assets with as few rounded edges as possible. The 60 fps target was also the reason why the game did many things differently compared to its spiritual predecessor Tactics Ogre. “At first, we wanted something closer to Tactics Ogre in terms of map size and character count. But no matter what we tried, the framerate dropped to 30fps.” As a result, FFT downsized character parties to 5 characters instead of 10.
Interestingly, this change in specification contributed positively to the dev team’s goal of making Final Fantasy Tactics more palatable to RPG players not used to complex tactical gameplay. “Having 10-character parties like in Tactics Ogre felt like too much. Final Fantasy games at the time had parties of four or five, so we figured FFT should be an extension of that. And that just so happened to align perfectly with Minagawa’s framerate concerns,” FFT director Yasumi Matsuno explains.
But it didn’t stop at map size and character counts – Final Fantasy Tactics’ Charge Time (CT) mechanic was also shaped by the technical limitations of the PlayStation. To disguise the inevitable load time between inputting and executing the more difficult spells and summons, the developers turned this delay into a game mechanic. According to Matsuno, Final Fantasy Tactics “was a game that could only have been made at that time, on that hardware. Even if we tried to recreate it today, there’s no way it would turn out the same.”
Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles releases on September 30 for Steam, PS5/PS4, Xbox Series X❘S, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.
