When Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chronicles launches later this year, the game will have been remade from a rebuild of the source code, officially confirming that the original was lost years ago.
Squaresoft is notorious for discarding source code for many of its PlayStation 1-era games, including Final Fantasy 8, which is one of the more mainline releases not to be preserved. At the time, the company didn’t realize the importance of game preservation, and few of its games were backed up after being shipped to the game presses. Similarly, much of the Final Fantasy 7 code was discarded.
“I’m embarrassed to admit it, but in some cases, we don’t know where the code is anymore. It’s very hard to find them sometimes, because back in the day you just made them and put them out there and you were done – you didn’t think of how you were going to sell them down the road. Sometimes customers ask, ‘Why haven’t you released that [game] yet?’ And the truth of the matter is it’s because we don’t know where it has gone,” former Square Enix President Yosuke Matsuda told Game Informer.
As Square Enix began to realize that they wanted to port older games to newer consoles, they realized it was impossible, as the source code was lost. Therefore, they created an internal program to rebuild them from scratch, rather than relying on emulation or reverse engineering, which were time-consuming and less accurate.
“Purists have the option to choose the Classic version, recreating the original as faithfully as possible, but crafting both it and the Enhanced version came with its challenges given the original master data and source code no longer exists. “This was simply the norm at the time,” explains Maehiro. “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.”
The classic version of Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chronicles uses a rebuild instead of an emulation. It is impressive to hear how much was able to be redone.
“That rebuild of the original produced the Classic version, which was then updated to create the Enhanced version. The hard work paid off, giving the team a solid foundation that all improvements and changes could stand on, allowing for granular quality of life refinements, such as an auto-save function, as well as adding elements that had to be dropped from the original, due to time,” a PlayStation Blog post confirms.
Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chronicles is set to launch for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2 on September 30, 2025.
