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Final Fantasy fans really love Final Fantasy - so much so that they're informal stewards of the games' source codes. It's been 28 years since Final Fantasy Tactics was originally released, and in order to remake the game for Final Fantasy Tactics - The Ivalice Chronicles (out next month), the team needed to account for one massive problem: they no longer had the source code from the 1997 game. 

At a panel at PAX West 2025, director Kazutoyo Maehiro explained that the reason why Square Enix no longer had the original source code for Final Fantasy Tactics boiled down to how that original source code was overwritten when the game was brought to audiences outside of Japan: "We would basically take that data from the Japanese version and overwrite the English data on it, and we wanted to do another language, we would keep just stacking on top and overwriting and overwriting," Maehiro began. 

"So we kind of went on a journey to find the original version, and we were using whatever resources we had available to us, so all those different versions would be analyzing what was there to try to find what we felt was the original. On top of that, we actually had to go to different websites made by fans and look for data there, because we know you guys do such a good job of keeping all of that up to date." 

I can't think of a more beautiful way for such a beloved game to be reintroduced to a new generation of gamers. 

Final Fantasy Tactics - The Ivalice Chronicles will be released on all platforms on September 30, 2025. 

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