Popverse's top stories

• DC has unveiled a major new Wonder Woman villain over two years in the making, co-created by one of James Gunn's top writers
• Simon Kinberg on writing X-Men movies, producing Glenn Powell's The Running Man remake, and co-creating Star Wars Rebels [Popversations]
• Livestream Monster Hunter Wilds, Borderlands 4, Magic: The Gathering x Spider-Man, and more PAX West 2025 panels live

As opposed to now, when most games shipped in the 90s, that was the end of development. Aside from the occasional DLC, the team behind most single-player games would move on to something new at the end of development. However, most games don’t have the legacy of Final Fantasy Tactics and most developers aren’t Kazutoyo Maehiro and Hiroshi Minagawa. The two Square Enix icons have been entrenched in the Final Fantasy series for nearly 30 years before they worked on the forthcoming Final Fantasy Tactics remake.

On the top floor of a Seattle hotel, surrounded by promotional material from upcoming Square Enix games and far from the bustle of PAX West, I sat down with Maehiro and Minagawa and dug deep into the development history of Final Fantasy Tactics and what players could expect to get from the new remake. They revealed a development process that spans years and began not with a board meeting where executives try to find a nugget of fan nostalgia to mine for more money but a genuine love for the game that they helped create.

“The true start of the project does actually start quite a few years ago,” Kazutoyo Maehiro, the Director of Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chronicles, explained to me. “So, you might be aware, a few years ago, Final Fantasy XIV, our MMORPG, had some crossover content now called Return to Ivalice, which had content from a couple of different games within the world of Ivalice… So, during the time that that content was coming out, the two of us actually had the chance to play through the original Final Fantasy Tactics as part of a live stream that was basically celebrating the crossover content. And so when we were playing the original Final Fantasy Tactics, we all affirmed and realized how great the game was. And I think the thought from us was, ‘He we’d really like to bring this to modern consoles.’ And from there, we just went further and further into creating it into an official project.”

For those keeping track, the Return to Ivalice content for Final Fantasy XIV came out in 2017, so this has been a labor of nearly eight years for both Maehiro and Hiroshi Minagawa, who came back as Art Director in the remake. Why did it take so long? Aside from the reports that the original game files for Final Fantasy Tactics were lost to time, forcing the team to recreate much of the game from scratch, everyone largely had other projects to work on. Maehiro explained to me that their engineers were diving into the original Final Fantasy Tactics to try to recreate the code around the same time that he and many of the key staff were working on Final Fantasy XVI. “So once [Final Fantasy] XVI wrapped, we merged with the other staff who were working on The Ivalice Chronicles, and from there we went into full swing for development.”

The love both these men share for Final Fantasy Tactics was palpable throughout our conversation. Maehiro described the original as a “very, very complete game” that remains “one step up” from other titles in the tactical RPG genre. When trying to recreate the look and feel of the original, Minagawa said that the whole team had to dive back into what made the original great. “This game is a remaster, and so with those types of projects, it’s really important to first be able to understand the original game… and really understand what it is that we can change and what we can’t, and deciding on what that is early is critical. And so, as we were thinking about remastering this game, it was really, really important for us to actually understand and research and analyze the original game as well. This might seem very obvious, but that sort of step is very important. It was also very challenging for us as well.”

Both cited the fandom around Final Fantasy Tactics as a blessing and a curse. As Minagawa put it, “There’s also many players who might still be playing the game even today, the original game today, and it felt as though maybe those players might even be more familiar or in tune with how the game actually is. And so, of course, that’s something that made me very happy, but it also felt a little bit intimidating too.”

“One other thing I am really thankful for is all of our fans and all the websites they have,” Maehiro added. “The list of all the different details and different texts and I think in bringing back the original experience, that was an extremely big help for us and it really supported us, so I am thankful for that as well.” So well done to all the fan wikis and strategy guides you've all written over the years - you helped make the Final Fantasy Tactics remake happen.

The loss of the original data meant that it might have been easier to take this remake in a totally new direction, similar to how Final Fantasy VII Remake has been. However, because the tactical RPG genre is a bit more niche, Maehiro wanted to keep this project as close to the original as possible. “We wanted to keep it a little bit more simple,” he told me. “So we decided to use the original game as the base and bring that back. And I think that by developing it in that way, we felt that we could widen the overall strategy RPG genre, maybe bring it to more people. And I think, with that in mind, that was one of the goals that we wanted to achieve, and so that’s the direction we took.”

The isometric view of Final Fantasy Tactics is one of the original’s most defining features and it also played a role in why Square Enix didn’t want to make too many changes to the remake. “When it comes to game design, especially when it comes to graphic directions,” Minagawa said, “Of course, we also did have options or possibilities, for example, to take the pixel artwork or the characters and maybe raise the character proportions or decrease it, stylize them accordingly. But Final Fantasy Tactics was a game that’s really built with the isometric, pixel-based, block-based style, and it’s a strategy RPG that’s based off of that. And so when we’re recreating the original game, the sort of thinking that we had was that the character proportion of the game as it was, would be the best format.”

Any changes, Minagawa stressed, to the character design or artwork would interfere with the gameplay itself. Minagawa was also the Art Director for Final Fantasy XVI, which did have more 3D rendered, realistic-looking characters, and he explained that the retro, pixel art style really differs from the way games are made today. “So when it comes to creating or designing pixel-based games, it’s one of those formats or aesthetics where the creators’ intentions really do come across very clearly against each of the dots that are shown because there’s always a very intentional or conscious decision that gets made about whether or not I should place a pixel here. And so, compared to, for example, more realistic renderings of characters, which typically actually involve texturizing and adding all these different noises, I do feel this format is one where that intention really does matter, and it comes to the forefront. And so, I think from a game design perspective, just that sort of intentionality and taking something that originally is abstract and making it more clear, it just reads much more clearly.”

Technological advancements can be a burden for developers as well. After all, there aren’t many people who are going to play Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chronicles on a CRT TV like most people did in 1997. That can have a surprisingly big impact on how a game looks. “With this game, if you wanted to be able to replicate how the game looked, especially when we were thinking about the development of the classic portion of the game, we wanted to make sure that the look kind of matches the way that players would’ve experienced the game through more of a CRT monitor. And so if you were to use, for example, the same data and just process it normally, we felt that that might actually be a little bit unnatural, so we had to make adjustments to ensure that what is actually shown on screen matches the way things displayed at the time. Because, with the CRT monitor, the way that it just processes that information does compress a little bit of the final output as well.”

“It was less about making the exact same visual look and more about creating that same impression,” Maehiro added.

Of course, I couldn’t let the pair leave without quizzing them on what other RPGs might get a remake or a remaster treatment from Square Enix in the coming years. Though they were keen not to give away any specific plans, Minagawa admitted that Vagrant Story would be his choice. Maehiro instead chose to turn the question around on me, asking which game I would like to see remastered. The answer was easy – Chrono Trigger.

“Yeah, Chrono Trigger is obviously such a popular game, and I know that there’s a ton of fans worldwide,” Maehiro agreed. “We did put it out on Steam at one point, but it was more of a port than a remaster, but even so, when that came out, we heard even more people talking about, ‘Hey, we want more than this. We want the full remake or remaster treatment.’ I myself am a big fan of the game as well, so I think from that perspective too, I would really love to see it happen.”

Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chronicles is out on September 30, 2025.

This interview was conducted with the help of two translators and has been edited for clarity.

The gaming industry has come a long way since Pong blew all our minds in the 70s. We've got everything you need to know about the next big thing in games. Of course, Grand Theft Auto VI is going to be the big game of 2026, but there are plenty of other games coming out between now and then. Here is our starter guide for every gamer:

• All upcoming games in 2025 and beyond
• Gamify My Life, our weekly gaming column designed
• Popverse Picks: The best Assassin's Creed protagonists
• How to play every GTA game in order
• Why the GTA 6 budget isn't as crazy as you think
• The Magic: The Gathering x Spider-Man crossover set wouldn't exist without the Spider-Verse

And be sure to check Popverse regularly for the latest gaming news.