Kazutoyo Maehiro is feeling the pressure. Nearly 30 years after working on the original version of Final Fantasy Tactics—one of the role-playing series’ most adored games—he’s returned to pilot a remake of the game, switching titles from events planner to director. Besides that, little has changed, including how Maehiro himself thinks about game design.
“Really, the approach that we wanted to take was modernizing [Final Fantasy Tactics],” he tells WIRED via a translator. “Players today expect a higher standard.”
When the game launches on Nintendo Switch systems, PlayStation 4/5, Steam, and Xbox Series X/S on September 30, players won’t notice a major overhaul. Instead, the $50 update will feature some tweaks to the game’s interface, plus some additional dialog and voice work.
By and large, Final Fantasy Tactics—The Ivalice Chronicles (it was given this new name to distinguish it from the older version) will be the same game that players of the original will remember. Battles are turn-based, played out on a boardlike map that requires strategizing about moves and countermoves. Characters serve different roles, such as healing or offense, that they switch between by assuming different “jobs.” Ramza, the game’s lead character, lives in a medieval-inspired society dealing with the aftermath of a war that’s left an insurmountable gap between the rich and the poor. People are judged based on the honor of their house names; lowborns are treated as less than human. Desperation pushes people beyond basic morality.
For a game that was originally released in 1997—a year that included hits like GoldenEye 007, Star Fox 64, and Final Fantasy VII—it was an ambitious story that stepped outside of playful heroics or black-and-white stories of good versus evil.
“That even 30 years later this game is still something that resonates—I think it speaks to just how compelling that story really was,” Maehiro says.
When the original game was first in development, Maehiro says that writer Yasumi Matsuno was keenly interested in the class structure of medieval Europe. The story delves into the politics and pains of an aristocratic hierarchical system in a time of kings and knights. Ramza hails from a noble family, while his best friend Delita is lowborn. The childhood friends are separated after a tragic event and eventually find themselves on opposite sides of a war where nobles and peasants clash amid religious corruption and claims to the throne.
But Final Fantasy Tactics has always been more than a fantasy tale. Matsuno wrote it against the backdrop of late-1990s Japan, a time of economic and cultural turmoil. “The collapse of Japan’s bubble economy engulfed the nation’s financial institutions in mountains of bad debt, triggering a wave of corporate bankruptcies, a sudden and extreme rise in unemployment rates, and stagnation of Japanese society as a whole,” he wrote on X shortly after the remake was announced. “It was an era when many were robbed of hope, when dreams were measured by their price tag.”