Square Enix’s tactical RPG masterpiece, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, is arriving on September 30, 2025, for PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X, Switch 1 and 2, and PC. But the highly anticipated remaster — or remake, to be precise — has one glaring caveat. Square Enix admits they have lost the original Final Fantasy Tactics source code entirely, which forced the team to rebuild the game from scratch. And because of this, additional content from a later version will also not be included.
“There were a number of major challenges, but all of them stemmed from the fact that the master data and source code from the original game no longer existed,” Final Fantasy Tactics remake director Kazutoyo Maehiro said explaining the team’s biggest development hurdle in an official Square Enix interview. The loss wasn’t due to mishandling, but the result of outdated development practices in the ’90s when data preservation was rarely a concern, he clarified.
“[…] Keeping that kind of data wasn’t a normal thing to do at the time. […] Unless there was any major reason to do something different, once you’d made the game, that was it,” said Maehiro.
To overcome the source code issue, the team essentially had to completely reverse-engineer Final Fantasy Tactics. They referenced various existing builds and even manually reprogrammed segments by ‘feel’ alone. Maehiro likened the work to porting an ‘old arcade game to the NES.’
But this issue isn’t unique to Final Fantasy Tactics: Ivalice Chronicles remake. At E3 2011, Kingdom Hearts director Tetsuya Nomura said the team needed to ‘recreate everything’ for HD 1.5 Remix. Square Enix President Yosuke Matsuda had to ’embarrassingly’ admit it had a longstanding policy of destroying source codes post-release during an interview with Game Informer.
There’s another aspect that serves as a gut-punch to long-time fans. Those hoping for additional content from The War of the Lions PSP port should prepare to be disappointed. Maehiro and his team intentionally chose not to rebuild Ivalice Chronicles from that version, opting instead to stick to the original systems. Yep, that means no Balthier, Luso, Onion Knight, and Dark Knight, or even internationally cut-contents like Zodiac Brave Story sound novel in this remake.
“[…] The original version of Final Fantasy Tactics is a very complete game both from a game design and story perspective. If we were to make major changes, it would only be a loss for not only fans of the original game, but also those new to the title,” argued Maehiro. This is in spite of the fact that the original writer Yasumi Matsuno contributed ‘new character conversations’ specifically for the remake.
Sure, the remake still looks promising, but it’s hard to admit that all of this doesn’t sound disappointing. After all, Square Enix might’ve been the one that lost the original Final Fantasy Tactics source code. But it’s longtime fans who’ll actually feel what’s missing.
