Final Fantasy Tactics, PlayStation game from 1998, is one of many popular titles in the Final Fantasy series. Later this month on September 30th, fans of the popular decades-old title are going to be able to play a brand-new remaster titled Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles. Square Enix, the developers behind the Final Fantasy games, recently shared some of the stories behind developing Final Fantasy: The Ivalice Chronicles, including losing the source code of the original game and having to rely on fan-made archives in order to lay the foundation for the remaster.
For Square Enix, retrieving and replicating the source code for their early titles has been a major issue. In an interview from 2019, Square Enix President and CEO Yosuke Matsuda admits that “in some cases, we don’t know where the code is anymore…back in the day you just made them and put them out there and you were done.”
One of these impacted titles was Final Fantasy Tactics. In June, 2025, game director Katsuyo Maehiro replayed the original 1998 game and struggled when attempting to port it to modern consoles. Maehiro explains that the game’s original source code and master data no longer existed due to the programming standards of the 90s. Since patching games or re-releasing them on different consoles was not a concept at the time, Square Enix was not concerned with keeping track of the game’s original source code. Furthermore, the game was originally programmed in Japanese, but that code was overwritten multiple times when the title was translated into other languages.
At a recent panel at PAX West 2025, Maehiro explains how the development team searched high and low for the source code of the original Final Fantasy Tactics while making the remaster Final Fantasy: The Ivalice Chronicles. The team played multiple iterations of the game in their search for the edition that most closely resembled the original. Additionally, they looked at fan-run websites which documented the game’s original data. Maehiro praised the fans who ran these archives, claiming that they “do such a good job of keeping all of that up to date.”