Final Fantasy Tactics - The Ivalice Chronicles director is a big PC gamer, and says he was 'very particular' about making sure they got the new UI just right
"They've actually done it: Not only can I finally play Final Fantasy Tactics on my PC, but this timeless classic has been done justice," begins our 91% review of The Ivalice Chronicles, the long, long-awaited remaster of one of the all-time great strategy games. As the developers at Square Enix have recently attested, pulling off the revival for PC and modern consoles has been no easy task, in part because the original source code no longer exists.
In a new interview with PC Gamer at the Tokyo Game Show last week, director Kazutoyo Maehiro went into more detail about the specific challenges of adding a new PC-friendly interface to a game designed for the original PlayStation.
"I myself play a lot of games on PC, so … I was very particular making sure we got it right," Maehiro said. "Tactics is a turn-based strategy RPG, so you might be playing it for a while. You'll spend a lot of time with your hands on the mouse and keyboard. One of the things I wanted to make sure was people wouldn't get tired from playing for extended periods of time. So when it came to that, it was a lot of discussions within the team: What kind of shortcuts could we have, what kind of ways can we make the mouse easier to use? We went through a lot of different iterations and discussions together to make that happen.
"We also looked at a lot of different strategy RPGs and RTS games as well. We would look at what kind of controls they're using, what's the standard that people have or what people are comfortable with, and we used that as a base to make what we have."
The Ivalice Chronicles producer Shoichi Matsuzawa added that Maehiro wasn't kidding about being particular. "Even down to the speed of the scrolling, he'd tell me 'the scroll's just a little bit off here,' and I was telling him 'we don't have time for this! The schedule does not allow for more adjustments.'"
The duo also discussed making sure the game worked well on the Steam Deck, though it's currently rated Playable rather than Verified due to some small text. That was a deliberate trade-off—they decided they weren't willing to sacrifice any of the important information they needed to fit onto the screen.
Our TGS interview also covers updating Final Fantasy Tactics' script to support its newly added voice acting without losing any of its sharp political commentary, as well as the archeological process of digging through the game code from past releases to cobble together this definitive version.