Naoki Yoshida has raised hopes about a new Final Fantasy Tactics title.
Now interestingly enough, this came up in conversation because The Gamer’s interviewer brought it up. Tactics fans should probably thank Gabrielle Castania for asking Naoki Yoshida, alongside Final Fantasy XVI: The Rising Tide DLC director Takeo Kujiraoka, as well as Square Enix localization director Michael-Christoper Koji Fox, about the prospect of making a new Final Fantasy Tactics based on Final Fantasy XVI.
OK so the thing is, all three agreed that using Final Fantasy XVI in particular would not be the best idea for a revival. Yoshida went on to elaborate:
“We have a lot of our staff who worked on previous games like Final Fantasy Tactics or Final Fantasy 12, so you’re going to have a lot of that [Tactics] feel because a lot of the same people are on the team. We’re very happy for you to suggest this because we’re all fans, but if we were going to make this, we wouldn’t want to do the same story that turns out to be a different story.”
So Square Enix would not want to just retell the same story as a tactical RPG. But Yoshida pointed out the bigger drawback, the technical aspect of doing so:
“How would we even do the Eikon versus Eikon battles in that style? If you have the Eikons, how many squares is an Eikon going to be? You have more people out there as well, so what about the wait time in between? … But the series does lend itself well to that kind of storytelling, and we love Tactics as well. It’s probably about time that we do a new one.”
So there you go. If Square Enix hadn’t been thinking about a Final Fantasy Tactics revival, a fan in the West just germinated that idea in them. But if they were going to do this, they need to address an earlier wrong first.
The first Final Fantasy Tactics released on the PlayStation in 1998, and received rereleases in PSP in 2007, and then mobile in 2011. Its immediate sequel, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, released on the GBA in 2003, and then the Wii U Virtual Console in 2016. Finally, Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift released on the DS only in 2007.
Final Fantasy Tactics clearly needs to get some modern rereleases, and preferably one that brings all the games as a multiplatform release. Its pretty wild that Tactics Ogre, the predecessor to Final Fantasy Tactics, and made by the same studio before they joined Square, already received that multiplatform rerelease before it.
But perhaps, Yoshida’s carefully worded statement is a hint that they already had something in the works that they may now be planning to reveal shortly.
