Square Enix has a strange story to tell about Final Fantasy Tactics.
It’s only been a few months since Square Enix announced Final Fantasy Tactics: Ivalice Chronicles. This is a remaster of the 1997 tactical RPG game.
Prior to now, the game had only been available on the PlayStation, and then the PlayStation Portable in 2007. The remaster is coming to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows at the end of this month.
Who Said Square Enix Lost The Source Code?
You will be surprised to learn this, but this comes from Square Enix themselves. In an interview on the Square Enix website, Director Kazutoyo Maehiro said this:
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.
… We analyzed a number of existing versions of the game and reconstructed the programming of the original, but there were also times where we played the original game and worked it out by feel alone…
A lot of gamers took this as evidence that Japanese game companies don’t take care of their code. And some also took it as proof that individual gamers are right to get their hands on this code, regardless of how they get access to it.
However, there’s a new detail that adds a new twist to this narrative.
What Does “Lost” Even Mean?
Maehiro – yes, the same Maehiro from the first interview – spoke about this situation again at PAX West. Popverse’s Jules Chin Greene wrote this report:
At a panel at PAX West 2025, director Kazutoyo Maehiro explained that the reason why Square Enix no longer had the original source code for Final Fantasy Tactics boiled down to how that original source code was overwritten when the game was brought to audiences outside of Japan…
As it turns out, Maehiro’s statements was completely misunderstood. They didn’t ‘misplace’ Final Fantasy Tactics code per se. They overwrote it without thinking of making a backup of the original.
It’s wild to think that this misconception went on for so long until Maehiro spoke up again.
Only, that isn’t what happened either.
Maehiro already said this in the original interview from June 2025. To quote him from this earlier interview:
…This isn’t to say that they were mishandled or poorly managed or anything like that – keeping that kind of data wasn’t a normal thing to do at the time.
In those days, we didn’t have the sort of robust resource-management tools that exist today, and on top of that, the production workflow for the game was such that the Japanese version was produced first, and then we would create localized versions by overwriting the data with that of other languages, including English.
There was also no such thing as online patches or updates, so unless there was any major reason to do something different, once you’d made the game, that was it.
So, I think it’s fair to say that developing this game without any master data or source code was the biggest challenge.
Someone Has Been Spreading The Story They Want To Tell…
Obviously, Square Enix should have made their own backups to their data. This was a mistake they recognized in hindsight.
But fans ran with the story that Japanese game developers don’t hold onto their original production materials at all. In this particular instance, that claim is hearsay.
It only takes misinterpreting what someone said to spread misinformation. And we wonder if there were people who intended to spread misinformation.
Square Enix Is Thankful To Their Fans Anyway
In spite of this willful misinformation, Maehiro did confirm that the loyal fans did play a role in this remaster. To quote his newer interview from PAX East:
…So we kind of went on a journey to find the original version, and we were using whatever resources we had available to us, so all those different versions would be analyzing what was there to try to find what we felt was the original.
On top of that, we actually had to go to different websites made by fans and look for data there, because we know you guys do such a good job of keeping all of that up to date.
Maehiro confirmed they went to fan websites only now. And now he has set the record straight.
