The newest Final Fantasy game is releasing later this month, and it turns out developer Square Enix had to turn to the fans to make the dream of Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles a reality. The Ivalice Chronicles is a remaster of the fan-favorite Tactics game, and, as it turns out, the fans were ultimately responsible for the development of the game.
During a panel interview at PAX West 2025, director Kazutoyo Maehiro explained that Square Enix no longer had the source code for the original game, and they had to seek the help of fans, saying: "we actually had to go to different websites made by fans and look for data there." Maehiro also explained how the popular developer lost the source code to the original game (via Popverse).
As it turns out, the original source code for FF Tactics was overwritten when the game was brought overseas from Japan, with Maehiro explaining: "We would basically take that data from the Japanese version and overwrite the English data on it, and we wanted to do another language, we would keep just stacking on top and overwriting and overwriting." That led to the original version needed for the...
