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The original Final Fantasy Tactics team was so committed to its goal of hitting 60fps that it actually scaled back ideas from its spiritual predecessor to get the game running at a consistent frame rate.
To promote the remastered Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, developers from the original Tactics team who are coming back to work on the re-release after almost 30 years reminisced on the classic strategy JRPG's production in an interview with Den-fami Nico Gamer (translated by Automaton).
Art director Hiroshi Minagawa recalled how he was personally very invested in getting FFT to run at a solid 60 frames per second after seeing it work for another PS1 Square Enix joint in the oft-forgotten Tobal No. 1.
FFT developers essentially started "working backwards" from there, and much of the game's art and design fascinatingly revolved around its ambitious frame rate target. For instance, the Tactics team apparently wanted to match the scale of Tactics Ogre, the cult strategy game that influenced much of FFT, "in terms of map size and character count," but Minagawa said the frame rate would suddenly drop "no matter what we tried." That explains why FFT had a shrunk five-person party limit compared Tactics Ogre's 10.
FFT and Tactics Ogre director Yasumi Matsuno was a little less tech-obsessed when it came to certain design decisions, though. "Having 10-character parties like in Tactics Ogre felt like too much," he explained. "Final Fantasy games at the time had parties of four or five, so we figured FFT should be an extension of that. And that just so happened to align perfectly with Minagawa's framerate concerns."
Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles comes to PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch on September 30 after literal years of rumors and wishful thinking.
