Diehard Final Fantasy Tactics fans waiting patiently for a remaster (or, you know, just official word that one is going to happen) have a new reason to be cautiously optimistic. In an interview with fan site Finaland, Theatrhythm Final Bar Line producer Ichiro Hazama let slip that "the Tactics team [at Square Enix] is incredibly busy at the moment."
Final Fantasy Tactics is 25 years old now, and other than some handheld editions (like a PSP remaster in 2007) it hasn't received much attention in the last decade—even as other games in the franchise are frequently being updated. It's also never been ported to PC, making it something of a white whale among Square Enix's library among FF fans who play on PC. "Hey, Square Enix: it's time to put Final Fantasy Tactics on PC already," PC Gamer features editor Wes Fenlon wrote in 2017.
Fans have sustained their hope through the huge (and surprisingly accurate—six out of nine Square Enix games to appear in the leak have subsequently been confirmed) Nvidia leak from 2021, which included a listing for Final Fantasy Tactics Remaster, and the recent releases of similar tactical RPGs including The Diofield Chronicle, Triangle Strategy, and Tactics Ogre: Reborn. If anything, Square Enix is embracing the genre with more gusto than it has in years.
The latest whiff of hope actually comes very indirectly, in a chat about Theatrhythm Final Bar Line, a rhythm action RPG coming to the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch next week. When asked whether fans can expect characters from Final Fantasy Tactics to be added to the game, Hazama said they'd first have to get permission "from the [development] team who owns Tactics," and that's apparently a problem right now.
"The Tactics team is incredibly busy at the moment, they have other things to do," Hazama said. "They are heavily involved in another project at the moment so we just don’t have time to talk to them. I think that’s probably why more Tactics characters haven’t been included in [Theatrhythm], we just need time to find out the details. I think that’s what is going on, at the very least with Tactics characters. I’m sure they will put them into the game, Fujiwara-san wants Tactics, I know that."
The inference is obvious: If there's a team at Square Enix dedicated to Final Fantasy Tactics, and they're too busy to answer the phone right now, then they have to be doing something else, right? And what else would it be? Because, you know, they're literally the Final Fantasy Tactics team.
Again, this is not by any means an official announcement, although it does come from an official Square Enix guy. But it does expand the pile of evidence that someday—someday pretty soon, even—Final Fantasy Tactics Remaster will finally become a real game.
