‘Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles’ Makes “Tweaks To Almost The Entire Script”, But Not Because Of “Current Events Or The Zeitgest”
According to returning Final Fantasy Tactics writer Yasumi Matsuno, while the Square Enix SRPG’s upcoming The Ivalice Chronicles remaster will make a number of tweaks to its original script, none of them have anything to do with ‘modern sensibilities’.
During a recent interview with German video game news site JPGames, Matsuno was met with the observation that “The English trailer announces ‘story adjustments,’ while the German trailer promises ‘additional dialogue,'” to which he was then asked, “Will there be any other adjustments due to current events or the zeitgeist? Can you give us an example?”
In turn, the writer clarified, “Not particularly, no. The concept behind the development for this title was just to present everything that was so fun and interesting about the original 1997 PS1 game in an updated format.”
“It’s kind of like the difference between a novel and a play,” Matsuno further elaborated. “It’s the difference between text that you follow with your eyes and text that you hear with your ears. The former needs to be easier to read, and in Japanese, that’s partly assessed according to how pretty the characters look written down, and that includes things like the balance between hiragana (plain, phonetic characters) and kanji (pictographic characters based on Chinese script).”
“The latter leaves room for the performer and seeks to show off their talents to the greatest extent, sometimes at the expense of readability and aesthetic beauty,” he added. “The result of this is that we have made tweaks to almost the entire script. That is to say that we shifted to a ‘listening-first’ approach in order to support the new voice acting implementation.”
However, Matsuno ultimately admitted, “In all honesty, I’ve grown older since I first wrote the script for this game, and my perceptions have changed accordingly. There may well be some minor changes to how certain lines are phrased that reflect this.”
“If my writing technique has improved, then that’s great, but if it’s just that I’ve got older and my sense of perception has grown dull, then I’m sorry,” he laughed as he wrapped up his answer.
Notably, should players find themselves unsatisfied with Matsuno’s updated script can play The Ivalice Chronicles‘ ‘Classic Version‘, which “unites the graphics and gameplay of the original 1997 version with the renowned War of the Lions translation [as originally released in 2007 for the SP].”
As detailed by returning director Kazutoyo Maehiro in his own interview with JPGames, this distinct experience came about because while The Ivalice Chroinicles dev team primarily set out “to make an Enhanced version that featured all new voice acting throughout and an overhauled UI”, they also recognized that “at the same time, there are surely fans of the original who feel that it doesn’t need a lot of extra polish.”
“This is a title that means a lot to fans, so they don’t want it to be ruined by heavy-handed developers which is faithful to the original and yet modern,” he said. “And I have felt this way about a number of remastered titles that have been released in the past. There are a huge number of fans who have felt love for Final Fantasy Tactics for many years, so we knew that it was also important for us to create a Classic version of the game based on the original.”
At current, Final Fantasy: The Ivalice Chronicles is set to begin its heretics journey on September 30th.
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