What do you mean? It's only been 17 years.
In a PAX East interview with TheGamer, Final Fantasy helmsman Naoki Yoshida (the well-loved Yoshi-P), FF16 DLC director Taeko Kujiraoka, and localization director Michael-Christopher Koji Fox showed some love for the long-dormant Final Fantasy Tactics series—though any kind of new Tactics entry still sounds a long way off.
One thing that doesn’t seem to be in the cards at all is using FF16’s setting as a jumping off point for a Tactics game. Yoshida said that “We wouldn’t want to do the same story that turns out to be a different story,” while Fox quipped, “What would we even call it? Final Fantasy 16 Tactics? That’s a lot.”
Yoshida also doubted that Final Fantasy 16’s signature Eikons (summons like Ifrit from previous games), as well as the large scale of its battles, could fit in a grid and turn-based format: “How would we even do the Eikon versus Eikon battles in that style? If you have the Eikons, how many squares is an Eikon going to be? You have more people out there as well, so what about the wait time in-between?”
Still, Yoshida says that the current Final Fantasy team members are “all fans” of the Tactics series, and offered a tantalizing bit of hope for FF Tactics’ future: “The series does lend itself to [Final Fantasy 16’s] kind of storytelling, and we love Tactics as well. It’s probably about time that we do a new one.”
A faint scrap for me and my fellow Tactics-likers, and I gotta wonder what a neo-Tactics would even look like in the current field. Indie devs basically have the market cornered on turn-based tactics games with grid maps, many of them deliberate homages to the Tactics series, while in the triple-A space XCOM’s gone on hiatus after revolutionizing the genre and Nintendo’s Fire Emblem series is loving life after Awakening began its modern era a decade ago.
Would a new Tactics game opt for a lower-cost, HD-2D riff on the classic games? Or would Square Enix go all in on massive production values? I think it will be some time before we find out either way. You can check out TheGamer’s full interview with Yoshida and company, which goes more in depth on Final Fantasy 16’s upcoming second DLC—a DLC we PC gamers might actually get to enjoy soon, given that work on the game’s PC port is “going smoother” than expected.
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