Final Fantasy Tactics Devs Reveal How 60 FPS Goal Shaped the Game’s Core Design

With Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles on the horizon, original developers are sharing details about the design choices that shaped the classic tactical RPG. In a recent interview with Denfaminicogamer, translated by Automaton Media, the team discussed how PlayStation's hardware limitations defined the game.

A core goal from the start was hitting a consistent 60 frames per second. Art director Hiroshi Minagawa pushed for this framerate after seeing Tobal No. 1 run at 60 fps on the same console. To make this happen, the team essentially "worked in reverse," tweaking every game element to fit the PlayStation's capabilities.

This framerate goal directly influenced the game's scale and mechanics. The team initially aimed for map sizes and character counts similar to Tactics Ogre, but ran into performance issues.

“At first, we wanted something closer to Tactics Ogre in terms of map size and character count. But no matter what we tried, the framerate dropped to 30fps.” — Hiroshi Minagawa

So, Final Fantasy Tactics ended up with a five-character party limit, a cut from Tactics Ogre's ten. This decision helped performance but also made the game feel more familiar.

“Having 10-character parties like in Tactics Ogre felt like too much. 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.” — Yasumi Matsuno

Even the Charge Time system, a signature battle mechanic, came from a technical need. It was designed to hide hardware delays during spell and summon animations, turning a technical challenge into a key gameplay feature. These design choices show how unique the original Final Fantasy Tactics was to its development era.

“[Final Fantasy Tactics] was a game that could only have been made at that time, on that hardware. Even if we tried to recreate it today, there's no way it would turn out the same.” — Yasumi Matsuno

Source:

automaton-media.com

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