Final Fantasy Tactics - Development

Development

Final Fantasy Tactics was produced mostly by the team that made Ogre Battle and Tactics Ogre, and was Yasumi Matsuno's first project with Square following his departure from Quest in 1995. In an interview with Akito Inoue, an assistant professor at the International University of Japan, Inoue mentions that Final Fantasy Tactics was made because of how casual gamers are usually put off by games with branching storylines found in other Matsuno's titles such as Tactics Ogre.

Several historical and mythological references were altered by translators: for instance, the Norse World Tree, Yggdrasil, makes an appearance as Yugodorasil; the word "breath" is consistently rendered as "bracelet" in attack names; and Wiegraf's name is nearly homonymous with a character from Beowulf but rendered differently. The in-game tutorial function also shows examples of Engrish - poorly translated English - including lines such as "This was the darkened Items won't appear."

The game also includes references to several Final Fantasy specific characters, places, and situations from earlier games in the Final Fantasy series — Final Fantasy VII's Cloud Strife is a playable character, and through the "Proposition" system in bars scattered around the world map, treasures and lost areas such as "Matoya Cave" (a reference to the first Final Fantasy) and various colors of materia can be found. To keep with tradition, Olan's adoptive father, Cidolfas Orlandu, is nicknamed "T.G. Cid", and chocobos are present in the game as well. Additionally, most of the monsters appear in one Final Fantasy game or another, although the Lucavi are entirely new monsters altogether.