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[Thick Thighs Save Lives]

Via Noisy Pixel

To celebrate the 27th anniversary of the beloved Final Fantasy Tactics, the game’s director, Yasumi Matsuno, shared some early prototype images of the game’s development.

These images were previously shown during a live broadcast for the Final Fantasy XIV: Return to Ivalice event, but they were of lower quality and were not captured directly. These images are now much clearer to peruse.

Matsuno says that these images are from 1996, and the game was originally planned to be in the RTS style of Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen. However, these plans never came to fruition, ultimately leading to the final game. He also notes that the jaggedness of the presentation is due to the 256×224 resolution of the original PlayStation.

You can view these early images of Final Fantasy Tactics below:

 

[DonkeyPunchJr]

Wow that’s crazy, I had no idea they explored a completely different style for this game. Glad they changed direction, FFT is still the GOAT strategy JRPG.

 

[Arsic]

I like how this looks too.

Would’ve been a success either way I think.

 

[Deft Beck]

Great sprite work.

 

[Shifty1897]

This is a dead ringer for Bahamut Lagoon's graphics/art style

 

[Madflavor]

So FFT was a completely different game in 1996, and then they scraped and reworked the combat system and got it out the next year as one of the best TRPGs ever made.

Boy oh boy it's hard to imagine once upon a time how quickly games got developed and released.

 

[Valonquar]

Give me a modern FFT with the original's writing and dark tones with mechanical complexity and stat scaling like a Disgaea game.

 

[DonkeyPunchJr]

So FFT was a completely different game in 1996, and then they scraped and reworked the combat system and got it out the next year as one of the best TRPGs ever made.

Boy oh boy it's hard to imagine once upon a time how quickly games got developed and released.

Squaresoft released a new mainline FF game every 1-2 years and a shitload of other high quality JRPGs in between. Not to mention Enix, Capcom, Konami, Atlus, Working Designs, Sega, etc were all cranking out quality JRPGs as well. You couldn’t even keep up with them all if you tried.


I have to laugh when people are like “OMG there are 3 promising JRPGs releasing this year, it’s a new JRPG GOLDEN AGE!!!” Yeah right dude, you have a short memory if you think that. (And I swear I’ve heard people say this every year for the past 15 years at least…. the second coming of 90s Squaresoft is always just around the corner)

 

[IAmRei]

Wowowow, its also awesome.
If they go like these, i dont know how it will be success or not. Its radical changes, considering the final product. It has potential, the artstyle still awesome tho