>>211886836This tech retardation was in the 90s, the Final Fantasy cases I'm talking about came from the 90s. These were people in their late 20s and early 30s too, in a company where there was nobody over the age of 40 working. There's no "elder japanese boomers want things the old way" excuse. As someone with a passionate interest in the series I found out it was an Iranian doing the programming heavy lifting for them.
This is not to mention that in the early 2010s they tried having their own in-house engine for Final Fantasy, it became a completely buggy and unusable mess, and then finally caved and switched to Unreal.
From what understand Nintendo actually does good data retention and version control. Which is why Square sniffed around and hassled them for the old source code for Legend of Mana.