Square Enix‘s Ryoma Araki, director of the upcoming remaster of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, did an interview with Destructoid. There, Araki revealed why the decision was made to remove offline multiplayer from the game. You can see what Araki said about the matter in full down below.
“I believe players of the remaster will enjoy the same multiplayer user experience as they did back in the day with the original game. Three of the four platforms that this game will be released on are portable, so even if all four players play on different hardware, they can play together in the same location, or even if they’re physically far apart. Multiplayer was made so that players can choose how to play depending on their gameplay style. The game didn’t mesh well with local play that would restrict it to one platform, and implementing both a cross-platform feature and a local play feature may be a challenge for us to tackle in the future.”