With the Final Fantasy 7 remake’s release coming soon the excitement for the update of this iconic PS1 classic is reaching fever pitch.
Today, a demo for the new game has released on the PlayStation Store so you too can get the game in your hands and see what all the fuss is about.
I recently had some hands-on time with the remake of one of the most anticipated games of 2020, and after playing it for a few hours I was very impressed by what I saw .
At the Final Fantasy 7 preview, I was lucky enough to sit down with the game’s producer Yoshinori Kitase, known for his work on legendary titles such as Chrono Trigger as well as FF6, FF7, FF8 and FF10.
I also spoke with co-director of FF7 Remake Naoki Hamaguchi who worked on the FF13 trilogy.
(Image: Square Enix)
Why remake Final Fantasy 7 as opposed to making a sequel like Final Fantasy 7-2?
Yoshinori Kitase: After we released the first Final Fantasy seven we did a lot of spin-offs. We did Advent Children and other sequels and spin off games. And the image that most people have of these kinds of Cloud and Sephiroth is from those, actually with a more realistic portrayal and with speaking voices. And the original story for the original Final Fantasy 7 is still kind of left behind somewhat with the PlayStation one standard of old-style graphics.
Naoki Hamaguchi: I kind of felt that there was a need to update that to the latest technology and the latest graphics to show that original story in order to make Cloud and several of them entail something that would stand the test of time. We would still be loved by people in another 20 years’ time.
Why remake the game in sections rather than do it as a complete game?
Yoshinori Kitase: We sat down to work out how to approach the remake, we realised very early on in order to recreate all of the aspects and elements from the original Final Fantasy 7 using this modern level of technology. Modern game development would take huge amount of time and a lot of game data and a lot of work basically a lot of volume of content.
So it kind of became obvious that there were two options on how we could handle that. First of all, we would put everything into one game, but it would be chopped up, like a digest of the original story probably wouldn’t be quite as satisfactory as it should be.
The other option was to concentrate fully on putting everything in the story and every moment in there fleshing that out. But of course, that would then have to be in more than one game. We basically decided the second option was by far the best way to go.
(Image: Square Enix)
How divergent from the original plot is the remake? And how can you keep the story fresh and exciting?
Yoshinori Kitase: The story itself up until the escape from Midgar really does stick quite closely to the original Final Fantasy 7 storyline. Where the additions and extras have been added in is with this extra level of reality and the depth to how the characters are shown.
There’s a lot more picking up on those characters and showing the drama between them. Cloud, Sephiroth, Arieth, Tifa and all of these guys and really fleshing out their stories and how they are portrayed.
The other problem of the new content is saying some of the sub characters you really been given more of a role – more personality. You see lots of extra story sections and background details.
The other thing of course is to stand as the story as a standalone story, just the end of Migar works as a single game. We’ve actually had a number of changes in the rearrangements of the game to give it a really big climactic feel to the end, obviously, that the balancing of the placing of the boss fights and the character growth and everything has been tweaked, adapted to work with that rhythm and big climax at the end.
So even though it’s a story people may know, you still feel really new and fresh and unique to people who played the originals.
(Image: Square Enix)
Did the limitations of the 32-bit original make it easier or harder to remake? Because obviously you have the basis for design, or does it make it more difficult if things just don’t work when you add that layer of realism?
Naoki Hamaguchi: I mean, certainly the construction of the original partners there, we looked a lot of the design documents from the original game where we set out doing a remake. And it wasn’t really a case of sitting down to say, “Well, this is what we couldn’t do with the original so we’re definitely going to put that in now we have to do this because it wasn’t possible then.”
It’s very much about how we handled the stuff that was in the original game. But of course, I think the visual part of it, in some ways the player had to fill it with their imagination. When it was convenient for the way that you presented games in those days, the way the storytelling happened. Obviously, there was a lot of that in there.
That style of filling in the gaps of the imagination works brilliantly in that kind of game with that kind of presentation from those days. But what we’re aiming for with this much more realistic portrayal of Final Fantasy 7 in the remake, it all comes down to the concept of immersion and a lot of those abbreviated kind of like as a more indirect storytelling and presentation tools in the original game don’t really work so well. They feel a bit weird in the modern presentation.
So for example, the time the idea of time in the game, there’s the original if we work when we started building out, we kind of worked out that the progression of time, where Cloud is at any one point, is kind of abstract and is it said. He looks like he’s active for days on end right up until the middle of the Shinra building he just like keeps going without sleeping now feels very weird when you consider it in a modern realistic way.
So we really did try and keep that immersion in the game by fleshing out all those extra sections, adding that in there. And of course, that means there’s a lot more volume in there now. But because we have that freedom, we set out to make the game in as a whole level of volume, standalone, fun fancy, we were free to put all that extra stuff in and we felt that the fans wanted to see anyway, they really worked out to be really satisfying experience in that way. So it was great for you. Let’s do that and I think he’s got a really good result because we have managed to out them actually realism.
If you could remake any other Final Fantasy game in the series, which one would it be?
Yoshinori Kitase: Okay, first of all don’t report this as confirmed. If I were given the opportunity. The first Final Fantasy that I ever worked on in my career was Final Fantasy 5. So would be really nice maybe to go back to that one day.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake will be out 10 April 2020 on PS4 but with other episodes coming at a later date.
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