The floor beneath Square Enix’s Tetsuya Nomura’s toes trembled. In his time since serving as character designer and visible director on Final Fantasy VII, his legend has grown considerably. In addition to engaged on almost each acclaimed Final Fantasy sport since Nomura additionally helped create the Kingdom Hearts collection and has change into a figurehead and luminary throughout the stacked ranks of Square Enix’s secure of builders. But this 2015 journey to Los Angeles, California, was completely different.
PlayStation’s E3 2015 livestream had simply revealed a teaser trailer that includes the long-lasting Final Fantasy VII protagonist, Cloud Strife, strolling by means of Midgar in wonderful, fashionable, HD graphics. The dream of so many – a remake of the traditional RPG – was lastly realized. The followers weren’t the one ones feeling the burden of the second, although, and it was now not simply the bottom that was shaking; it was Nomura’s complete physique.
“There were no staff members around, so I was kind of just off to the side, standing there alone,” Nomura says. “When I heard the cheers from the crowd and the passion, I became overwhelmed and I started shivering. I was walking like a fawn, just overwhelmed by the intensity of the crowd. I thought, ‘This has become such a big deal,’ and I wanted to cry.”
Meanwhile, collection producer Yoshinori Kitase was at his residence in Tokyo watching it on YouTube. “It still comes up on my ‘Videos You Should Watch,” he says with amusing. “Someone should have taken a video of you, like a reaction video and uploaded it to YouTube!”
“I don’t think we had that culture of reaction vids back then,” Nomura says. “If I knew, I would have taken it, but I might have been shaking mid-way through!”
The highway to this second was lengthy and arduous however one thing Nomura had dreamt of for years. Operating as a group of 1, Nomura had spent a part of the 2000s imagining what a contemporary remake of Final Fantasy VII may appear like. Unfortunately, not a lot progress was made since the remainder of the group members had been tied up with different initiatives.
Around this time, followers began clamoring for a modernized remake of Final Fantasy VII, and the builders started listening to about it from media members. Kitase, who has labored at Square Enix since 1990, serving as director on beloved video games like Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, the unique Final Fantasy VII, and Final Fantasy X, was inundated with questions throughout a collection of 2009 interviews.
“We were on the U.S. media tour for Final Fantasy XIII, and we took on a bunch of interviews, and we got a ton of questions from reporters asking, ‘When are we going to make a Final Fantasy VII remake?'” Kitase recollects. “Just hearing that so many times, I did think that we would do it one day, that’s for certain.”
Kitase returned to Tokyo and approached Nomura about making it a actuality. As two of the creators of the unique Final Fantasy VII, they seen the writing on the wall; fan and media demand was at a fever pitch, and Square Enix was starting to embrace the thought of recent remakes for traditional video games greater than ever earlier than. They knew they needed to act.
“Within Square Enix, gradually, remakes were being made, and these ideas for remakes were coming up in other departments,” Nomura says. “If we weren’t going to do Final Fantasy VII, others were going to do it, so we had to rise up and do it! We had the sense that we had to guard Final Fantasy VII and have to be the ones taking this on, or someone else is going to do it. I thought it may be a bit troublesome is other teams without us took on the project.”
Nomura and Kitase are a pair of legends throughout the Final Fantasy and Square Enix fandom, however they wanted assist to make it a actuality. To create the group, the duo tapped into Square Enix Creative Business Unit I, the group traditionally accountable for most of the most beloved Final Fantasy titles. Kazushige Nojima, who joined Square Enix in 1994, engaged on video games like Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and X, in addition to the Kingdom Hearts collection, and Motomu Toriyama, who joined Square Enix in 1995 and labored on the unique Final Fantasy VII along with Final Fantasy X, XIII, and extra, signed on to co-write the remake.
“I had always hoped to be a part of the title if and when a remake was to be made,” Toriyama says. “I was very happy when hearing the news [that we were making one].”
But the event group behind this challenge could not simply be members of the unique dev group; most had left the corporate or had been engaged on different initiatives. “I would say the majority of the dev staff and production members are those who were players of the original, not creators,” Toriyama says.
Motomu Toriyama and Teruki Endo
Two of these builders who began as followers of the Final Fantasy collection earlier than becoming a member of Square Enix are Naoki Hamaguchi and Teruki Endo. Hamaguchi joined Square Enix in 2003, engaged on titles like Final Fantasy XII and the XIII trilogy. After serving as challenge supervisor on the cellular title Mobius Final Fantasy, he joined the Remake group as a co-director. Endo bought his begin within the late 2000s at Capcom, working totally on the Monster Hunter collection, however when he heard a couple of remake for Final Fantasy VII, as a fan of the unique, he could not resist becoming a member of the group as battle director.
“I was working for another gaming company when I heard they were looking for members to be involved on the battle side of creating this game and felt like this was a great opportunity in which I could utilize the skills that I had gained thus far working in the industry,” Endo recollects.
With the core group assembled, Final Fantasy VII Remake was underway.
Naoki Hamaguchi
When a sport is as beloved as Final Fantasy VII, modernizing it with out alienating followers of the unique is usually a tough proposition; in case you hold issues too near the unique, then you do not sustain with the most recent traits, squandering the chance to create one thing distinct. Conversely, in case you put issues too far-off from the supply materials, you threat alienating those that made Final Fantasy VII so well-known within the first place.
According to Toriyama, the members of the group who skilled VII as followers, like Hamaguchi and Endo, are extra protecting of the supply materials than those that labored on the unique title. Kitase frightened these youthful employees members can be too loyal to the unique title, however his considerations eased as soon as the group began working collectively. “This concern was all for naught because this was clearly not true,” Kitase says. “We were able to work together very well and realize all of our visions and a game that can be accepted and enjoyed by contemporary users, so that was wonderful.”
“The top consideration, I believe, is that for both players who may not know Final Fantasy VII and those who do know or have played it, for both of these types of users to be able to play [Remake] and enjoy it,” Nomura provides.
The group labored collectively to steadiness the previous with the brand new, to create one thing that definitively retells the story of Final Fantasy VII with fashionable conventions whereas not going too far in both path. “For me, it really comes down to considering what it was that the players enjoyed and loved in the original title,” Endo says. “Of course, we expect a variance in each player’s depth and span of what they enjoy and the things that they love, but at the end of the day, I do have to trust my instincts and thoughts on what I loved and enjoyed playing the game.”
Teruki Endo
For Endo’s half – the battle system – he opted to mix motion with the extra conventional Active Time Battle (ATB) mechanics from the unique sport, through which characters can act as soon as a meter fills. The end result appeals to each new and longtime gamers. “Seeing that the Final Fantasy series has a strong focus on its characters, I believe the action enhances this and lets the players be further immersed into the characters they play,” Endo says. “Along with the strategic battles that I believe are key to Final Fantasy VII, I wanted to see how best I could mix these two elements of the command and strategy-based battle with the action that allows for instant immersion.”
Though Endo needed to introduce motion, his want to steadiness it with the standard ATB components struck a chord with Nomura. “I do have this idea of how Final Fantasy battles should be and should feel,” Nomura says. “We want to still keep this strategy element, in which the player will consider the elemental weaknesses of enemies during battle while using these action moves and being engaged, intact. That was always my core belief in how we should approach Final Fantasy battles. […] I thought this was truly vital to this game; I didn’t want it to be a game where it’s a reflex-type action or reflex-based battle; we wanted to combine all of these elements.”
For Hamaguchi, it was extra about eradicating limitations that exist for gamers when attempting to really feel as if they’re part of the world. “I do believe that, not just for RPGs, but for other fantasy-type titles as well, the trend will be such that it’ll be moving towards incorporating more action elements and that will be the trajectory of games overall,” Hamaguchi says. “It’s very much favored by contemporary players in that it creates a sense of immersion because players are able to receive this immediate response to the input from the controls. There’s this immediacy that brings about further immersion into the gameplay. Instead of viewing this fantasy world from the outside perspective as a player, you’re able to be fully immersed as if you are inside that world.”
“In that sense, I believe the Final Fantasy VII Remake series has this wonderful balance of all these elements,” Nomura provides. “It’s not quite completely action-leaning or action-focused, but it very skillfully combines these elements into a balanced and enjoyable, immersive experience.”
The battle system of Final Fantasy VII Remake garnered acclaim, but it surely’s not the one piece of the title that modified. The visible leap ahead is straight away recognizable, and the story obtained quite a few upgrades. Instead of retelling the whole Final Fantasy VII arc in a single sport, Square Enix opted to launch the remake within the type of three video games. The first title, Final Fantasy VII Remake, retold the get together’s preliminary push by means of Midgar – a bit of the unique that takes about 6 hours to finish – throughout a 30 to 40-hour title.
This determination got here from Nomura, who recognized early on that totally capturing the occasions of Final Fantasy VII in a contemporary approach and with sufficient depth to do the story justice would not be potential in its authentic one-game kind, to not point out the drastically completely different format the sport takes following the get together’s emergence from Midgar. “To recreate the world of Final Fantasy VII as it was in the original today in its full volume, the only way for us to realize this was to divide the titles or else it simply was not possible,” Nomura says. “We had to divide it, or we can’t do it right.”
Final Fantasy VII Remake’s prolonged keep in Midgar totally fleshed out characters beforehand relegated to minor roles like Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie and additional developed the personalities and relationships of the primary characters like Cloud, Tifa, Barret, and Aerith. “When the remake project was first decided, at that point, we had already felt that if we are going to take on this series, it’s imperative that we depict the characters much deeper,” Nomura says.
Final Fantasy VII Remake was launched on PlayStation 4 on April 10, 2020, incomes an 87 out of 100 on critiques aggregator Metacritic, together with an 8.75 out of 10 from Game Informer. And now, with the standard bar set excessive and fan expectations even increased, that very same group units out to push the well-known story ahead as Cloud and his mates step out of Midgar and enterprise into a large world stuffed with journey and intrigue within the second act of the Remake collection, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth arrives on PlayStation 5 on February 29. To study extra about Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, go to our unique protection hub by means of the banner beneath.
Parts of this text initially appeared in Issue 362 of Game Informer.
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