Fan Project Remakes Final Fantasy 7 As 2D Brawler
I’m about to say something weird, but bear with me. Suppose that Final Fantasy 7 happened, but it wasn’t made by Square. Instead it was created by Capcom and released as a fast-paced 2-D fighting game.
That’s the alternate reality some fans are creating in FFVII: Reimagined. The twist? It actually looks like it could work. The video shows a game that looks very fun to play.
Once FFVII: Reimagined is completed, every boss fight in the game will be re-rendered as a lightning-fast battle. You can control Cloud, Tifa, or both at once in co-op. Materia and summons will still be used, though how they’re implemented hasn’t been revealed yet. You can also call in Barret for offscreen help now and then.
Animation is very fluid and slick, moving like the best of the arcade fighters. The humans responsible, PD Design Studio explained the thought process: “We reimagined how the game would be like if it’s an action game. Classic 2D side-scrollers, such as Dungeons and Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara, Streets of Rage, etc., came to our minds. We thought about how we can incorporate some of the FFVII game play elements, such as Materia and summoning of Guardian Forces, into a Hack and Slash genre.”
You can play the game embedded in your browser at PD Design Studio’s website, or if that doesn’t work, you can download it to play on your PC. Whichever method you choose, you’d best do it quickly: Square has a nasty tendency to shut down projects like this whenever they get wind of them.