Here’s What Made Square Change Their Minds About A Final Fantasy 7 Remake
The creative team at Square-Enix behind Final Fantasy 7, or what was left of it, has repeatedly denied requests to remake the game with better graphics than 1997 could offer, and introduce a new generation of gamers to one of the series’ best cast of characters. They’ve claimed it would be too big a project, that it would be impossible to include everything in high-poly 3D without spending a trillion dollars, etc. What now made them suddenly think otherwise?
The director of the Final Fantasy 7 remake, Tetsuya Nomura, conducted a Q&A with the website Eurogamer where he was asked this very question. The truth turned out to be that the subject of the remake had been brought up repeatedly, but they’d decided against it time and time again. What made them change their minds was……a midlife crisis.
“The talks about making this remake, internally it’s been mentioned on and off,” Nomura said. “Sometimes we think we can do it, and then sometimes we think maybe we can’t. Considering some of the original staff, like Kitase, he’s acting as producer, and [Kazushige] Nojima, he’s doing the script – we’re all getting older! If we keep going like this, the thought occurred to us that we might have to pass this on to a younger generation, without the original developers taking part. It doesn’t seem like such a grand intention, but we wanted to do it with the original members.”
So there you go. It was because of their biological clocks. But Nomura admitted a second reason for the remake too: the declining popularity of consoles in Japan. It’s his hope that seeing a familiar brand in a game people have been waiting to revisit will spur people who have left the market into coming back to console gaming again. “We’re hoping that announcing the remake of Final Fantasy 7, it’ll give a boost to people wanting to buy this current generation of console….We wanted to reassure players that PlayStation 4 is coming out with great titles including Final Fantasy 7.”
Eurogamer had one more question. It’s been reported that the FF7 remake won’t be exact; that the new story will deviate from the original in some ways. So……will Cloud still have to put on a dress? “Please look forward to it,” Nomura said.