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Development on Final Fantasy VII Remake is “going well” and is “further along than perhaps many had released”, director Yoshinori Kitase has said.
Kitase discussed the game’s development on the Square Enix Blog while defending the decision to split the remake across multiple parts, explaining that a multi-part approach will let the team expand upon the original game’s story and “turn it into an epic experience”.
“With FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE, we have the opportunity to go beyond the story, world and experience of FINAL FANTASY VII in ways we’ve always dreamed of – from the depths of Midgar to the skies above the Planet,” he said. “The multi-part format enables us to expand the original story and turn it into an epic experience for fans and new gamers alike.
“This past weekend at PlayStation Experience we were thrilled to present more of FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE. It was great to see so much excitement when we surprised everyone with the first gameplay footage and it was a treat for us to show that development is going well, and further along than perhaps many had realised. Just like when we revealed the announcement trailer at E3 earlier this year, we like surprising you.
“One thing that we wanted to be clear about during this weekend to accompany the new trailer was the scale of this project. We wanted to tell you this now and not in the future so that you’d share our vision for what we want to deliver. The biggest reason why we haven’t done a remake until now is because it’s a massive undertaking to reconstruct FINAL FANTASY VII from the ground up with the current technology. Producing a proper HD remake of FINAL FANTASY VII that maintains the same feeling of density of the original would result in a volume of content that couldn’t possibly fit into one instalment.”
If Square had tried to fit everything from the original into a single game, it would “have to cut various parts and create a condensed version of FINAL FANTASY VII”, Kitase adds. “We knew none of you would have wanted that.”
“I hope that by explaining a little more about our design decisions that you can appreciate the size of this project and what we have planned for this remake,” he continues. “Going beyond the scale and depth of the world, narrative and gameplay from the original to deliver something that feels familiar yet new. As I said before, we like delivering surprises.”
The first gameplay footage of Final Fantasy VII Remake was revealed during last weekend’s PlayStation Experience which appeared to confirm that Square Enix had dropped the original game’s turn-based battles for a new real-time battle system.
A release date for the game has yet to be announced.
Source: square-enix.com
