Kitase would want to make changes for FFVII remake

Final Fantasy guru Yoshinori Kitase says that he would be tempted to make several changes to any future remake of Final Fantasy VII.

“If I may speak as a game creator, if we were to produce a remake of VII, for example, I would be really tempted to delete things and add new elements, new systems or whatever because if we were to make exactly the same thing now, it’d be like a repeat,” said Kitase, speaking to OXM.

“It’d be an issue of repetition and not as much fun to make such a game. So I’d be really interested in rearranging games or reshaping games into something slightly different even though it’s supposed to be the same game. But if we did that, the fans might be disappointed or ‘this is not what I was expecting’ so in that sense maybe some might say that it’s better to let memory be memory.”

Kitase’s point is that there may be a clear difference between what gamers might think they want from a FFVII remake, and the game that he and his Square Enix colleagues might want to make:

“When we play the games we made years ago, sometimes we think, ‘Oh, that is not really cool’ or ‘That probably should have been a bit better than that’ and that sort of thing. But on the other hand, those slightly negative features and bits, for some of the really enthusiastic fans of these titles, that gives the game extra flavour or personality or whatever.

“So maybe they would rather we didn’t do anything about it and we just leave it in as it is. It’s very difficult to decide what we should keep in and what we should take out.”

Kitase is currently serving as producer on Final Fantasy XIII-2, due for release in Europe on March 9 next year.

It’s refreshing to see Kitase being so frank about that challenges he would face with a FFVII remake. Will we ever see one, though? It would be pretty much guaranteed to be a massive hit, regardless of how it reviewed, but it would cost an awful lot of money to make game on that kind of scale.