FINAL FANTASY
Final Fantasy VII director Yoshinori Kitase on redefining the concept of a videogame remake
Nostalgia is powerful. How else can we explain today’s constant flow of videogame remakes and remasters, updates and ports, and the rapturous receptions they routinely receive? Look at Metacritic’s aggregated review scores since 2020, and among the 25 highest-rated videogames you’ll find six rereleases. Square Enix is no exception, but the manner in which the publisher has approached remaking Final Fantasy VII, the jewel in its crown, is unlike any other.
Yoshinori Kitase was director of the original game; on Remake and this year’s Rebirth he’s in the role of producer. “A producer from one of the other teams came to me and said, ‘You’ve kind of changed the bar and definition of what a remake should be’,” Kitase tells us. “’And that’s making it a lot harder on everyone else who’s trying to remake a game!’”
Perhaps it had to be this way. Talk of remaking 1997’s FFVII began in 2005, a year that saw the release of computer-animated film sequel Advent Children and an E3 tech demo that recreated the game’s opening sequence using the then cutting-edge PS3 hardware. “We always had the idea that it’d be great to be able to revisit the original game with the same level of graphics as Advent Children,” Kitase explains. When that ambition became technologically feasible in the PS4 era, a simple refurbishment would not suffice. As a consequence, random encounters and turn-based battles were jettisoned in favour of a more action-oriented system for 2020’s Remake.
While Kitase was there for FFVII’s creation, Remake game director Naoki Hamaguchi was, at the time of its release, in high school. He stresses that he was always a fan, with a deep respect for the original’s design. “To keep it modern and relevant, we do need to move with trends in gaming, but you can’t go too far in the other direction and just make it completely new,” he says, citing the Active Time Battle gauge and the Materia slots system as elements retained. “We’ve added in action mechanics over the top, but the base of it is still very much respecting the original.”
Such a reimagining isn’t unprecedented – you need only look at how Capcom turned Resident Evil 2 from fixed-camera survival horror to a thirdperson action experience. The scope of this remake, however, surely is. Rebirth is the middle entry in a trilogy, the first instalment of which is roughly as long as the entire first game. Its developers not only wished to add depth to the story, but to do so without cutting any elements deemed essential to the experience. This meant fleshing out NPCs and building optional party members into characters with a part to play in the story.
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