Final Fantasy VII Remake is real. Here’s everything you need to know about the overhaul of PlayStation’s favourite RPG, including the story behind its episodic structure…
Thought the Final Fantasy VII Remake project seemed impossibly cool and years away back at its E3 announcement in June? You unbeliever, you – it’s a very real thing. At last month’s PlayStation Experience event, debut gameplay footage of FFVII Remake in action recalled everything we remember about the original’s epic opening, where former SOLDIER Cloud Strife is recruited by Barret Wallace and his unit, AVALANCHE, to help strike at the planet-draining Shinra Inc with a spot of explosive eco terrorism.
Not only does it start Cloud’s long journey to meeting Sephiroth, the game’s iconic antagonist, along with so many other stories that fans fondly recall, this opening’s also a chance to show off Remake’s advanced combat and exploration. The team at Square Enix is rebuilding everything from the PS1 original, and it’s so colossal an undertaking that FFVII Remake will be released across multiple instalments.
So far, Square’s shown off Sectors 1 and 8 of its new take on pizza-shaped sci-fi city Midgar, from both the start and end of the prologue in which Cloud, Barret and co destroy the Mako reactor. It kicks off with a sequence recreating one of FFVII’s first moments, shortly after Cloud leaps off the train and Wedge and Jessie open the first blast doors. The dialogue has been polished up a lot from the original – while the backbone of the story remains true, Remake features more cinematic cutscene versions of the early exchanges, with voice acting and longer, fleshed-out scripting.
That approach, to go deeper into what players remember, appears to be behind the key creative decisions of this reboot. This is the story you know and love, with the benefit of nearly 20 years of evolution in art direction, combat and storytelling. Square Enix wants to give you every incentive to go back.
After a compilation of imagery capturing the backdrop of Midgar – an immense cityscape, Cloud and Barret pushing through a busy crowd, a shot of some flowers – we get our first look at the game in motion. And it’s extraordinary. We see Cloud crawl through broken pieces of the environment, very similarly to how Noctis and company creep around the Behemoth and through the dark cave in FFXV’s Episode Duscae demo. Then we get a proper look at the streets of Midgar, leading up to Wall Market from the original game.
ON A MASSIVE SCALE
What were simple, flat pieces of art in FFVII on PS1 have been scaled up into a beautiful 3D world that recalls Blade Runner in its vibe of rundown industrial sci-fi city, eternal night and neon lights. There are no cut corners, here, and you won’t need to use your imagination to fill in the gaps on how incredibly sprawling Midgar is – it’s all here on-screen.
The scale reveals a lot about what Square Enix is trying to do with Remake. It’s not a simple case of giving each location or cutscene a cursory nod, it’s about taking the parts of FFVII you love, and showing you many of the things that you previously had to imagine. And that’s why FFVII will be broken into multiple releases – one of the more surprising reveals that accompanied the first footage of the game. How will that work? It’s up in the air at this point, but the basic reasoning is to ensure the reboot can cover as much of what people love about the original as possible.
There are fairly obvious reasons why Square Enix would want to break FFVII Remake up into several parts. Firstly the practicality of simply making it comes to mind. After all, FFVII hails from the beginning of the CD-ROM era, and world map aside, its entire backdrop is presented as relatively small pre-rendered backgrounds. You felt like you were exploring them, but they were static.
In the HD age, think of the work needed just to turn Midgar into an explorable 3D environment, or how much harder it must be to make a submarine or snowboarding minigame. The likes of FFXIII simply don’t have the breadth of places that VII had, and bringing all of that to life will logically take multiple entries. It could be a trilogy or more, it’s not yet been made clear, but all of this is in service of going deeper into the story: to make sure everything from the original gets adapted to this higher level of detail.
In an interview with Dengeki (translated by Gematsu), director Tetsuya Nomura explains they’re “delving into these episodes more deeply,” while executive producer Yoshinori Kitase expresses how Square Enix’s intention is to make this more than just a nostalgia fest, and give existing fans new reasons to play.
The most surprising sliver of news, however, involves a press release mentioning how the game is going to be told across “a multi-part series, with each entry providing its own unique experience.” The immediate, more extreme reaction was one of, “Holy crap, are they making this into a Telltale-style season?” Luckily, producer Yoshinori Kitase has elaborated on why Final Fantasy VII Remake will be a series of games, rather than just one entry.
EPISODIC RPG?
“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. The multi-part format enables us to expand the original story and turn it into an epic experience for fans and new gamers alike.” FFVII was a dense RPG compared to the XIII series, for example, with an absolute ton of locations, characters and story strands.
“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,” Kitase explains.
The alternative would have been a ‘condensed’ version of the original game, according to Nomura, and nobody wants that. There are so many amazing individual moments in FFVII that we’re excited to see brought to life once more: we want to see the Midgar Zolom serpent, ominously impaled by Sephiroth. We want to go to the village of Kalm and hear Cloud’s hazy retelling of the Nibelheim incident, which ends with the town up in flames. We want to fly the Highwind over the world, and watch the Junon Cannon black out Midgar before punching a hole through the enormous Diamond Weapon.
A FFVII Remake needs to have everything – and when you consider what a big task it is to bring all of that into the modern age, breaking it up into more than one entry makes sense. Nomura confirmed in an interview with Famitsu (also translated by Gematsu) that the classic Don Corneo crossdressing sequence will feature in Remake, too. It all counts. Remove any of these moments from the game and it just won’t feel like a true remake.
CLOUD-POWERED
Some elements do need reinventing, though. As the trailer clearly depicts when a combat encounter kicks off against Shinra troops, FFVII is taking its cues from XV’s real-time fighting. You still control up to three characters in a party at a time, and, as suggested by both Cloud and Barret being controllable in the demo (not to mention Barret performing an orange burst attack that looks an awful lot like Big Shot, his first Limit Break), you can change your playable character at any time. It’s the only sensible move, really, as a turn-based system would have felt unusually antiquated in a reboot that looks this pretty. Nomura teases that elements such as Limit Breaks and the ATB gauge will be incorporated in new ways, while Kitase says the remake isn’t entirely action-based, and players still need to be “strategically minded.”
Remake’s trailer climaxes with two memorable shots: one of the first boss from the game, the faithfully recreated Guard Scorpion in Sector 1’s reactor; and the first shot of Cloud jumping off the train from the game’s opening moments. It closes the loop on FFVII’s prologue, and despite almost two decades of progress in 3D visual design, these all feel like the same places. It’s the colour palette that really nails it: the green hue of a city that runs on Mako energy.
And Square Enix has perfected the character designs. We always expected that they would, based on the characters’ subsequent appearances in other media since the original’s release, but to see all the new models so clearly related to their PS1 incarnations is a real joy.
YOU ASKED FOR IT
People have been clamouring for FFVII to be remade for over a decade. What’s strange is how little demand we hear for games of that era to get this kind of treatment generally. The idea of an FFVII remake grew within the series’ fandom, then gradually became something Square Enix’s developers would be asked about during every round of interviews. Why specifically this game, and not FFVIII or IX, then? Is it just because this is the first Final Fantasy game that really caught fire in the West, shifting ten million copies? That’s likely a factor, but we think it’s not the only one.
See, it’s easy to dismiss the hype around Final Fantasy VII Remake as being the product of nostalgia alone – of people reminiscing about a game from their childhood, and just wanting to relive it in some form, in much the same way people are excited about the idea of new Star Wars films. But FFVII isn’t an RPG that was great once and has earned some kind of inflated reputation in the intervening years – not only does it hold up, but among that extraordinary trifecta of PS1 entries in the series, with VIII and IX, it is perhaps the most idea-rich story in the series, and the best-paced in terms of set-pieces and twists.
From the moment Cloud releases the enormous Weapon creatures from the North Crater, in the second half of the story, the game doesn’t slow down as Meteor and the final battle with Sephiroth approach. Its endless battles; exploring the ocean floor in a submarine; a trip into space; finding Knights of the Round; Shinra’s desperate war with the forces of the planet – FFVII remains a brilliant RPG, and chunky character visuals aside, its pre-rendered backgrounds are still gorgeous. All the ingredients Square needed to bring FFVII into the modern age are already there, because no-one’s come close to matching its unique blend of sci-fi and real-world inspirations.
It means as much to Square Enix as it does to fans, too. Back at E3, we asked Tetsuya Nomura himself what the game means to him. “It was like a big changing time when we went from the sprites – like the dot images – of an RPG to something that’s more lifelike and in 3D,” he said. “It was just such an iconic moment; a drastic, dramatic change. It was not only the first 3D Final Fantasy game, but we packed in so much playable content and material into the game for the players to experience. We feel that maybe that’s one of the great reasons that this game had such an impact on fans; that they were able to experience such a very different game, and it was such a new game-playing experience.”
SOONER THAN YOU THINK?
Remake still feels like a very long way off, though. If the first footage of FFXV was revealed at E3 2013, and we expect it towards the end of 2016, VII’s remake is likely coming in 2017 at the earliest. Heck, we might not be playing it until the end of PS4’s lifecycle. And will Square have enough time to finish the full series before another PlayStation console arrives?
Maybe. This first gameplay reveal shows the team is much further ahead with the project than anyone thought, and Kitase likes delivering surprises. If there was some way we could be exploring this version of Midgar in 2016 (with, say, an Episode Duscaestyle prologue demo bundled with FFXV) it would cap off PlayStation’s greatest year of all time.