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After a big presence at E3, we still have so many questions about Final Fantasy 7 Remake.
By Matt Purslow
While the excitement may be at peak levels for Final Fantasy 7 Remake, there’s also a lot of worries and even disdain among the community for its development roadmap. Square Enix plans to release Final Fantasy 7 over multiple installments, and plenty of people – including us – have concerns about this approach.
These concerns have been formed thanks to the incredibly limited amount of information that Square Enix has provided. So far we know that Final Fantasy 7 Remake will launch on March 3 as a two blu-ray set, and that this first game will only cover the Midgar portion of the original game. Beyond that we have no idea what the Remake project entails; no projected cadence for game releases, no suggested length of the series, no information on how the ‘episodes’ will link, and no indication as to how the development team will deal with the console generation leap due to happen shortly after the first game launches.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake Has Already Left Fans Waiting
To make matters worse for fans, Final Fantasy 7 Remake endured a long, complicated development. It was announced at E3 2015, meaning by the release of part one, it will have been in development for at least five years. Chances are it’s been in some kind of planning phase much longer than that; in 2005 a technical demo shown at E3 featured Final Fantasy 7’s opening cutscene rendered in PlayStation 3-grade graphics. The demo may not have been an announcement of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, but it certainly showed that a modern version of the world of Mako, Shinra, and Midgar was on the development team’s mind. TL/DR: it feels like Remake has been in development for forever.
Why the lengthy process? There were likely a million little aspects in play, but the most highly publicized issue came from Square Enix’s split with CyberConnect2, the studio that was originally co-developing Final Fantasy 7. “This company decision was made wanting to control quality as well as keeping the schedule stable,” explained Final Fantasy VII Remake’s co-director Naoki Hamaguchi at the time. He also described the decision as “a sensitive subject”, suggesting that the process had not been clean or easy.
Following the split, rumours began to spread that Square Enix had not only pulled development in-house, but had effectively scrapped much of CyberConnect2’s work and started afresh. These were never confirmed by Square Enix, but even from an outsider’s perspective, Final Fantasy 7 has undergone significant changes over the duration of the project. Compare the 2015 PlayStation Experience trailer to the E3 2019 trailer and you can see that the combat system has since been redesigned. Regardless of whether the entire game was overhauled or not, a combat rework is not a quick process.
Complications like this, which contributed to the extended length of Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s development, would be easy to dismiss were we due to receive the full game in March 2020. However, this multi-year development period has been entirely devoted to just one section of Final Fantasy 7’s story, and a short section at that. In the original 1997 game, the city of Midgar takes around 6 or 7 hours to complete, and is effectively the introduction to a much, much larger world and story.
It’s important to note that the Midgar we’ll be seeing in 2020 isn’t the same city as the one we explored in 1997; talking to us at E3, producer Yoshinori Kitase explained that Midgar has been massively expanded, and now is the size of a traditional stand-alone Final Fantasy game. At a guess, that means the Midgar section of Final Fantasy 7 will now take anywhere between 30 and 80 hours to complete. In terms of data, the two-disc set means Midgar is comparable to the entirety of Red Dead Redemption 2. That’s… well… a bit insane.
There Are Still So Many Questions
But this expansion raises many questions for the project overall. Will this approach be applied to every game in the series? Will places like Junon, visited for just a couple of hours in the original, now be a twelve-hour destination? Will the second game end at a logical story beat, such as that big moment, or will it end much earlier due to the expansion of other areas, and thus mean the series is much longer than the trilogy of games so many expect?
It seems that not even Square Enix itself knows the answer. In reference to future game development, Square’s line is “Whilst the development team finish the first game in the project they are planning the volume of content for the second. Due to the work already done on the first game, we anticipate the development of the second game will be more efficient. However, for now, we would like to focus on the first game in the project.”
With statements like this, it’s easy to worry that Square Enix doesn’t have a solid plan for the series, with no idea how many games the series will span, and that this will negatively affect the pacing and content. A more cynical eye would even suggest that there is a plan, and that plan is to make as many games as possible, regardless of pacing and content.
While we may not know how many games Final Fantasy 7 Remake will be made up of, we do know that it will continue across the next hardware generational leap. Xbox’s Project Scarlett is due Holiday 2020, and it’s very likely that Sony’s next PlayStation will arrive at a similar time. While the development of the next Remake game will almost certainly be much faster – the core mechanics of it will already be set in stone, and it’s still almost certain to arrive after the PS5 has launched. With that in mind, will part two be a PS5 exclusive? Will it be a PS4 game? Will it be both? If so, will PS4 players miss out on content or features? And, most importantly, how will it deal with carrying over your progression from one game to the next, especially if you’ve made the jump to the next generation?
The details of progression are a real concern for many fans. While there are many games that have used save data from one game to inform another – Mass Effect is a prime example – it’s hard to think of any that actually transfer complete character stats and inventory data as well as story progress. Instead, that’s something more associated with DLC, such as taking your Geralt from The Witcher 3 into Hearts of Stone. With that in mind, it’s easy to wonder if part two of Remake will be a DLC expansion rather than a separate release. After all, it’s likely to get messy at retail if part two is to be sold as a standalone game – likely at full price – while also requiring you to have bought and completed part one.
…But Final Fantasy 7 Remake is Looking Good
Right, enough with our concerns, it’s time to lighten the mood. After playing Final Fantasy 7 Remake at E3 and listening to Yoshinori Kitase explain his philosophy behind the project, I have an incredible amount of faith in it. With the number of setbacks the project has suffered, development of this version of Remake is potentially only on par with a typical Final Fantasy game, and there’s likely truth in the team’s statement that development on subsequent parts will move much more quickly now the key design elements are in place. The real picture is likely less messy than the collage of news stories and eternal waits suggest it is. I personally think that the team doesn’t have the full plan mapped out, but I do trust them to nail the landing, in part because the quality of what they’ve shown so far is far beyond what a game this troubled should reasonably be.
I do understand why we’re likely not getting all the answers we want, too: because plans change. Comparing the 2015 footage to this year’s E3 trailers only proves that. And if we’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that people get angry when plans change. Developers have been torn apart by fans when the final game is changed from what is first shown, and so if Square announce that Final Fantasy 7 Remake is four games over six years and it turns into three games over ten years, they’ll undoubtedly feel the fury of some of the fans. As such, the seemingly sensible option is to maintain radio silence on anything beyond that which is almost ready to ship.
But ultimately that silence generates fan anxiety, and a fear that the project is in unsafe hands. And so, the only way Square Enix can resolve the problem is through better communication. Not every simple question has a simple answer, especially not when it comes to a project as complex as Final Fantasy 7 Remake. But it’s vital that players understand what they’re buying into. Hopefully, those answers will be summoned before March 2020.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer. You can follow him on Twitter.
Source: IGN
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