Tetsuya Nomura of Square Enix recently participated in an interview session attended by VentureBeat’s Mike Minotti. During the session, one interesting question he was prompted with broached the subject of remakes for the other Final Fantasy titles that launched on the first PlayStation: Final Fantasy VIII and Final Fantasy IX. Nomura’s response, reproduced below, took the question of which titles to remake in a different direction:

“Considering that we have remakes of Final Fantasy up to IV and then we have VII — I’ve been working with Mr. [Yoshinori] Kitase since Final Fantasy V, and we’ve noticed that V and VI are missing. That bothers me,” Nomura said. “How come we skipped over those two?”

Off the heels of the positive reception to the announcement of Final Fantasy VII‘s HD remake, the eighth and ninth games might have seemed like obvious choices. However, the gap between the fifth and sixth games, and the graphical capabilities of today is quite large, compared Final Fantasy VIII and Final Fantasy IX. It would be no easy task to re-imagine those sprite-based games to a visual level on par with Final Fantasy VII‘s remake, but there’s also a significant amount of untapped potential, to say nothing of the new ideas Square Enix may introduce to these remakes. Visually, the mobile ports for V and VI have been received with mixed reception at best. Who knows — perhaps an entirely unexpected art direction could be pursued!

Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI also feature some iconic villains in the recurring annoyance Gilgamesh and the maniacal Kefka, so I would find it interesting to see how they are handled in a remake. But, to quote Gilgamesh: “Enough expository banter!”

What do you think of the idea of remakes for Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI?

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