The long-awaited remake to Final Fantasy VII was formally announced last night at Sony’s E3 press conference. Since then, director Tetsuya Nomura, who was actually a character designer on the original version of the game released in 1997, has given some insight into the project.
Every time the possibility of a remake of the classic RPG was brought, it was said that it would only be done if the original staff could get together to do it. It looks like that holds true as Nomura comments on the staff’s desire to work together on the project.
Sometimes we think we can do it, and then sometimes we think maybe we can’t. Considering some of the original staff, like Kitase, he’s acting as producer, and [Kazushige] Nojima, he’s doing the script – we’re all getting older! If we keep going like this, the thought occurred to us that we might have to pass this on to a younger generation, without the original developers taking part. It doesn’t seem like such a grand intention, but we wanted to do it with the original members.
Another topic that was brought up was the timing of the announcement. With the PC version of the game recently being announced for the PlayStation 4, it seems odd that a full remake would be announced so soon. Apparently though, the remake was in full production at the time of that announcement, as Nomura said “When we announced the HD port, the PC port on the PS4, we weren’t sure when we wanted to announce the remake.” He continued:
The production was underway then, so there’s no real connection between the timing of the two FF7s coming to PS4. We’ve announced several different titles coming to the PlayStation 4 like World of Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts 3.
One interesting bit of information was given, though. It turns out that a major reason for the remake was the hopes that it’ll increase console sales in Japan, where they are slowly stagnating.
There’s more and more titles being introduced for the platform, and we’re hoping that announcing the remake of Final Fantasy 7, it’ll give a boost to people wanting to buy this current generation of console. If we announced the remake after all those titles have been sold, it wouldn’t have created such an impact, so that’s why we decided on this timing. We wanted to reassure players that PlayStation 4 is coming out with great titles including Final Fantasy 7. That’s why we decided to announce the remake.
The Final Fantasy VII remake will be released first on PlayStation 4, then probably on other platforms as well. No release date has been given.
