There are few fictional locales as iconic as Final Fantasy VII’s Midgar. Originally envisioned as a rain soaked New York-esque metropolis, the final sprawling cityscape kept the Big Apple’s detective noir grit – but imbued it with a quietly ominous steampunk flavour. Boot up the PS1 original today, and its blurry pre-rendered backgrounds still conjure up a startling sense of place – Midgar’s billowing chimneys and dusty streets blending seamlessly with skyscrapers that could preside in modern-day Tokyo.
Drawing visual comparisons to Blade Runner and the character-led melodrama of Star Wars, this PlayStation 1 role-playing game has attained an almost mythological status – a pioneering playable parable about climate change destined to be retold time and time again. It was to fans’ delight, then, when 23 years after the release of the low-poly original, 2020’s Remake saw Final Fantasy VII reborn in high definition.
While it gave the original’s crude, blocky heroes a new lease of life, it also dared to deviate from its near-sacred story beats, taking Cloud Strife and co to strange and unexpected new places. Now, as Square Enix gears up to release the second chapter of its FFVII Remake trilogy – Rebirth – Final Fantasy VII’s original creators reflect on its creation, and how they tackled the daunting task of remaking – and changing – a classic.
“Final Fantasy has always been about trying to do the unexpected,” says FFVII’s original director and VII Remake’s producer, Yoshinori Kitase. “When we were thinking about what direction to go with for Seven on the original PlayStation platform, there definitely was the option to continue with the pixel art style [of Final Fantasy VI] and try and evolve in that direction. But we felt that at the time if we did go that way, we’d be being a bit conservative.”
Following the critical and commercial success of Final Fantasy VI on the Super Nintendo, its creators felt the pressure to innovate once again. With the world around Kitase becoming increasingly more global and technology advancing rapidly, the arrival of Sony’s PlayStation inspired a new type of Fantasy.
“The fact that gaming went from 2D to 3D … I think that was one of the big influences on why we went for a more cyberpunk feel to [Seven’s] world. If that big hardware change hadn’t happened when we were starting to think about Seven, we probably wouldn’t have that drastic shift in tone – and it would have been a lot more of a classic fantasy.”
Still, it’s hard to truly discuss the impact of Final Fantasy without talking about its iconic character designs. Many of its spiky haired and chain-rocking heroes were drawn by artist Tetsuya Nomura, who created the likes of Kingdom Hearts’ Sora and The World Ends With You’s core cast, as well as the main characters of Final Fantasy VII to XI. Yet when a 24-year-old Nomura initially began work on FFVII, he wasn’t allowed anywhere near its heroes.
“Originally, I was a monster designer,” reflects Nomura. “When I wrote out proposals for things to go into games, they were handwritten, and I’d put a load of little illustrations there to show what my thinking behind them was. I remember [co-director] Mr Sakaguchi saw some of my proposals and looked at the character illustrations and said: “You should be doing character design!”
Twenty eight years later, the scribble-happy Nomura is now the director of FFVII Remake. Kitase reflects on being reunited with Nomura: “What’s it like to work together? Well, he complains – a LOT,” he laughs.
Despite Nomura’s relatively junior position in 1995, even then he had a vision for Cloud Strife’s story. “When we were working on the original Final Fantasy Seven, I was the director so I was in charge of everything,” explains Kitase, “but in terms of the story planning, gameplay systems, design, etc, if there was anything Mr Nomura didn’t like the look of, he definitely came and let me know!”
Remake isn’t the first time Nomura has decided the fate of Cloud, Sephiroth and Tifa. After directing the cult CG film Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, its world became one increasingly close to Nomura’s heart: “Even before we announced the remake project – before we even started officially thinking about it – there were a lot of people calling for a Final Fantasy Seven remake. So I had been thinking, “Well, if we were going to do it, how would I approach a remake? What would that even look like?”
For Nomura, it was clear that a simple 1-1 remake wouldn’t do the iconic tale justice. “There were a number of successful remade games out there – and looking at them and how they turned out, I realised that if we just made it a better looking version of the original game it probably … wouldn’t have become the scale of project that it is, and it probably wouldn’t have worked out. To get people interested and give players the motivation to play through it again, we needed to change Final Fantasy Seven and add in new elements …” – he pauses – “… to make [Remake] what it should be, rather than just sticking to the original.”
While the pair are tight-lipped on what story changes to expect from Rebirth – and the currently untitled third entry – Nomura reveals that Advent Children fans will be well catered for: “If you play right through to the end, it will link up [to Advent Children] so you don’t need to worry about that,” he says with a knowing smile.
As I play a brief chunk of Rebirth at a London preview event, I come away impressed with the tweaks to its real-time combat system. There’s an increased level of control over – and synergy between – party members, adding a welcome layer of depth to the action-heavy encounters. Like Remake before it, it’s a world away from the glacially paced turn-based battling of 1997.
“The big challenge in modernising and updating Final Fantasy Seven was how to recreate the battle system,” reflects Kitase. “Obviously the classic battle system in Final Fantasy Seven is an ATB [Active Time Battle] system, but it’s still very much a menu based command system, [so] we really had to focus on recreating battles to appeal to an audience familiar with modern action games.”
With Kitase and Nomura on board, Square had the “something old” and “something borrowed” for their proposed marriage of iteration and innovation, but what Remake’s core team was still missing was the “something new”. Enter Remake Project’s co-director and lifelong FF fan, Naoki Hamaguchi.
“I’m very happy to be a part of it,” says a grinning Hamaguchi. “As a fan who played and enjoyed the game back in the day, I think I bring a different approach to [the project].” Spending his formative gaming years playing Final Fantasy VII, Hamaguchi was the perfect hire to do the new combat system justice. “I was looking at how we can remake it for the modern audience – from a fan perspective, which is quite different to the original creators’ perspective. I can’t say that there is no pressure to get it right, but I think the enjoyment, satisfaction and fun of actually being able to work on Final Fantasy Seven overshadows all that.”
“In terms of which part of the modernisation I’m most satisfied with, I definitely think that it’s the battle mechanics,” says Kitase, on Nomura and Hamaguchi taking the reins. “I really did appreciate the balance that they came up with. This has been taken even further in Rebirth, with the collaboration between different characters and how that’s reflected in the battle mechanics. I think it’s become an even better battle system.”
Unlike most of its PS1 peers, 26 years later, Square’s first foray into 3D is still considered one of the medium’s defining moments. It’s an accolade shared by another of Kitase’s creations, Chrono Trigger.
“Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy Seven shared a lot of developers on the team, but they came about from very different places,” he reflects, when asked about any shared philosophies. “Obviously Chrono Trigger is not part of the ongoing Final Fantasy series culture of game development, and I don’t really think there are that many similarities between how they were made. But actually, I think that is ultimately what made them both so beloved.”
What is less beloved to many Japanese developers, however, is the term JRPG. What do two of the godfathers of Japanese-made RPGs think of the divisive label?
“I’m not too keen on it,” says an animated Nomura. “Certainly, when we started doing interviews for the games that I started making, no one used that term – they just called them RPGs. And then at some point – I can’t remember exactly when – people started referring to them as JRPGs. And I’m not really sure what the intent behind that is. It just always felt a bit off to me, and a bit weird. I never really understood it – or why it’s needed.”
“Personally, I don’t see it as that derogative,” shrugs Kitase. “I think obviously with modern gaming, titles developed in the west are the majority now. So if [JRPG] is only used in terms of differentiating – maybe showing off a slightly different approach to games or a unique flavour in terms of Japanese-made games – I’m absolutely fine with that.”
Existential genre questions aside, it has now been almost four years since Remake launched. With Rebirth hitting shelves next February and Midgar no longer in the spotlight, only time will tell whether the new additions to VII’s story will go down as well as Remake’s – fewer side quests spent chasing cats would be great, if you ask me. Yet, so far at least, the Remake project’s risky new direction has at least gained Kitase’s approval.
“Trying new things – that is in the DNA of the series,” Kitase says. “I think certainly [Nomura and Hamaguchi] managed to reimagine Seven in a modern way, which is something I think they’ve done very well – and that I probably couldn’t have done – so I’m very happy.”
• Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is out on 29 February 2024 for PlayStation 5.
