There’s a previous generation of gamers that were introduced to the world of Final Fantasy through Cloud, Barrett and the gang in 1997. For many of us, this was our first foray into the RPG genre, giving us an experience that we’d never had before. Final Fantasy VII showed us a new world that was mostly interactive in ways other video games weren’t. It allowed us to explore and engage with the world in different ways, through a rich story filled with real characters and fascinating mythology. For two decades, with each new gaming system generation, fans have cried out to Square Enix for the game to be remastered because they wanted more. We wanted to be validated in our belief that it’s one of the best games that’s ever been made (it is for me). We want to see these characters come to life with the power of the many systems we have today. It wasn’t till this year’s E3 that I realized, however, that maybe we haven’t put into thought just how large of an undertaking this would be considering how large the landscape of the world was, its many characters and just how vast the story is.
Square Enix unveiled an extended demo of the Final Fantasy VII: Remake at E3 earlier this week and it looks absolutely gorgeous. The only issue is that they don’t know just how long it’s going to take to complete the whole game. The first chapter is going to be focused on the story of Midgar which, people will remember from the original game, only covered the first 4-6 hours of the game (about 10%). Square Enix has re-imagined the Midgar chapter increasing the amount of detail in the story adding even more life to the all the characters, even ancillary ones like Biggs, Jessie and Wedge. The fleshed-out dialogue with voice acting gives the characters even more emotion and personality than the polygon models and text bubbles did 20 years ago.
All-in-all I’m here for any content that involves Final Fantasy VII and by all accounts, it looks like it will be amazing, from the way the world looks to the facial expressions of the characters to the revamped battle scene. Yet it might be best to temper expectations considering that even Square Enix has no idea when or how the full project will be completed.
“Before we actually started working on this, we knew it was going to be a large amount of content,” producer Yoshinori Kitase explained to the press. “When we started out planning the plot for the first game, it hit us again. At that point we decided we were going to focus first game on Midgar and what happens in Midgar. Unfortunately we can’t say anything more about the future games, because we don’t know ourselves.”
And that’s perfectly fine. From what we’ve seen, we should be happy with any more time we get to spend with Aeris, Cloud, Tifa and Barrett. The other characters can come later. We can wait. It’s only been twenty years. Another few won’t hurt.
