You look back at the original release of Final Fantasy 7, and I wouldn’t blame you if you dropped to the floor with nostalgic PTSD. Those were the four-disc days of our lives, where games required nay DEMANDED numerous hours of life in exchange for their FMVs and tricky secret encounters. Days when beds were unmade, homework was left to rot and your room smelt like the ultimate anti-vampire safe zone.
Final Fantasy VII was a gargantuan undertaking at the time, a sprawling saga taking place not only in a massive city but also in a wide world of mystery and danger. For Final Fantasy VII Remake, some fans have been scoffing (scoffing…TO THE MAX) at the first chapter in this reborn series being constrained to Midgar. After all, how much can you really do within that city once you’ve worked your way through the story? “We can’t say exactly how much there is – we want to keep some surprises for players,” Final Fantasy VII Remake Co-Director Naoki Hamaguchi said in a Square Enix blog interview.
I will say, Final Fantasy VII Remake has been designed as if it were a standalone game, and comparable in size to other mainline Final Fantasy games. The content you mentioned from other Final Fantasy games… I don’t want to say precisely what’s in Final Fantasy VII Remake, but if you’re expecting endgame content, you won’t be disappointed.
One way that the show will go on and keep players around? By making Midgar far denser than it was back when players first explored it back in the day. “In the original game there were a lot of breaks in the game, where the screen went black, and then the game continues in a different location,” producer Yoshinori Kitase explained.
In other words, there were a lot of parts in between sections of Midgar that were implied, but never seen. That was something that we wanted to address with remake – to fill in all those gaps, show how the different parts of the city are connected, and make it a continuous experience.
Final Fantasy VII Remake drops from a lengthy bout of development on April 10. It looks like lengthy, gorgeous and nostalgic stuff, and Gaia knows that we need this kind of content currently as we head into a lockdown.
Last Updated: March 24, 2020
