Last weekend at the PlayStation Experience in San Fransisco, gamers received a welcome surprise when they were given a glimpse of what to expect the for the eagerly anticipated remake of Final Fantasy VII. Developers, Square Enix, later announced that the remake would be split into 'episodes' which has understandably ruffled the feathers of the gaming community.
In terms of gameplay, the response has been generally positive, most gamers understand that turn based RPG’s are a thing of the past. Although the battle system looks more similar to the Kingdom Hearts series and the upcoming Final Fantasy VX game, the FF7 remake still contains elements of it’s old system including the ‘ATB’ (Active Time Battle) and ‘Limit Break’ gauge.
Now here’s the kicker, it’s just been revealed that instead of releasing the FF7 remake as a 'whole game' it will be in 'episodic form', similar to what Telltale games do with many of their titles. Whilst the reaction to this change from the gaming community has been less than welcoming the game’s original director, Yoshinori Kitase, and character designer, Tetsuya Nomura, explained why they went with this direction. Speaking to Japanese gaming website Dengeki Online, Kitase explained:
“From the beginning, we thought a Final Fantasy VII remake would be bigger than a single release… If we took everything that’s in the original game and remade it at that quality, we couldn’t get it all on a single release”.
Nomura added that:
“If you did get it into a single release, there would be things we’d have to put into a shortened compilation. Since we thought there would be stuff we would probably have to pare down and supplemental things we probably couldn’t add, we decided to divide it up, concluding that we have to do a remake that’s fully packed with content.”
During this year's E3, Square Enix did announce that the upcoming remake would be totally different from the original... We just weren’t expecting that sort of drastic change.
For those of you who prefer the traditional version, the PlayStation port of Final Fantasy VII is currently available on Steam, iOS and – as of last weekend – the PlayStation Store.
[Via Kotaku]
