Square Enix comments briefly on Final Fantasy VII Remake Part 2

During CEDEC + KYUSHU 2020 (via ResetEra ), producer Yoshinori Kitase and co-director Naoki Hamaguchi of Final Fantasy VII Remake talked about various topics related to the title, including its future.

Below is the summary:

• Remake really came up with the desire to create an Advent Children-style game;
• Kitase said that he imagined that many people would think that the first FF7R trailer would be a new film and that they would go crazy when they saw it was a game;
• The team knew that nostalgic fans would want the old system, so they did their best to offer something new and old at the same time;
• Hamaguchi says he joined the project in the middle of it. When questioning Kitase and Tetsuya Nomura about what they wanted, Kitase said a game that used the graphics of Advent Children, while Nomura wanted a focus on the story;
• They felt no need to create an open world as long as it was focused on history;
• Nomura supervised the characters and various elements of the story, including dubbing;
• Interestingly, the team talked a lot about where the characters would hide their weapons, like Aerith’s baton;
• The original game lacked the concept of time, so the team wondered which characters needed to sleep and what kind of story would happen at that time;
• Kitase says he would love to work on a new IP if he didn’t need to work with Final Fantasy. Hamaguchi wanted to do something realistic;
• FF7R Part 1 was focused on Midgar. Part 2 will be focused on the rest of the world;
• With Part 2, knowing that whoever played the original knows the story, the team wants to surprise and go beyond the players’ expectations. Not only that, they want to take their expectations and throw them away, in a good way;
• In Final Fantasy XIII, the first part is linear, while the second part becomes an open world. When this topic is brought up in the conversation, everyone laughs, and Hamaguchi says, “I’m going to write this down!”;
• Hamaguchi says he cannot comment much on Part 2 but says that the current development team has many people who have played Remake (Part 1) and want to improve it in several ways, mainly to evolve the combat system further. The Part 1 team was made up of many people who played and loved the original.