One of the creatives behind the original Final Fantasy 7 wanted to remake the classic RPG as he was worried someone else at Square Enix would beat him to it.
Game Informer has published an extensive interview with Tetsuya Nomura and Yoshinori Kitase, Final Fantasy 7 Remake's creative director and producer, respectively. Kitase recalls how he was on a North American media tour for Final Fantasy 13 back in 2009 and suddenly began getting a series of questions during multiple interviews asking when Square Enix would remake Final Fantasy 7.
"Just hearing that so many times, I did think that we would do it one day, that's for certain," Kitase says. The veteran developer then approached Nomura, and the pair noticed the demand from fans and media was at a "fever pitch" level. It just so happened, thankfully, that Square Enix was "beginning to embrace" the idea of remakes more than it had in past years.
- During the original Final Fantasy 7's development, the devs considered Tetsuya Nomura "the Demon King of retakes" - "He was always making the designers re-do things"
- The Final Fantasy 7 remake series is "perhaps one of the best interpretations" of an RPG remake, but Hironobu Sakaguchi wants to "continue giving birth to something new"
"Within Square Enix, gradually, remakes were being made, and these ideas for remakes were coming up in other departments," Nomura explains. "If we weren't going to do Final Fantasy 7, others were going to do it, so we had to rise up and do it! We had the sense that we had to guard Final Fantasy 7 and have to take this on, or someone else will do it. I thought it may be a bit troublesome is other teams without us took on the project."
From there, the pair recruited other veterans: Kazushige Nojima, a writer who worked on Final Fantasy 7, 8, and 10, and Motomu Toriyama, a director and writer who worked on Final Fantasy 7, 10, and 13. But since most of the original game's development team had left Square Enix in the years since, the "majority of the dev staff and production members" were players of the original Final Fantasy 7 instead of developers at the time, Toriyama reveals.
Now, we're just over a month away from the remake saga continuing with Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, which launches on February 29 exclusively for PS5. You can read our complete Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth preview for our thoughts when we played Square Enix's hotly anticipated sequel for ourselves.
You can also check out our new games 2024 guide for a look ahead at all the other big-time releases coming over the next few months and beyond.
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