At this year’s E3, Square-Enix finally announced they were remaking Final Fantasy VII, and this past weekend, they unleashed the first full trailer for the game, which was kind of amazing. So, Final Fantasy fans couldn’t possibly have anything to complain about, right? Well, not so fast.
When looking over promotional materials for Final Fantasy VII Remake, fans came across this line…
“Final Fantasy VII Remake will be told across a multi-part series, with each entry providing its own unique experience.”
Wait a minute, so the new Final Fantasy VII is going to be an episodic game? Sure seems like it. Tetsuya Nomura, director of the remake, tried to explain the decision…
“If you did get it into a single release […] 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. If we took everything that’s in the original game and remade it at [the quality seen in the new trailer], we couldn’t get it all on a single release.”
In other words, remaking a game as story-heavy and complex as Final Fantasy VII with modern top-of-the-line PS4 graphics would simply be too expensive/risky to do all in one go.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with Final Fantasy VII Remake being episodic, as long as A) the wait between episodes isn’t too long and B) this isn’t an excuse to overcharge for the full game. If Square-Enix splits the game into five chapters of 10 – $15, then I have no complaints. I’ll be less pleased if they decide to charge $20 or more per episode.
But hey, if you want to play through a non-episodic version of Final Fantasy VII, the game is now available on the PS4. This is a more-or-less straight port of the original game with trophy support, so get prepared for some old-school blockiness. The Final Fantasy VII PS4 port is 32 percent off until December 12.