“We intended on it changing and altering direction from the beginning,” producer Yoshinori Kitase tells me ahead of the release of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. “Certainly in terms of how the story plays out. However, we very deliberately in Remake wanted to make it start, and appear for a very long time that it was following along the main storyline from the past, and then gradually adding new el🐼ements to make people wonder whether things could change.”
Kitase, alongside director Naoki Hamaguchi, are visibly exhausted yet enthusiastic as I speak to them ahead of the sequel’s rele𒅌ase, which will promise both a melodramatic narrative and massive open world to explore that honours the original game as much as it subverts. It can feel a little like the remake trilogy has been making things up as it goes along, but it’s clear after a 40-minute chat with the duo that it’s perhaps more measured than we give it credit for.
It all begins with the return of Zack Faire, a fan favourite protagonist of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Crisis Core and old friend of Cloud💞 Strife. In the existing canon he’s a dead man, grieved by ex-girlfriend Aerith and his parents in the small town of Gongaga. But after Remake and the events of Episode Intermission, he is back as a major player in Rebirth. Why this happened, and what exactly things will lead to, is an answer neither Kitase nor Hamaguchi would give me, and the jury’s still out on whether the game will either.
“If you’ve actually seen tho♉se scenes, it’s not very straight up that he’s alive,” Kitase says. “There is still a lot of mystery surrounding that, and exꦍactly how Zack is involved in the story and what his presence represents, [which] means there are still a lot of questions that go unanswered.”
Rebirth is aiming to be more than a simple expansion of the narrative, with Square Enix promising an ambitious open world that not only rivals its contemporaries, but aims to push Final Fantasy forward as a franchise. The team previously highlighted 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt as a core influence, and I wanted to explore its Western inspirations 💞further to see exactly what ꦦmakes Rebirth tick.
“The Witcher 3 is a game I really respect,” Hamaguchi tells me. “It was certainly useful as a reference for what we wanted to do. Not just The Witcher 3 though, there were a number of other games I’ve been playing that’ve been really good for that, like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Horizon Zero Dawn and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ghost of Tsushima. We played a lot of t🥂hese games and are looking at everything out there and seeing what works. However, I don’t want to just copy what another game does. I don’t think that would help anyone or work out in a good shape in the end. What we’re focused on with the side content and side activities in Rebirth is very much♔ for everything to have unique elements to it that makes it feel completely different to all the others.”
"People know that event is in the game now, they know the story, so we can’t reall🔯y expect them to react to that in the same way as before" - Yoshinori Kitase
Rebirth boasts roughly 100 hours of content, meaning there is valid concern from fans about it growing repe⭕titive. There are plenty of collectibles, mo🀅nster hunts, and new secrets to find, but from my conversation with Hamaguchi, he seems confident in striking a balance.
“If all the side content is the same or repetitive, players lose interest, they don’t want to play it, or it becomes a chore,” Hamaguchi admits. “We really wanted to avoid that, and specifically how we should approach it. First of all, in each side quest, weꦿ took a lo𓆏t of care making sure they each had their own storyline. So there’ll be characters from the main storyline who appear again in side quests in a different way, and you dig deeper into them. Not just characters from the main story or original Final Fantasy 7 either, but some from the Compilation and spin-offs will also appear.”
Compilation of Final Fantasy 7 is a metaseries of games, films, and shows released during the early 2000s alongside Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children. This included the PS2 shooter 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dirge of Cerberus and mobile games like Before Crisis. The♚re was also original animation Last Order and PSP classic Crisis Core, all of which fold into the brand-new canon used by Remake and Rebirth, which themselves are considered as part of the compilation.
Revisiting many of these experiences is a strange ordeal for Hamaguchi and Kitase. While some of the original development team for Final Fantasy 7 had a hand in said projects, an equal number were inspired by them as younger gamers ♔before coming to work on Remake and Rebirth. As expected, they have a fundamentally different perspective on this universe and what it means to them. So to help it grow, and know that in doing so they help honour 🏅millions of fans around the world, is no easy task.
“The actual number of people involved on the original [Final Fantasy 7] are fairly few on the team,” Kitase admits, who was in the trenches for all of them. “They probably have a little bit of nostalgia towards it, but not so much. Specifically, creative director Tetsuya Nomura and scenario writer Kazushige Nojima really want to make use of this opportunity as a restart for Final Fantasy with the remake p🅰roject and make it the best experience possible for all fans out there. That obviously includes the desire to feature all the wider universe, wider lore, and characters from the compilation titles. So I’d say that was their real intent, and their real drive for putting those things in, was to use the whole of the Final Fantasy 7 universe.”
Rebirth also wants players to feel closer to the likes of Cloud, Barrett, Tifa, and Aerith than ever before. Both through progressing the main narrative and paying close attention to new affinity gauges associated with each character. “We’ve used [side quests] to help illustrate characters and their relationships even further than we could in the main story, because we just couldn’t have fit them all in,” Hamaguchi adds. “There are a number of mercenary quests that Cloud can take on where he’ll be paired with a certain other character in the party. For exampleꦆ, there will be one where Cloud and Barrett are together solving a problem, or Cloud and Aerith on an adventure doing something. And through those stories and interactions we want to show other aspects and different parts of those relationships by digging deeper into them. It also tells us more about this world and how these fit characters are a part of it.”
Your relationship with each character will inevitably extend to the Golden Saucer, in ღwhich you embark on a date with one of several characters, depending on exactly how you interact with them over the course of the game. In the original 🍰game, this was a surprise that earned a cult following. Now, we’re all looking forward to and expecting adorable dates with our favourites, and will likely pursue them from the outset.
"I’m not really trying to hold ෴back and stay within the limits of ‘this is a JRPG, I’m making a JRPG’ and whatever that means. It’s not how I approach games. But if the game comes out and the world calls what I’ve made a JRPG, that’s clearly what the wor🏅ld thinks and I’ll be okay with that." - Naoki Hamaguchi
&ld🅷quo;People know that event is in the game now, they know the story, so we can’t really expect them to react to that in the same way as before,” Kitase explains. “We thought that if players know that dinner date event is coming up later in the game, and perhaps they want to go on a date with a specific character, they prepare themselves and start thinking about it and maybe get a little caught up in and a bit defensive of it all. They may not want to go and do something because it will change who they end up on aไ date with, and it would prevent them from playing some of the content in the game that otherwise they pick up and play.
“In that sense, 🐈we felt that having parameters where you see the affinity level with each character and having that visible and tracka𓆏ble by players throughout the game would help alleviate that issue. Essentially, you know what’s going on and can see roughly how close you are to each character at any point, and that stops you from overthinking or being a little too guarded about how you approach certain events in the game.”
We all remembeܫr the legendary gondola scene in the Golden Saucer, with Cloud sitting next to whatever character he’d inadvertently pulled into a date night. But Kitase has other plans, an♔d has always wanted to place a larger focus on other parts of the beloved scenario.
“Before the gondola, there is a scene I really like liked, which is when Cloud and his date go to the theatre and they watch a play,” Kitase recalls. “It was the story of a hero and princess trying to take on a dragon, a fairly simplistic play scene in the original game that we’ve expanded on so much and made really expressive and operatic in Rebirth.🔥”
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, in all of its elements, takes inspiration from the 1997 classic and a laundry list of contemporaries ranging from The Witcher 3 to Breath of the Wild. Kitase and Hamaguchi have a clear understanding of modern video games and how it wants Rebirth to stand alongside them, but also set itself apart. This inevitably brings us to the conversation of what it means to be a ‘JRPG’ in 2024, a term which Naoki Yoshida brought into question prior to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 16’s release last year.
“I don’t t▨hink I have a strong opinion either way,” Hamaguchi tells me. “Certainly from the perspective of a creator and what I’m making. I’m definitely looking at the world globally in terms of who I’m aiming my games at and who I’m making them for. In that sense, I’m not really trying to hold back and stay within the limits of ‘this is a JRPG, I’m making a JRPG’ and whatever that means. It’s not how I approach games. But if😼 the game comes out and the world calls what I’ve made a JRPG, that’s clearly what the world thinks and I’ll be okay with that. But I certainly don’t try to limit myself to that or whatever it may mean, I’m making the game I want to make.”
Rather than the genre, Hamaguchi is more compelled by how Rebirth will help change the landscape of what it means to be a Final Fantasy game: “Previous Final Fantasy games have been very story driven, very tight, scripted experiences. Which are great games in♉ their own right, but we try to do something different this time around. The dramatic story is very much still there, but also pair that with much more player freedom and choice to explore this expansive world. By combining those I feel we’ve got a new type of Final Fantasy on our hands here.”
