Final Fantasy developer Yoshinori Kitase says if he were to remake Final Fantasy VII, he’d be tempted to switch things up, “delete things” and add “new elements.”
It’s that time of year again, folks. The time when the ghost of Final Fantasy VII rises from its grave and starts rattling its chains at us, demanding a remake and generally being a nuisance. In an interview with OXM, Final Fantasy VII director and scenario planner Yoshinori Kitase talked about how he would approach a potential remake of the much-loved JRPG. Purely in hypothetical terms, you understand.
“If I may speak as a game creator, if we were to produce a remake of 7, for example, I would be really tempted to delete things and add new elements, new systems or whatever because if we were to make exactly the same thing now, it’d be like a repeat,” he said. “It’d be an issue of repetition and not as much fun to make such a game. So I’d be really interested in rearranging games or reshaping games into something slightly different even though it’s supposed to be the same game.”
“When we play the games we made years ago, sometimes we think ‘oh, that is not really cool’ or ‘that probably should have been a bit better than that’ and that sort of thing,” he continued. Despite its reputation for excellence, FFVII had its fair share of issues, particularly the slightly goofy translation.
“But on the other hand, those slightly negative features and bits, for some of the really enthusiastic fans of these titles, that gives the game extra flavour or personality or whatever. So maybe they would rather we didn’t do anything about it and we just leave it in as it is. It’s very difficult to decide what we should we keep in and what we should take out.”
He recognizes that any changes made to the game, presumably exempting more absurdly vertical fight scenes, would inspire insane, animal rage in long-term fans. “If we did that, the fans might be disappointed or ‘this is not what I was expecting’ so in that sense maybe some might say that it’s better to let memory be memory,” he said.
Personally, I’m choosing to interpret that last quote as a warning. Essentially: ‘Stop asking! Stop it! Stop it, or I’ll put Goofy in it, so help me God.‘
Source: OXM
