Birds of Prey is 2020’s fourth biggest movie so far, trailing Sonic the Hedgehog ($265 million), 1917 ($362 million), and Bad Boys for Life ($405 million) in terms of global box office results.
According to reports, Birds of Prey carried a gross budget of $97 million, but that came down to $84 million thanks to tax credits in California, where the movie was filmed. Some sources dispute this, as Variety reported that the budget was actually closer to $100 million “due to elaborate sets and CGI.”
The box office results for Birds of Prey so far are about $100 million ahead of the reported production budget, but the figure does not include marketing expenses, which were surely substantial.
Birds of Prey may end up making the lowest amount of money for a DC Extended Universe movie, but it’s production budget was also the smallest. The budgets for Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman, Justice League, Aquaman, and Shazam! were all in excess of $100 million.
According to Variety, Birds of Prey will need to make $100 million in North America and $300 million worldwide to break even. Other sources told the site that the breakeven number is around $250 million globally. Looking at the numbers that way, if they are indeed correct, Birds of Prey may struggle to break even, as the movie currently stands at $78.8 million in North America and $188 million worldwide.
Several movie theatre chains changed the name of Birds of Prey to Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey in an attempt to drum up more interest in the movie. The movie’s official title remains Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn).
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Final Fantasy 7 Remake producer, Yoshinori Kitase, has explained why Sephiroth features in the game, despite the character not being present in the section of the original game that the new project recreates.
Remake only covers the Midgar section of the original story. The opening hours of the 1997 original holds back the reveal of the game’s big bad, Sephiroth, instead opting to just hint at his existence with snippets of dialogue. But for Remake, Square Enix did not feel the need to be so cryptic.
Talking to IGN at a Final Fantasy 7 Remake hands-on event, Kitase – who also directed the original game – said: “In the original players had no prior knowledge of that world or many of its characters, so I really wanted to build Sephiroth up as this really major threat. You don’t see him, you see the after effects of what he’s done. You hear rumors about him to build up the fear of this massive evil presence without actually seeing it.
“Obviously nowadays, of course, everyone knows who Sephiroth is, so I thought we didn’t really need to go quite as far to hold him back and to hide so much,” he explained.
“Looking at the the remake overall, it’s clear that Sephiroth is going to be this massive presence overarching throughout the whole of the story, and this rival of Cloud’s throughout the whole story,” he added. “So I really felt I want to include that in this first game in the project, to really have that feeling of him as a really clear presence right from the start.”
Sephiroth can be seen in many of the Remake’s trailers, sometimes even clashing blades with Cloud. It’s unclear from this footage if Sephiroth is actually present in these sequences, or if it’s just a figment of Cloud’s imagination, but no doubt veterans of the original game will be able to come to their own conclusions about this.
In regards to “everyone” knowing who Sephiroth is, this is actually one of the reasons Square Enix opted to remake Final Fantasy 7. “There’s a lot of people who may not have played the original Final Fantasy 7, but who know the characters,” Kitase said. “They have come to love the lore and the story of the characters, but never really saw their origins. And when these people will come to say ‘Okay, I want to play, I want to see what the start of story was’, the only game available to them was the original Final Fantasy 7 with PlayStation 1 generation graphics. So I felt that I really wanted these people to be able to experience that story with this more modern, more realistic style of Cloud and Sephiroth.”
More graphically advanced titles such as Crisis Core, Kingdom Hearts, and the Final Fantasy 7 movie Advent Children helped more realistic depictions of characters such as Sephiroth permeate pop culture. It’s easy to understand how after seeing those interpretations, for some the blocky polygons of the 1997 original may have been a difficult sell.
Square Enix’s Final Fantasy 7 Remake is a faithful retelling of the original story, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t big changes. In a new hands-on preview, it has been revealed that the Sector 5 Reactor – the second target of the Avalanche freedom fighters group – has been substantially reworked in a couple of key ways.
As you’d expect of the remake, the area is notably larger and more detailed, with wider spaces to allow for the action-focused combat to unfold. The core journey through the reactor remains the same as in the 1997 original game; Cloud, Tifa, and Barret must place the bomb, use a simultaneous button switch to unlock the gates, and then fight the Airbuster boss battle. But the route through the reactor to this techno soldier fight involves a new mechanic unseen in the original game.
Spoiler warning: the following paragraphs reveal in detail how the contents of Sector 5 Reactor have changed.
As the party enters the reactor, they discover that this is not just an electric power plant. It is also an assembly line for anti-armour robots known as Airbusters. Pretty much the first thing you see is a powered-down shell of one held in a docking clamp.
After placing the bomb and setting a remote trigger, the party is confronted by huge holographic representations of both President Shinra and Heidegger, Shinra’s head of Public Safety. They threaten the team with the Airbuster, but cannot immediately deploy it due to the robot not yet having been assembled.
Subsequent rooms contain the production line being used to manufacture the Airbuster, which introduces a new mechanic for the reactor. Components can be removed from the production line, which prevents them from being installed into the robot and thus allowing for a slightly easier fight.
Removing components is done by plugging a keycard into a console. After defeating a room’s enemies, the card is easily found, but there is a catch: there are not enough keycards to deactivate every console. After the first room, which has one card and one station that can deactivate one of the Airbuster’s three ‘M Units’ that provide Mako-fuelled attacks, the further two rooms each have one keycard, but two and three consoles each respectively.
This setup forces players to make a decision about which element is removed. Available to deactivate are 3x M Units, 3x Big Bomber Shells (hugely damaging explosives), and 4x AI Programming Cores (which enable a stunlock ability). The options provided in each room means you’re unable to completely deactivate any one of these attacks, but allows you to focus on reducing abilities you know you struggle with. For instance, if you know you’re often tripped up by stuns, then you can spend the keycards on removing two of the AI Programming Cores.
For more Final Fantasy 7 Remake, check out our big hands-on preview for extra details on the Airbuster fight, the party’s abilities, and summons.
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Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer. You can follow him on Twitter.
An explosion detonates within the heart of Midgar’s North Mako Reactor, causing its cooling tower to burst apart in a plume of orange and green. It’s a familiar sight to anyone who’s played Final Fantasy 7, but in the Remake it is the starting point for a demonstration of what this ambitious, multi-game retelling of the story can be. The Scorpion Sentinel boss preceding this moment speaks to a bigger and flashier version of 1997’s most captivating JRPG, but it’s when you’re beyond the perimeter of the North Reactor that the game’s new scope is made clear. This is a project exploring how better technology and modern ideas can change and redefine old perspectives.
During a recent hands-on with Final Fantasy 7 Remake, I discovered that the escape through the streets of Sector 1 after the bombing of the reactor is a far cry from the somber sequence in the original. The slow, melancholic music is swapped out for the brasher Shinra Inc. signature tune. The streets are packed with people, colossal chunks of debris, and spreading fire, creating a scene that feels distinctly the product of a post-9/11 world. Rather than emerging from the mission a hero, Remake asks you to consider Cloud’s role as a terrorist as he picks his way through a mess of emergency service vehicles and devastated families.
This change is initially jarring. The quiet track played during this scene in the original game is called Anxious Heart, and that title alone tells you exactly how the deathly silent streets of Midgar seem at that moment. It’s easy to feel as if its bombastic replacement is missing the point; the streets are not just filled with civilians, but also soldiers and riot guards ready to strike you down in extended combat encounters. Upon reflection, though, this offers a different angle on the same story, which is symbolic of everything Remake is doing.
The sequence uses the opportunity to add more detail to Shinra’s depiction. While in the original game it was obvious that the company was more than an electric power supply, Remake uses voice over to quickly establish that Shinra is a dystopic totalitarian regime. Loudspeakers shout commands at the population, telling them to leave their homes immediately and evacuate. As you run through residential streets you can see not just how immensely large and populated Midgar is, but also how Shinra has a terrifying stranglehold on everyone within its borders.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=It%20offers%20a%20different%20angle%20on%20the%20same%20story%2C%20which%20is%20symbolic%20of%20everything%20Remake%20is%20doing.”]This expanded scope goes beyond being able to render locations as larger, more detailed, and with more life. The second bombing run in the Sector 5 Reactor also incorporates new gameplay ideas based around player choice. As Cloud, Barret, and Tifa storm through the cavernous, steel-plated guts of the building, there’s the opportunity to re-code a manufacturing line that is assembling the area’s boss, the Airbuster. Decisions here directly affect the kind of boss battle you’ll eventually face, although the effect is not quite as dramatic as the decision would perhaps have you believe (it’s about reducing the Airbuster’s resources, rather than denying it abilities altogether). Nevertheless, the mechanic does allow you to have more impact on what was once an entirely static world.
Changes such as these dramatically alter the story’s pace. It feels odd that places which previously took ten minutes to work through now take three times longer. But, importantly, this extended length seems to be made up of worthwhile elements rather than filler. Sometimes that’s via a new mechanical design like the Airbuster production line, or sometimes that’s through entirely new areas, such as the loot-filled storage vault that can be unlocked if you have the patience to do that simultaneous button pressing lock puzzle another handful of times.
But, as demonstrated in the E3 2019 demo, it’s in the boss fights that Final Fantasy 7 Remake really shows off its flair for expansion. Like the Scorpion Sentinel, the Airbuster is now a multi-stage battle with cinematic presentation and more explosions than your average Marvel movie finale. It’s against this techno soldier that the new hands-on build finally provides a stage to test the limits of the Remake’s combat system with a full three-member party. And, somewhat predictably for this project, the results are remarkable.
Classic Final Fantasy boss battles that use the original Active Time Battle system can be tense and stressful in their own way, but Remake takes that feeling and runs a mile with it. (If you’ve yet to read anything about the system, we’ve got a full breakdown of it to help you out.) The combination of action elements, command menus, and the requirement to constantly swap between characters to remain efficient is surprisingly taxing in a boss fight scenario. This is not a criticism; after Final Fantasy 15’s streamlined approach, it’s a real thrill to creep further and further to the edge of your seat the deeper into a fight you get.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=Boss%20battles%20can%20feel%20exhausting%20and%20test%20the%20limits%20of%20your%20endurance.”]There’s unrelenting pressure to be using your ATB gauges as they become available in order to ensure your team is consistently unleashing a barrage of high-damage attacks. While you’re only ever actively in control of one character at a time, those temporarily controlled by AI do not use their special skills automatically and so must be frequently issued orders. This preserves the classic nature of Final Fantasy 7’s command-based battles, but its implementation in a real-time environment feels like a non-stop juggle rather than a deliberate rhythmic exchange. The end result is that these big boss battles can feel mentally exhausting and test the limits of your endurance. It’s almost akin to the biggest fights in a Platinum-developed game, just with a tactical rather than reflex-based approach.
The pressure of these battles can certainly be relieved by being properly prepared. The Sector 5 save game provided at the hands-on was set up so that the party only had access to one orb of lightning materia, and so exploiting the Airbuster’s electrical weakness was a tough job. The final segment of the demo featured the fight against Abzu (previously known as Aps) in the sewers beneath Midgar’s slums. For this battle, every member of the party was equipped with Fire materia, allowing Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith to bombard the beast with highly damaging flames. With the right equipment, it seems as if at least some of the bosses can be cut down in a matter of minutes.
Aerith also had Ifrit summon materia (yup, summons are now available in Midgar, including Leviathan and Shiva), allowing her to call in the fiery demon to flame-punch the monster into submission. Rather than just elaborate magic spells, summons now fight alongside you on the battlefield, and can even be commanded using your ATB gauges. They cannot be called in at will, though; a bar appears the HUD and fills over time and, when full, can be spent to call in a summon of your choosing. Taking away the on-demand nature of summons does restrict their use as a tactical tool, but this new system does enhance the narrative that they are powerful entities that arrive when they believe you are in need of their gifts.
While party combat really comes alive in boss battles, there are new enemies specifically designed to make use of multiple team members. During Cloud’s solitary escape from the North Reactor, he faces a team of Shinra soldiers armed with riot shields that easily deflect sword swipes. It makes fighting them solo tricky, and their leader, a beefy guy called The Huntsman, is painfully laborious to defeat. Fight these guys with a party, though, and it’s an entirely different story. Cloud can tank them while Tifa runs behind and uses her Whirling Uppercut heavy attack to launch them upwards, which in turn opens them up to a salvo of Overcharged shots from Barret.
Regardless of your target, party members have a variety of returning and brand new skills to make use of. There’s significant focus on providing more non-magic options, and so there’s always something to unleash without the need for spending MP. Tifa, for instance, can deal big chunks of damage with fun moves like Divekick and Starshower, or buff her basic attack stats with the Unbridled Strength ability. Many of Cloud’s former Limit Breaks have also been turned into these standard abilities; Braver is the first one you’ll get, and later you’ll pick up Blade Burst, which is effectively Blade Beam.
Meanwhile, Aerith has been transformed into a full-blown white mage-style caster; her primary attack sees her hurl blasts of magic rather than whack foes with her staff, and her abilities are all based around support spells such as Soul Drain, which absorbs MP from enemies, and Lustrous Shield, which blooms a defensive barrier from magical petals. Additionally, all party members can be equipped with new purple materia that provides skills used in the action elements of battle, such as augmented dodges that follow up with damage.
It’s a dizzying array of additions and changes; enough to overwhelm and even incite just a little nervousness. Despite all the big moments being there and the experience feeling fundamentally true to Final Fantasy 7, Remake is a very different beast. There are moments when you’ll expect something to happen and it won’t, and what it does instead can cause confusion and a pang of disappointment. But those feelings are all short-lived, because no matter how great it would have been to see those classic moments exactly replicated in modern tech, it’s much more exciting to see how it’s all changed.
The remix presented so far seems well judged, but the most notable thing is how it all feels like the design equivalent of an entire battleship broadside salvo firing at once. This no-holds-barred approach creates the most absurdly entertaining boss fights I’ve fought in years in the Airbuster, but if the correct lines are not drawn, then the game’s more somber, thoughtful moments could be distorted and lose their impact. If restraint is shown though, and what’s here is representative of the quality of the whole experience, then there’s little more to say than: yes, they might really have really done it.
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Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer. You can follow him on Twitter.
Final Fantasy VII Remake is one of 2020’s most-anticipated games, and it’s coming soon. The long-awaited PS4-exclusive arrives in April, and GameSpot recently had an opportunity to play a chunk of the game. In a new video, Edmond Tran guides you through what he thinks about what he played during his four-hour demo.
Edmond played through Chapters 1, 2, and 7, as well as some of Chapter 10, so there is a lot to unpack. He talks about some of the unique elements that make Final Fantasy 7 Remake feel like a new game, including the new combat mechanics and what makes Midgar feel more alive than ever. Edmond also had things to say about the American voice cast for the new game, so be sure to watch the full video for all the nitty gritty details.
As announced previously, Final Fantasy 7 Remake will be released episodically, so what’s available at launch is just the beginning.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake launches on April 10 for PS4. It’s a timed-exclusive for PS4 until 2021, at which point it will presumably launch for other consoles and/or PC.
Final Fantasy 7’s opening sequence, known as the Bombing Mission, is one of the most recognizable moments in video game history. Whether you’re a fan of Square Enix’s RPG series or not, you’ll no doubt be familiar with some element of: the exciting music, the sweeping camera movement that pulls viewers into the world of Migar, or Cloud’s little backflip off the train. It’s an iconic moment, which makes seeing it in the upcoming remake an exciting prospect.
Those that have been keeping up on the Final Fantasy 7 Remake news will know that the game will be quite significantly different to the original. Much of it will take place in Midgar, which means players will be seeing more of the city and undertaking a variety of new adventures there. With that in mind, how much has developer Square Enix changed the opening Bombing Mission sequence and the sequence immediately following it? Does it stay true to the original or has it been reworked? You can watch the video above and find out for yourself.
Final Fantasy VII Remake is scheduled to release on PS4 exclusively on April 10. The game’s limited-time exclusivity is expected to last for a year, with releases expected thereafter.
Barret, Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie are joined by hired mercenary Cloud Strife as they make their way to Midgar’s Sector 1 reactor core. Their goal is to rid the planet of corrupt company Shinra’s influence. As they make their way through the reactor they have to fight Security Officers, Sentry Rays, Sweepers, and the dangerous Scorpion Sentinel boss.
In the video you’ll see Cloud and Barret using their various iconic moves including magic such as Thunder, Fire, and Cure, as well as offensive abilities such as Braver, Charge Attack, and more. The new combat system lets you switch between your party members on the fly, but you’ll see how Barret is definitely more effective against enemies such as the Sentry Rays. Final Fantasy VII Remake is set to come out April 10, 2020 on Playstation 4.
Seeing the reimagined opening of Final Fantasy VII Remake for the first time really is something special, if the original is something you’re familiar with. The establishing shots of Midgar, the train, the first couple of battles–there’s definitely an unavoidable nostalgia, no matter how reserved and wary you’re trying to be. I’d certainly been very skeptical about how Remake was going to turn out, and that’s partially on me–I generally avoid watching pre-release coverage of things I know I want to experience myself. But after getting the chance to spend somewhere between three and four hours playing the first two chapters and some mid-game stuff, I’m feeling much better about letting myself be very excited about Remake’s impending release.
You’re likely already aware that Square Enix is blowing out the Final Fantasy VII saga to encompass multiple releases. The first part is set solely in the corporate-owned slums of Midgar, and will extrapolate greatly on the beats of the original. Having started a replay of the PS1 FF7 shortly before I dove into the Remake demo, it’s a little shocking how much more detailed the new game feels. The original Final Fantasy VII was in no way a small or unambitious game, but if I were to imagine the same kind of treatment being given to the rest of VII–well, I hope I live to see it all happen.
A big part of the joy, of course, is simply seeing a more realistic depiction of a Midgar you likely know, and from all angles. There’s a big nostalgia factor, naturally–jumping off the train for the first time is pretty cool. But there’s a lot more about the setting that was never present in the original, and that certainly brings a feeling of curious wonder about something completely new. You can look up and see the plate far above, which physically separates the city’s rich from poor. The streets are populated with people, shopfronts, and ads for hair gel, giving the city a kind of character I never thought about it having.
Similarly, scenes that fly by in a minute in the original are expanded on for almost an hour. We encountered a handful of ‘slow walk’ scenes where the game spends time fostering a particular tone and atmosphere as it forces you to take a closer look at the aftermath of events through the city, listen to the citizens, and delve into Cloud’s fragile psyche. Speaking to Yoshinori Kitase, a producer on Remake and director on the original Final Fantasy VII, he pointed out that this would be the first time fans will see a greener, more unsure and inexperienced Cloud in this kind of realistic detail, and that’s something they paid a lot of attention to–the Cloud we saw in Advent Children and other supplementary Final Fantasy VII material in the years after the original release was far more hardened after the dramatic events of the game.
But the most notable example of expansion I saw in Remake was the entirety of Chapter 2, wherein Cloud, Barrett, and the rest of Avalanche split up, agreeing to rendezvous back at the train. Fans are used to seeing short scenes of Cloud running through the city streets, nonchalantly bumping into a seemingly inconsequential flower girl, and quickly being backed into a corner by Shinra guards before making a daring escape.
In Remake, a lot more focus and attention is given to that seemingly inconsequential flower girl. Cloud converses with her for longer, the two get into a bit of trouble with the guards, and there’s a very curious and unexpected wrinkle complicating things. Kitase mentioned that the development team did some research into scenes fans found particularly memorable from the original game, wanting to make sure they had some extra consideration in Remake. This feels like one of the results, but personally, the expanded flower girl scene was one of the points in the demo where I was left feeling a bit unsure–something I’ll only be able to resolve once I see where it goes in the full game.
Following this scene, Cloud’s originally quick escape from guards is extended out into an exploratory segment where you’re asked to move through the streets and rooftops of Midgar, trying to find your way to the meeting point. It feels primarily like a chance for you to get a better feel for the new tactical real-time combat system with more challenging enemies. The defacto ‘boss’ enemy of this area is a named elite unit called “The Huntsman,” an incredibly defensive shield unit who forces you to get used to dealing positional damage–you either have to distract him long enough to hit him from behind, or do what I do and perfect your parrying and countering skills to stagger him. At this early stage, and in my short time with the game, I was more than happy to spend time exploring every nook and cranny I could, finding out-of-the-way chests with equipment and Materia upgrades for Cloud, and just marvelling at a Midgar I hadn’t seen before.
But my biggest worry comes from wondering about the full game’s pacing, and the ifs and whens of whether roaming around expanded city streets and Mako reactors for the sake of a seamless Midgar will get tedious. These worries crept into my mind a few times during my hours with the game–when I was asked to wait for laser grids to momentarily come down before dashing across, when I had to hunt for keycards three different times before progressing, after climbing up my 20th ladder. I expect some roadblocks and puzzles, and the sequence where Cloud has to pull levers synchronously with Tifa and Barret was nice to see again (with additional unbridled enthusiasm from Barret), but I really hope there isn’t too much busywork placed between major beats.
But the thing that I just couldn’t get enough of, the part of Remake I’m dying to go back to, is the tactical real-time combat system. It’s accessible. It’s complex. It’s flashy, it’s challenging, and best of all, it has a good heft to it, a good feel.
If you’ve been following the reveal, you know have some idea about how it works: There’s a lot of focus on blocking and dodging, regular attacks are mapped to the Square button, and when you’re using melee characters like Tifa or Cloud, individual strikes are linked to discrete button presses. Characters with long-range weapons, like Barret’s gun arm or Aerith’s magic staff, require you to hold down Square for sustained fire. Sustaining attacks will build up segments of your ATB meter, at which point you can spend the segments on abilities and spells (which still require MP).
You can activate spells and abilities in two ways: the first by assigning them to shortcut commands (L1 in tandem with the face buttons), allowing you to trigger them instantaneously, which allows you to seamlessly combo into them from your regular strikes. Played this way, Remake’s combat can feel closer to a character action game, ala Devil May Cry. The second method is to hit a button to slow down time to a crawl, allowing you to more casually peruse a menu in order to weigh up the option available to you, and target them more specifically.
Even given the game’s huge focus on action in combat, I found that when playing some of the mid-game content, at which point your characters have dozens of skills, spells, and items under their belts, the tactical pause option is vital to make the most out of your assault. Slowing down time lets you squeeze out advantages without faltering for a second–taking advantage of elemental weaknesses, piling enough pressure onto enemies to lock them down, and making sure your positioning is optimal. To me, it evokes the same kinds of feelings of playing an intense FTL scenario.
This is especially true in boss fights. Those familiar with FFVII might recall the Air Buster fight, which takes place in Chapter 7 of Remake, where your team of Cloud, Barret, and Tifa are separated by the boss itself. I had to constantly switch between characters to make sure they were mitigating as much damage as possible when they were being targeted (with abilities like Barret’s Steelskin and plenty of heals) while pressing the advantage when they had the opportunity to attack Air Buster from behind. Your party members will behave of their own accord when you’re not directly in control, but they won’t be as effective, and won’t build up their ATB meters as quickly. During regular battles, I found it was usually okay to just stick to my preferred character (Tifa, of course), but making sure you’re optimizing your plan of attack during boss battles, where the dynamic can change dramatically on a dime, is a tense and welcome challenge in Remake’s combat. Summonable creatures (like Ifrit, Shiva, and Leviathan) act like extra party members when called upon, attacking of their own accord for a limited time. Anyone who has ATB meter to spend can use it to trigger one of the summoned creature’s special abilities, and once time is up, the summon will perform their big, cinematic attack before disappearing.
I was pleasantly surprised by how different each character feels to use. Not just because of melee vs. ranged weapon preference and abilities, but also the innate secondary skills each one has. Pressing Triangle with Cloud will switch his sword stance, for instance, giving him access to stronger hits and the ability to counter at the cost of his dodge. For Barret, however, Triangle is a single charged shot that does a huge amount of damage but has a long cooldown. Tifa has a Whirling Uppercut with a short cooldown that becomes a frequent part of her combo toolkit as she gets in close, and Aerith has a ranged ability called Tempest that gets more powerful the longer you hold the button to charge it, at the cost of, well, doing anything else.
The short time I did get to use Aerith in battle was the most divergent experience of the four. The last portion of the game I got to play was the fight with Abzu in the sewers, which takes place in Remake’s 10th chapter. Abzu is ferocious, pouncing all over the arena and unleashing huge area-of-effect attacks. Focusing your efforts as Aerith during this fight felt necessary because of how devastating Abzu can be. Staying far away from danger zones and repositioning when necessary, I spent most of my time laying down buffs, debuffs, and regular heals to avoid having to frantically throw Phoenix Downs around to revive everyone one by one. When things were generally okay, it was a matter of working out how long I could charge my Tempest ability for a big hit without getting interrupted. This supporting role is the kind of action that can really stall the momentum of a fight in a turn-based scenario, but with the constant dangers of Remake’s real-time combat, even the act of keeping everyone alive can be thrilling.
And with all that Remake experience now under my belt, it’s the constant thrill and excitement of combat that makes me happy to charge headlong into any and all battles the game wants to throw at me. I may have come away with some hesitations about how the structure of Remake’s first part might shake out in the full game, but so long as the fights keep coming, I think I’m going to have a buster of a good time.
Have any questions about the Final Fantasy VII Remake content we saw? Leave it in the comments below and we’ll answer what we can. For more coverage, read our interview with Yoshinori Kitase, director of the original Final Fantasy VII and a producer on Remake.
Until Final Fantasy VII Remake was officially announced in 2015, the frenzied fans that had been whipped up by a reimagining of the game’s opening, shown a decade earlier, had basically lost all hope that it was ever going to get off the ground. But developers at Square Enix had been working on it all along. Key members of the original game’s development team, including director/scenario writer Yoshinori Kitase, character designer Tetsuya Nomura, and Kazushige Nojima, also a scenario writer, were trying to get the ball rolling on the project for a long time. But other Final Fantasy projects, as well as the limits of console tech, were always a roadblock in making sure Square Enix had the right team to successfully revive and reinvent one of the most iconic games of all time.
Yoshinori Kitase, now a producer on Final Fantasy VII Remake, told GameSpot that even before the team started production on the original Final Fantasy VII, they strived for the already-popular series to both do more ambitious things and reach a broader audience than before. “When we finished doing Final Fantasy VI and moved to start work on Final Fantasy VII, there was that idea in our heads that we wanted to go outside of Japan for this game,” Kitase reminisced, through a translator. “I don’t think we had the expectation that it was going to be as big as it was in the end (Final Fantasy VII remains the series’ best-performing entry with over 12.3 million units sold) but we did have that passion to make this go out to the world–rather than VI, which was a much more domestic-focused title.”
Paramount to making an impact on a broader audience was taking advantage of Sony’s PlayStation, and considering what that meant for the series’ former, iconic pixel-art look. “There were a lot of debates within the team about the right style to go for when we were making that transition,” Kitase said. “We went around to a lot of international CG events, things like SIGGRAPH, looking at what we could do.”
“Those debates went right up until the start of production. Lots of different opinions–obviously there were people who were saying, ‘Final Fantasy should still evolve as a 2D type of game.’ There were still games that were being done in that classic style, maybe enhanced a little bit, so it was an obvious option. There were also people who were saying: ‘Maybe we should do a hybrid style. We can have the backgrounds done in 3D, and we’ll keep the characters as billboard-style 2D anime characters’ (SaGa Frontier and Grandia were a couple of notable titles that used this style around the same time). But in the end, the group that won out were the ones who said: ‘No. We should go all-in on the game–the characters, the backgrounds, should all be in full 3D’, and that was when the direction was really decided on.”
As a result, Final Fantasy VII was on the cutting edge of console gaming’s tech arms race. At the time, it was one of the games you had to play, if only to marvel at the remarkable FMV cutscenes–at least, that was the case in my schoolyard. Of course, VII hasn’t aged as gracefully as other Final Fantasy titles, and it’s perhaps serendipitous that the team had to hold off for so long. The technological leap is now much higher, and the impact of seeing the reimagined game is more astonishing.
“One common theme between the original and what we’re doing now is that idea of using new technology to make the characters more expressive–that was one of the main reasons why we wanted to move to polygon characters originally. We thought we could make them much more expressive than 2D sprites could be, and that’s pretty much the same now with Final Fantasy VII Remake.” Remake runs on Unreal Engine 4, with the team at Square Enix working with Epic on custom modifications and enhancements. “A lot of the new technology is all geared towards making the characters, facial expressions, much more dynamic and believable, just to be able to depict more emotions.”
Some of the new tech revolves heavily around the use of AI systems–one that produces bespoke death animations for enemies, depending on the condition of their final blows and their environment, as well as another that customises the mouth movements of each character to sync up exactly with the performance of voice actors whether they’re speaking in English, Japanese, or any number of the game’s language tracks.
But Final Fantasy VII Remake isn’t just a graphical overhaul. If you’ve been following the project, you know that the team decided to considerably expand upon the source material, to the point where the full adventure will be split between separate games. The release of the first part, which takes place solely in the initial location of Midgar, is imminent. From what I’ve seen of the first few hours of the game, it greatly meditates on the original beats of the story. Scenes that used to flash by in minutes can take up more than an hour. More time is spent with characters who have become beloved since its release. But as for the other 90% of the saga, that’s something Square Enix isn’t keen on discussing. At this point, it feels like it could even be another couple of decades.
Is this what long-awaiting fans want? Does that even matter? “The fans may be more familiar with the franchise than we are in some ways. They’ve played the game and have been returning to it ever since,” Kitase said. The team “looked on the internet for people’s comments and opinions to find out which particular scenes in the original game were memorable, which ones are the ones that people wanted to see, or which stayed with them.”
“But if we were just to make it a 100%, one-for-one remake of the original game, just follow the story exactly as it was, and not change anything… I think people would like it but it would just be ‘Oh yeah, I remember this. This was great, how nostalgic,’ and that’s all you get.”
“We have to meet people’s expectations, give them what they want to see… But we have to go beyond that and really exceed their expectations and give them new surprises as well. So it was something we had to pay a lot of attention to and we were very careful… it didn’t just stop at ‘Yeah, that was a great game, I remember this.’ We had to go further and provide a new experience.”
Part of the new experience, and part of having Final Fantasy VII once again reach for an even broader audience, came in the radical modernisation of its combat system. And as much as RPG fans still love a great turn-based battle system, it was never really on the cards for Remake. Kitase explains that it’s to do with “the changing tastes of the fanbase of the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole. We’ve got lots of younger gamers now and they like that very instinctive action-game style of control.” There is a whole new generation who has likely never played Final Fantasy VII, and the focus on refining the heavy action is to cater to that new, younger audience who “are familiar with that and expect that.”
But this is all in the service of being able to make sure Final Fantasy VII’s memorable characters and powerful themes–environmentalism, terrorism, life and death, among others–can live on. Thinking about VII’s themes in the world that Remake is releasing in certainly makes them seem more relevant than ever. Climate change and radicalism might immediately come to mind for some, but Kitase was hesitant to draw any correlations or speak about increased emphases in Remake.
“Obviously, it’s still a fantasy world. It’s a fantasy game and the concepts of Mako Energy and the Lifestream are very much fantasy concepts. We aren’t specifically trying to make it a comment on one specific thing or say anything specific about a real-world issue through that, we’re trying to make more timeless and universal themes.”
But all of that isn’t to say that he doesn’t hope audiences don’t engage with it intellectually. “I really want to see people look at the way that those issues are tackled in Final Fantasy VII, and maybe see how they resonate with some of the issues that are important to them. But we can only do that by keeping it as a kind of universal presentation rather than specifically pointing out one thing. The realism of what we’re showing now is much higher and the way that we’re depicting things is very different now. So I really want to see how the messages may be received differently by people these days in this new depiction.”
It surely is a long road until we get to see the end of the Final Fantasy VII Remake project, and Kitase told me that he and the team likely won’t even take a break once the first part is released–“I think we’ll probably get straight into it.” But personally, he isn’t worried about the possibility of having to work on Remake for the rest of his career: “I think it is a very important thing.”
Of all the games Kitase has worked on, Final Fantasy VII still remains his personal favourite, though his very first Squaresoft project, Seiken Densetsu (known as Final Fantasy Adventure in the West), holds a special place too. Despite working on a number of other very highly-regarded titles, like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI, he wouldn’t give me a hint about what other remakes he’d like to consider (“Even if I made a joke about it, it would still go around the world in seconds–it’s too dangerous to say something about that”), and wouldn’t even open up about whether people in the Final Fantasy universe eat chocobos or not (“I think that’s a secret for now”). FFVII is all he’s going to be focused on for the foreseeable future.
“Final Fantasy VII is a game which, if it just stayed as the original, would just be remembered as something from the past and people wouldn’t be as engaged with it. I think in order to be something that continues to be loved and followed by future generations we have to keep updating it as we’re doing now. And in 10 years time, 20 years time, it may need to be done again! So even if this is the only thing that I do in the rest of my career, I won’t be disappointed.”
The playable demo for Square Enix’s Final Fantasy 7 Remake is now available to download from the PlayStation Store. The demo allows you to play the first chapter of the game that includes the iconic Mako Reactor 1 bombing mission and the Guard Scorpion battle (now known as the Scorpion Sentinel).
Downloading the demo not only allows you to dive into the game and experience the FF7 remake over a month before release, but will also bag you a PlayStation theme that will unlock when the game launches.
If you want to check out what’s in the demo before you play, check out the full Mako Reactor 1 in the gameplay video below.
