Square Enix has brought back Final Fantasy VII from the cult grave

It’s insane. One minute, Square Enix has brought back Final Fantasy VII from the cult grave. Not just Cloud doing a Omni Slashes in the latest Smash, or PS4 getting the original PSX classic. The world-ending RPG is making a comeback, as many expected. Confirmed at the PlayStation Experience this week, Final Fantasy VII is getting an actual remake coming. Not a remastered. The trailer shows the title nearly pulling off a re-enactment of what 1997’s Squaresoft title presented us. The plan, the break-in, the Shin-Ra soldiers getting theirs, the attack dog of a boss battle. Everything seems nearly perfect to me. Then… comes the fighting. And wait… WE’RE TALKING?! Voiceovers are also in. Guess there need to be answers. Square? Yeah, that was the next minute.

Barrett, who seems to be rocking some shades this round, and Cloud, get locked into a battle with Shin-Ra’s finest. Here’s the difference. No prerendered screens. No flashy swirly thing happening before the fight. No invisible enemies. And, of course: no bloody way out. Not this time. Everything’s in 3D. Almost akin to Advent Children and the other title to come forth, Final Fantasy Versus XIII….err XV’s battle system. Newly appointed game director Tetsuya Nomura said there’d be changes according to Games Radar. Fast paced fighting. With his KH3 experience, there could be some good things in the pipeline. Some things remained the same from the look of it, but heck, a faster fight? This didn’t bore me much in Episode Duscae. Magic, Elixers, Curas, Firaga? They were there. Goblins? sure. They were with boy band party in our Just means that perhaps VII will get the same handle and care.

One of the skeptical moves will be how the game will be split into several parts instead. According to what’s going on in the market, Telltale Games and Capcom seem to be proof that episodic gaming works and quite well. 3 Discs, remade into probably several parts, and distrubed with a crapload of impossible wait times. I felt as if I knew it was coming. I mean, the first VII trailer explained the epicness of that entry in a commercial’s timing. You saw nearly every part of the game and “a cast of thousands”.  Compare it to the near first 10-15 or so minutes of the remake game, thrown into a flashy trailer. How far is Square with this production? what’s the schedule? we just saw what’s probably episode 1. We didn’t see Tifa. We didn’t see Aerith. We didn’t even see Barrett get up the freedom fighter’s butts about money. No Seventh Heaven. Alot was missing story-wise in that trailer. Give me the Cait Sith at least, Square. Let me believe.

There’s hope in Final Fantasy VII’s retelling. Yoshinori Kitase and Kazushige Nojima are back to pen craft the remakes. And there’s a possibility of FFVII becoming a multi-console thang. Still, there’s hope to seeing where all this will go. Sadly, we’d not get something complete until all episodes are released.

“The biggest reason why we haven’t done a remake until now is because it’s a massive undertaking to reconstruct Final Fantasy 7 from the ground up with the current technology. Producing a proper HD remake of Final Fantasy 7 that maintains the same feeling of density of the original would result in a volume of content that couldn’t possibly fit into one installment.” Kitase’s words.

Square Enix pulled a fast one before, and with XV at a playable stage(according to geek.com) and three months before their announcement: there’s no way out for Square. It’s the official put-up or shut up for PS. Hope we’ll know more in 2016. Hopefully, we don’t need to wait another 12 years for that.

Does Square Enix have a shot at restoring Final Fantasy VII to its’ original glory? (insert the part where I ask the reader to leave a comment below). 😉