Final Fantasy VII Remake
Final Fantasy VII Remake[lower-alpha 1] is an action role-playing game developed and published by Square Enix, released for PlayStation 4 on April 10, 2020. It is the first in a planned series of games remaking the 1997 PlayStation game Final Fantasy VII.
Final Fantasy VII Remake | |
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![]() North American cover art, featuring the game's protagonist, Cloud Strife | |
Developer(s) | Square Enix Business Division 1 |
Publisher(s) | Square Enix |
Director(s) |
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Producer(s) | Yoshinori Kitase |
Designer(s) |
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Programmer(s) |
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Artist(s) |
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Writer(s) |
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Composer(s) |
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Series | Final Fantasy |
Engine | Unreal Engine 4 |
Platform(s) | PlayStation 4 |
Release | April 10, 2020 |
Genre(s) | Action role-playing |
Mode(s) | Single-player |
Set in the dystopian cyberpunk metropolis of Midgar, players control mercenary Cloud Strife as he and an eco-terrorist group known as AVALANCHE oppose a powerful megacorporation known as Shinra from using the planet's life essence as an energy source. The gameplay combines real-time action with strategic and role-playing elements.
Remake was announced in 2015 following years of speculation. Several key staff members returned, including character designer Tetsuya Nomura as director and main character designer, director Yoshinori Kitase as producer, writer Kazushige Nojima, and composer Nobuo Uematsu. The staff redesigned the characters to balance realism and stylization.
The game was generally well received for its graphics, gameplay, narrative, and faithfulness to the original. It has become one of the fastest-selling PlayStation 4 games.
Premise
![](../I/m/Final_Fantasy_VII_Remake_gameplay_screenshot.png)
Final Fantasy VII Remake is the first in a planned series of games remaking the 1997 PlayStation game Final Fantasy VII. IGN estimated that Remake covers approximately 10-15% of the original game's story.[1] Set in the dystopian metropolis of Midgar, players control Cloud Strife, a former Shinra soldier turned mercenary who joins the eco-terrorist group AVALANCHE to fight the Shinra Corporation, who have been draining the planet's life energy.[2][3] Every element has been remade, using real-time polygonal graphics as opposed to the pre-rendered environments of the original.[4][5] The story includes major expansions to character development and some notable plot additions.[1]
Exploration and battle mechanics both take place in real time, like Final Fantasy XV. The game features an altered "Active Time Battle" (ATB) system from the original, which gradually fills up slowly, or can fill faster with attacks. Once it is filled, the player can halt the action and use special abilities such as magic, items, and special moves. The player can also assign these special abilities to shortcut buttons, allowing them to play entirely in real-time without pausing. Each special ability uses up a segment of the ATB bar.[6] The player can also switch between party members at any time. Each party member has their own individual skills, such as Cloud's close-quarters melee attacks and Barret's long-range distance attacks.[7] Players are also able to use magic and summons, and a Limit Break gauge allows characters to perform more powerful attacks once charged. While the game has more real-time elements, strategic elements still remain, such as selecting weapons and magic for each character to wield.[4][5]
Plot
Cloud Strife is a former member of SOLDIER, the elite warriors of the Shinra Electric Power Company. Shinra uses mako, the Planet's spiritual energy, harvested by massive reactors, to power the metropolis city of Midgar and develop cutting-edge technology. Disillusioned with Shinra, and at the request of his childhood friend Tifa Lockhart, Cloud takes a mercenary job for Avalanche, an ecoterrorist organization, led by Barret Wallace, who believes excessive mako harvesting will cause environmental disaster, which they attempt to prevent by bombing a mako reactor. In the aftermath, Cloud is haunted by memories of Sephiroth, an enigmatic former SOLDIER member, and meets the florist Aerith Gainsborough. Although Cloud intends to leave Avalanche after receiving his pay, mysterious ghost-like entities, who often reappear at pivotal moments in the game, cause him to be recruited for another reactor bombing, which goes awry, separating him from the group.
Cloud meets Aerith again and protects her from Shinra forces, who pursue her for unknown reasons. While attempting to reunite with his party with Aerith's help, they see Tifa entering Wall Market, a lawless walled-in city, and, reuniting with her, learn that she is trying to gain information from Wall Market's crime lord Don Corneo. Corneo reveals that Shinra plans to collapse a piece of the "plate," home to Midgar's upper class, onto the slums of Sector 7 to retaliate for Avalanche's destruction of the mako reactors. Cloud, Tifa, and Barret fail to stop Shinra's plan, and the plate falls. Thanks to Aerith, most of the population is able to evacuate in time, but she is captured by Shinra.
While clearing the rubble left by the plate's fall, Cloud, Tifa, and Barret discover an underground Shinra research lab. Horrified by the experiments they find inside, they infiltrate Shinra headquarters and rescue Aerith before she suffers the same fate. She reveals that she is the last descendant of the Cetra, a near-extinct precursor race who resided in a "Promised Land", which Shinra covets due to its boundless mako reserves. The group also meets a talking wolf-like creature called Red XIII, who explains that the strange ghost-like entities the group has encountered are called Whispers. They exist to ensure that the course of destiny (implied to be the events of the original game) is not altered, by correcting any deviations from this course. Meanwhile, Sephiroth infiltrates Shinra and steals a mysterious entity known as "Jenova", somehow connected to the extinction of the Cetra.
In a confrontation at the top of Shinra headquarters, Sephiroth murders the president of Shinra and also impales Barret, although the Whispers save him, while the party fights a hallucinatory apparition of Jenova. With the death of President Shinra, his son Rufus assumes control of the company and briefly fights Cloud, but is defeated. Cloud and his allies flee the scene via the Midgar Expressway, but find Sephiroth waiting for them at the end. Sephiroth cryptically challenges Cloud, opening a portal to another dimension. Aerith somehow alters the portal, stating that they will change destiny if they continue. The group enters the portal and battles the Whisper Harbinger, an entity formed by an amalgamate of Whispers. While this happens, in what appears to be an alternate timeline also engulfed by Whispers, SOLDIER Zack Fair fights an army of Shinra troops determined to kill him and Cloud.
After the Whisper Harbinger is defeated, Sephiroth confronts the group, seemingly seizing the remnants of the Whisper's power. Together, the party overwhelms him, but as Cloud seems poised to finish him, Sephiroth transports the both of them to a metaphysical realm he calls the Edge of Creation. Sephiroth urges Cloud to join him, and defy fate together. Cloud refuses and fights Sephiroth, but is no match for him alone and is defeated, although Sephiroth spares him before departing, cryptically stating that he will have seven seconds to defy fate.
Meanwhile, Zack Fair triumphs over the Shinra forces. After Cloud returns to his group, they agree that Sephiroth is a greater threat to the Planet than Shinra, and commit to pursuing him. However, as the group departs Midgar, Aerith expresses concern over their now uncertain future.
Development
Background
![](../I/m/Square-enix_dissidia_yoshinori-kitase.jpg)
Final Fantasy VII was developed by Square for the PlayStation console and released in 1997.[8] Its staff included producer and series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, director and co-writer Yoshinori Kitase, artist Yusuke Naora, character designer Tetsuya Nomura, and writer Kazushige Nojima.[9] The game was a critical and commercial success, and established the Final Fantasy series as a major franchise.[8] It was expanded through the multimedia project Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, comprising additional games, films, and other media.[10]
In the early 2000s, Square announced a remake for PlayStation 2 alongside Final Fantasy VIII and IX, but nothing further was heard of the project.[11][12] It was abandoned because of the increased challenge of developing on new hardware, and would have necessitated cutting content.[13] The staff were also preoccupied with developing Final Fantasy XIII and its sequels, and Remake would have been an equally large or larger project hard to undertake at the same time. Once the XIII series ended, the team was free to pursue other projects.[14]
Demand for a remake grew following a PlayStation 3 tech demo at the 2005 Electronic Entertainment Expo, showcasing the opening of VII with Square's new Crystal Tools engine. Further demand came during the game's impending tenth anniversary in 2007. On both occasions, Square denied that any remake was in development,[15][16][17] for reasons including their focus on new games, the necessity to cut elements to make a remake manageable, the difficulty of developing for modern hardware, and the amount of development time it would require.[18][19][20][21][22]
The Remake project finally began when Final Fantasy producer Shinji Hashimoto broached the subject to Kitase, Nojima, and Nomura. All three were reaching a stage of life that they defined as "that age": all felt that if they waited much longer, they might not be alive to or would be too old to develop a remake, and passing the project on to a new generation did not feel right.[23][24][25] Another reason for developing the remake was that Square Enix was creating a growing library of PlayStation 4 titles, and the team hoped to increase the console's popularity.[25]
Design
![](../I/m/Characters_of_Final_Fantasy_VII_Remake.png)
The game entered full production by late 2015, led by Business Division 1, an internal production team within Square Enix.[26][27][28] While Nomura was involved with the project from the start, he only discovered he was the director after seeing himself credited in an internal company presentation video, as he had expected Kitase to fill the role. He revealed that Kitase himself thought Nomura expected to become director.[23] Nomura worked as director for both Final Fantasy VII Remake and Kingdom Hearts III.[29] Despite there already being a story in place, which greatly simplified production on some fronts, Nojima was brought back in to create new story material.[14][23] Another project leader was Naoki Hamaguchi, who had previously served as a programmer for Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII and project lead for Mobius Final Fantasy.[27]
While the team had the option of merely creating a remastered version of VII with better graphics as many fans had requested, they noted that its graphics and many of its mechanics had become dated by modern standards. With this in mind, they decided to do a full remake, rebuilding the game systems to suit contemporary tastes and using current gaming technology to recreate the world of VII.[23][25] This decision triggered the creation of Remake's action-based battle system, in addition to the most representative modern title for the Final Fantasy series being the 2009 fighting game Dissidia Final Fantasy. With this in mind, the battle system draws from that action-based style while not going over to an entirely action-based system.[14] Nomura and Mitsunori Takahashi are handling the battle system, the latter of whom had worked on both the Kingdom Hearts series and Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy.[30] One of the game designers was Kyohei Suzuki, a veteran of the company's Business Division 4 who had previously worked as a planner for Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days and Kingdom Hearts Coded.[31] The team aimed to retain all the original gameplay mechanics that were well-liked by players.[30]
Rather than using the character models and graphical style of Advent Children, which by that point had been developed using ten-year-old technology, the team decided to create new designs and models for characters: Nomura wished to balance the realism of Advent Children with deformed stylization. Nomura was in charge of the revamped main character designs, while designer Roberto Ferrari was in charge of designs for secondary characters. Character modeling was supervised by Visual Works, Square Enix's CGI development branch.[13][26]
Rather than developing their own engine, Square Enix licensed Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4 to develop the game, with Square Enix and Epic Games Japan working together to optimize the engine for Remake.[32][33] The team also received technical assistance from the developers of Kingdom Hearts III, as the latter game was developed using the same engine.[34] The game's lighting is augmented with the lighting engine Enlighten.[35] To help with the action gameplay and video quality, Square Enix originally partnered with video game developer CyberConnect2, with the two companies keeping in close contact due to different development styles.[13]
In 2017, the game's development focus shifted from being developed with external partners to being a primarily internal project.[27] One of the most significant changes was the fact that the game was planned as a multi-game release: according to Kitase, this was because trying to fit the game onto a single release would entail cutting large parts of the game, which went against the team's vision. By splitting the game into multiple parts, the team can give players more substantial access to areas in the game, such as within the city of Midgar, which was mostly inaccessible in the original.[13] Each game is planned to be on a similar scale to Final Fantasy XIII.[14] The first installment focused on the city of Midgar due to its iconic status among the Final Fantasy community.[36]
Scenario
While developing the scenario, the team needed to work carefully, so the game did not come over as too nostalgic. They also needed to make decisions about what could be carried over from the original and what needed adjustment due to changes in social norms since the original's release.[13][14][26] The scenario for the first installment was completed in December 2015.[34] The game is fully voiced, with the original plan being for the voice actors from the CGI movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children to reprise their roles.[26][34] Ultimately, the English characters were recast for Remake.[37] According to Kitase, choosing a new generation of voices for the characters was part of the game's rebirth as Remake.[36]
Nojima is worked into making Cloud's interactions with Tifa and Barret natural. Despite fear of the possible end result, Nojima also wants the players to connect with the character once again.[38] Co-director Naoki Hamaguchi noted that since in the original game, the player could decide Cloud's interest in a female character, he wanted the remake to give this possibility again in the form of an intimate conversation when splitting from the main team.[39] Cloud's initial redesign for Final Fantasy VII Remake departed more dramatically from the original's, but was later altered to more closely resemble Nomura's original design.[40]
Music
The game's soundtrack has contributions from original Final Fantasy VII composer Nobuo Uematsu, along with Masashi Hamauzu and Mitsuto Suzuki.[41] It was the first time Uematsu and Kitase had worked together since Final Fantasy X (2001), with Kitase initially believing Uematsu would refuse as he had long since left Square Enix and found success as an independent composer.[42] The theme song "Hollow" is meant to reflect Cloud's state of mind with Nomura placing high emphasis on the rock music and male vocals. He also wanted the song to have an image of "rain".[43] A original soundtrack of the game can listened to in the game's official website.[44]
Release
Rumors of a Final Fantasy VII remake appeared in 2014.[45] It was announced at the 2015 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) during the PlayStation conference, and received a standing ovation.[46][47] Visual Works created the announcement trailer.[23] Square Enix's stock prices rose to their highest rating since November 2008, and the YouTube release of the reveal trailer garnered over 10 million views in the following two weeks.[48][49] The game was next showcased at the 2015 PlayStation Experience, demonstrating cutscenes and gameplay from the opening sequence.[50]
During the Final Fantasy 30th anniversary opening ceremony event hosted by Square Enix in Tokyo on January 31, 2017 — the 20th anniversary of Final Fantasy VII— the game's first piece of CGI key art was unveiled, along with announcements for a collaboration event with Mobius Final Fantasy.[51] On February 18, Nomura revealed two screenshots, showing off the updated HUD.[52] Due to its lack of footage since 2015, switch to internal development, and other projects Nomura was involved in, there were concerns about the status of the project. Speaking following E3 2018, Nomura stated that the game was in development, with his full attention shifted to it when Kingdom Hearts III was completed.[29][53]
After years without substantial footage, a teaser trailer was shown during PlayStation's May 2019 State of Play broadcast. Kitase announced that the team had wanted to "try something new" on the State of Play broadcast by showing the trailer.[54] The release date, March 3, 2020, was revealed the following month in a second teaser trailer during an orchestral concert dedicated to the music of Final Fantasy VII in Los Angeles.[55] Further release details were announced at the company's E3 2019 press conference, including different editions of Remake.[56] Kitase later clarified at the event that Square Enix had yet to determine the number of games in the Remake series, adding that they were in the process of planning the second installment.[57]
An extended gameplay showcase and demo was playable at E3 2019, demonstrating parts of the opening mission, including some of the exploration, combat system, and first boss battle. The playable demo has received a positive reception in early previews, with praise towards the graphics, gameplay and combat system.[7][58][59][60][61][62] At E3 2019, it won three awards at the Game Critics Awards for Best of Show, Best Console Game, and Best Role-Playing Game,[63] as well as the best looking Unreal Engine game at E3 2019.[64] Extended footage of the demo, as well as an additional trailer, was featured at the 2019 Tokyo Game Show.[65] In December 2019, it was announced that the game would be a timed PlayStation 4 exclusive until 2021, with no further details about its release on other platforms.[66][67] In January 2020, the team decided to push the release date back from March 3 to April 10, 2020.[68] A demo of the game was released on the PlayStation Store on March 2, 2020, covering the first chapter.[69]
On March 30, 2020, Square Enix announced that Europe and Australia would receive physical copies of Final Fantasy VII Remake early, due to growing concerns of the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on distribution.[70][71] This did not apply to digital downloads, as they are not directly impacted by the global supply chain. The digital copies were released on April 10, 2020.
Reception
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Final Fantasy VII Remake received "generally favorable" reviews, according to review aggregator Metacritic.[72]
Tamoor Hussain of GameSpot states that, while Remake is only the initial entry in a full reimagining of the original game, "It is rich in details that were previously unexplored, realizes new storytelling ambitions with confidence, and presents fresh perspectives that feel both meaningful and essential." He summarizes that it "tells a smaller, more personal Final Fantasy 7 tale and marries it with a smart mashup of action and RPG gameplay to deliver a must-play experience."[80]
Tom Marks of IGN calls the game a "complete reinvention", praising the combat system, its "story fleshed out with real emotional arcs" and its nostalgic feel, but criticized the game for having filler and sometimes convoluted new plot points and side missions. He stated that "Final Fantasy VII Remake's dull filler and convoluted additions can cause it to stumble, but it still breathes exciting new life into a classic while standing as a great RPG all its own."[89] Despite noting his antisocial attitudes in the remake, IGN, Metro and GameSpot commented that Cloud is the character who has the most notable arc in Remake, with Cody Christian's performance helping to improve his appeal.[90][80][89]
Nahila Bonfiglio of The Daily Dot states that the "game’s neo-noir, Blade Runner-esque setting perfectly marries with its gritty but heartfelt tone." She adds that it is matched by "the exquisite level design with seamless mechanics, addicting gameplay and rousing battles, and you have a recipe for perhaps one of the best games of the year."[91]
Sales
In Japan, it was the best-selling retail game during its first week of release, selling 702,853 physical copies in its first weekend,[92] with the game sold out in many stores.[93] Including digital copies, Final Fantasy VII Remake exceeded 1 million sales in Japan within three days of release.[94]
In the United Kingdom, the game debuted at the top of the weekly sales chart,[95] selling an estimated 60,000 physical copies in its first weekend.[96] German trade association GAME announced that it took Final Fantasy VII Remake only a few days to sell more than 100,000 units within the country, for which it won a Gold Sales Award.[97]
Worldwide, the game had shipped and sold over 3.5 million copies within three days.[98] This made it one of the biggest launches for a PlayStation 4 game and the fastest-selling PS4 exclusive in history, surpassing the launch sales of the two previous record holders, Marvel's Spider-Man (3.3 million) and God of War (3.1 million).[99][100]
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