What You Need to Know About Final Fantasy VII Remake

Thursday, July 02, 2015

Brian McIver, GoLocal Contributor

 

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Since the dust of E3 has now settled it’s a good time to discuss one of the bigger announcements of the show, the announcement of the remake of Final Fantasy VII. Now Final Fantasy’s history goes back to the original NES, and there have been many an entry in the series since then. In fact Final Fantasy XV is set to release some time this year. So why choose 7? There are better games in the franchise, VI in particular is considered by some to be the “best” Final Fantasy, but there are a few reasons for the excitement.  

The First of Its Kind

Final Fantasy VII was the first 3D Final Fantasy game created. Previous games in the series, which had been on the Nintendo and Super Nintendo, only used little 2D 8-bit and 16-bit sprites that had very little in the way of animation. Characters in battle scenes would move forward a bit, wave their little pixilated arm, and then move back.  With FFVII the characters still just kind of moved forward a bit to preform a given attack, but this time there was a full animation for whatever action the character preformed. This was possible because all of the characters and environments where fully rendered in 3D.

The Animation

Thanks to the 3D the game designers were able to take the animation and cinematic expression to a level never before seen in a video game. The opening scene in the game is a shot of some stars that cuts to a young flower girl. It then pans out to a giant industrial looking city, and then pushes back in to a train running through the aforementioned city. It pulls into a station and a blonde spikey haired kid jumps out of one of the doors, and BOOM! you’re now playing the game. Today something like this is commonplace, but in 1997 this was some mind-blowing graphics.

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Of course this wasn’t the only epic cut scene in the 100+ hour game. Animations like Knights of the Round, Chocobo races, explosions all took you on a ride like never before. 

It Came On Three Discs!

First everyone was shocked at the time that this game wasn’t coming out for the Nintendo, but Nintendo had decided at the time to stick with cartridge based games, while their new rival Sony had decided on the cheaper and easier to produce CDs for it’s Playstation. It was an easy call for Squaresoft. With the size and scope of the game it had to be on CDs. At the time there were several games that spanned 2 discs, but FFVII was one of the first to be 3. There was just so much there and it took players months to not just beat the game because you never really beat Final Fantasy 7 unless you defeated the Emerald and Ruby weapons, two of the hardest boss fights in gaming history.

So while people would love to see modern remakes of Final Fantasy 6, or 9, or 4, seven has a special place in peoples hearts, and for good reason. The nostalgia and excitement are palpable, and if you don’t believe me watch this reaction video on YouTube and you’ll get an idea of how excited people are for this game to come out.

 

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