Rumor: New Final Fantasy VII Remake Details Revealed

With the Electronic Entertainment Expo happening in just a few weeks, all eyes are on major publishers to see what’s happening with their projects. This include Square Enix, who has a huge presentation lined up on June 11. During that time, we’re likely to get new details on games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Kingdom Hearts III.

But that leaves an interesting question — what about Final Fantasy VII Remake? It’s been a few years since the ambitious project was first revealed; and we’ve heard that it’s run into a lot of trouble since that time. However, a new piece on Resetera suggests that its progress is coming along smoothly — and some new details have been revealed.

Translated from a behind-closed-doors panel with creators of the game during the FF 30th Anniversary Exhibition back in January, the following details were unearthed. However until we legitimately hear something from Square Enix, you might want to take them with a grain of salt:

Here’s the first batch of notes from the author:

“They’re talking about Aerith’s house and how it’s surrounded by water in the original.

They make comments about how they made it a river for it to make more sense, and how this impacts living conditions/structure of the world, and then talk about how this kinda stuff has to make sense in terms of how unlike before, with the quality of older games, that kind of stuff (like presumably how the water underneath Aerith’s house makes little logistic sense) went unnoticed or wasn’t cared about by gamers, but how it’s changed in recent time therefore demanded that with the “richness”(realism) of the remake, that those kinda things be changed into something that is more coherent in terms of world-building.”

The second batch of notes goes into a little more detail:

“Gotten to the point Nomura comes on and presents the new concept art.

They start with Biggs. One thing to take away is that they say he looks “completely different” from what he looked like in the trailer.

The say the same thing for Wedge. The repeated use of “zenzen chigau” seems to indicate major change from their original designs in the trailer, meaning that this is probably even very different from the designs shown in the Ferrari Art that was in the exhibition.

They say the images brought reflect the newest designs, taken straight out of the office.

Wedge, they remark, particularly as the hair is concerned, looks a lot more realistic.

They go on to say Jessie is perhaps the one that has changed the most – becoming a lot more beautiful and feminine in appearance.

Also worth noting, that now as they show Cloud, and going by earlier remarks and the use of the term “real-time”, these are not concept art pictures of the characters, but real-time rendered screenshots.

Nomura says that this version of Cloud is probably the closest visually to capturing the personality of the original Cloud I.E to clarify this phrase that’s been thrown about so often from the partial snippets we got a while back – Nomura is commenting on how the visual design reflects Cloud’s persona, and they go on to say that visually, they’ve designed him in a way that captures the way Cloud was not a cool guy in the original game – how he was actually a f***up just putting on a strong front.

They say he looks “real/very very young” this time around, and contrasts him to the AC Cloud, implying a very drastic change from that.”

And finally, the last notes:

“In terms of development, they say the game is progressing very very smoothly.

They’re in the process of working out the base “technology”, I’d say in this context, refers to the primary game-play base for the game.

They banter a bit talking about how Kitase, Nomura and Hamaguchi have are connected through Line (a social app very common in Japan) and how Hamaguchi will often work on the game till late night, and send messages to the others at 03.00 at night etc.

They’re adamant they’re making “something we’ve never seen before’ and ask us to ‘be excited’.

Hamaguchi goes on, after Nomura leaves, to comment on the long draught of info since the first trailers, and apologizes. He goes on to say that the project has moved completely in-house, and is again, progressing very smoothly. At the current point they’re at the stage where they’re basically cramming a bunch of stuff into the game, but once they hit the stage of polishing up the look of things and can deliver something with sufficiently high quality, they will be releasing new footage.

He anticipates this will be in the near future due to how smoothly things are progressing.

Kitase then signs us off by making the joke previously mentioned in the thread, saying he wishes to keep on polishing up the game for the 35th anniversary, to which they all laugh and Hamaguchi responds objectingly “Hey that’s a long ways off!”

He then however, also goes on to say that a lot is hanging on the next (presumably big) event, and that they’re hoping to show off (the game) by then.”

The author did note that they were somewhat baffled by what was said about Cloud, “because while it’s true that Cloud’s real persona is not a hard-ass like the Cloud we’re first presented with, it makes no sense to me to make this apparent through his visual design early on in the story/game.”

There’s a good chance we’ll see something about the game at E3 though it likely won’t be released until at least 2019. Once Square Enix makes an official announcement, we’ll let you know!