The news of a gloriously shiny Final Fantasy 7 remake was greeted with intense enthusiasm from fans when it was announced at E3 last year. The news that the game would be episodic was not. No one likes episodic games.
But it might not actually be as bad as all that, chums. Square Enix has recently clarified what they meant when they said episodic structure – and it turns out the “episodes” will in fact be full sized games, not the two/three hour chunks of gameplay that we’re used to with this kind of thing.
This revelation comes courtesy of Game Informer, in which producer Yoshinori Kitase said the development team was using the Final Fantasy XIII series (which spanned three games) as the model.
Kitase said:
It will essentially be a full scale game for each part of the multi-part series. In XIII, each installment told the story from a different angle. It was kind of like approaching an unknown territory in a sense. Whereas with Final Fantasy VII Remake, we already have a preexisting story, so it wouldn’t really make sense if that isn’t encompassed in a multi-part series… So if we’re just looking at each of these parts, one part should be on par with the scale of one Final Fantasy XIII game.
This should come as a bit of a relief to fans who were genuinely disappointed by the “episodic” news. After all, Final Fantasy 7 has probably been one of the most demanded remakes of all time – to spoon feed it to us in smaller installments would’ve been a bit of a dick move.
Still, there are bound to be a few people out there who still aren’t entirely happy. The remake looks to have changed up the gameplay completely from the original, favouring a more action heavy approach.
No word on a release date yet, but Final Fantasy XV comes out September 30, so I’m guessing we can expect it sometime after that.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.