We’ve finally been given a properly substantial look at the long-awaited Final Fantasy VII Remake, which we now know is intended as the first game in a series that will retell the iconic PlayStation RPG in much greater detail.
While we’ve already heard that nobody at Square Enix currently knows exactly how many games will eventually make up this ambitious new series, Final Fantasy VII Remake producer Yoshinori Kitase did confirm that work has already started on the second chapter, at least.
Kitase told press during a hands-off demo of the remake:
While we finish off development on the first game in the project, we’re actually continuing work on planning and fleshing out the volume of content and plot for the next game in the series.
It’s not much to go on, I grant you, but at least this probably means we won’t be waiting quite as long for Final Fantasy VII Remake Chapter II (as I assume it’ll be called) as we’ve waited for this first one, which was announced way back at E3 2016 and releases March 2020. At leasr I hope that’s the case.
For now, the first game in the series will focus entirely on the Midgar section of Final Fantasy VII, in which mysterious mercenary Cloud Strife teams up with the environmental activist group Avalanche in an effort to take down the evil corporation Shinra, who are destroying the planet with their greed.
Yikes at Final Fantasy VII’s story being more relevant today than it was in the 90’s.
Kitase told us that the team wants the Final Fantasy VII Remake to be “The new definitive Final Fantasy VII experience for a new generation.” and added that a number of the original team have only returned to work on the remake because they wanted to innovate and go much deeper into story and gameplay elements than they could back in the day.
As we know, the first entry in the series will be an entirely standalone game, and will be as big as any core Final Fantasy title, apparently. We’d previously heard it’d feature two blu-ray discs worth of content, so I can’t wait to see how they’ve expanded the gritty first chapter of the original game.
We also learned that Midgar is the focus of the first project in the series because Kitase and the team feel it’s an iconic location that sums up Final Fantasy VII better than any other area in the game. Certainly, the grimy steampunk aesthetic of the city is an enduring one, and I look forward to spending some more time there.
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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.