STACK #186 Apr 2020

GAMING FEATURE

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It’s taken five years to build the eagerly anticipated Final FantasyVII Remake – out this month - but fans have been waiting a lot longer than that. STACK met with the game’s producer,Yoshinori Kitase, to learn more about the process. Words Anthony Horan T he original Final Fantasy VII , released for the first PlayStation in Final Fantasy series. Instead, the beloved game would get a top- to-bottom remake, something

the in-game engine graphics have improved so much compared to what they were in the original, and that really has closed the gap between that and the pre-rendered scenes.” While the 2005 demo was built in Square Enix’s own Crystal Tools engine, Kitase and his team opted at an early stage to build Remake in a heavily customised version of Unreal Engine 4. “When we announced we were going to do the remake, we started recruiting team members, game creators from all over the industry – not just from Japan, but from all over the world,” Kitase tells us. “So, we felt that rather than go with an internal game engine, Unreal 4 is something people from outside of the company would be familiar with and had experience developing on. It was an easier and smoother way to get everyone working on the game as quickly as

that was on the cards as early as 2005, when a PS3 tech demo was shown of the opening movie. It looked

1997, was ground-breaking in many ways. It was the first Final Fantasy game to use 3D graphics which, at the time, looked like nothing else around, while

impressive back then (and can still be found online) but the same sequence in the final Remake is truly next-level cinematic

Yoshinori Kitase

its epic story was cinematic in scope and dramatically daring, and its turn-based combat offered a deep but accessible challenge. It was, needless to say, an instant classic. In later years, the game has appeared on PC (with a PS4 version based on that enhanced version) but Square Enix resisted the temptation to “remaster” the game for modern hardware, something they’d done successfully with several other entries in the

stuff. Most impressive is how seamlessly the pre-rendered movie integrates with player-controlled gameplay. “One of the big themes for the original game,” says Kitase, speaking through an interpreter, “was that seamless transition between the movie scenes and the gameplay itself. We think we’ve taken that to another level with the remake. The big thing is that

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APRIL 2020

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