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Final Fantasy 7 is widely considered one of the best JRPGs of all time for many reasons: its beautifully written and timeless story, its three-dimensional characters, its engaging gameplay, to name a few. But one other reason you might not know about is that it's largely responsible for Square Enix's embrace of the Western market following Final Fantasy 7's global success.
Richard Honeywood, a legend in the localization field and former employee of Square, explained to Time Extension in a new interview how difficult it was to persuade top brass at Square to let the company's localization team bring more games to the West... until Final Fantasy 7 "sold like hot cakes" and changed everything.
"At the time, a lot of the development teams at Square basically felt that the foreign versions were essentially petty cash; it's not real money," said Honeywood. "So they preferred to spend their time working on a Japanese version, which they felt was going to sell way more. We basically had to go like evangelists to each of them, saying, 'Can you please allow us to localise this game?'"
Of course, despite a famously botched localization job, Final Fantasy 7 released in the US and Europe just a few months after its initial Japan-only launch to near-unanimous critical acclaim and overwhelming commercial success. With that in mind, it didn't take long for Square to realize Honeywood might've been onto something.
"What eventually made that easier is that Final Fantasy VII ended up selling like hot cakes in North America and Europe and made so much money," said Honeywood. "Suddenly, after that, even the games we weren't going to localise were begging us to localise them. At the same time, the US was also trying to hire more staff to increase the number of translators over there. So they hired two new translators, [Yoshinobu "Nobby" Matsuo] and Brian Bell."
Nowadays, the West is obviously a crucial market for the vast majority of AAA developers, Square included, but it's fascinating to ponder a time not so long ago, in the great scheme of things anyway, when one of the top developers pioneering the JRPG genre considered the entire region "petty cash" commercially, especially knowing it was about to drop one of the most beloved and financially successful games of all time no matter what side of the pond you're on.
