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For decades, Final Fantasy 7 has been widely regarded as one of the best video games ever made, and if a 1997 interview is anything to go on, plenty of credit for that is due to Tetsuya Nomura and his relentless do-overs.
In a compilation of 1997 interviews with various publications, now available on Shmuplations, 10 developers who worked on Final Fantasy 7 discuss the challenges of creating the game, with programmer Ken Narita and singling out Tetsuya Nomura for his penchant for retakes when it came to designing character movements. "Nomura was the Demon King of retakes," Narita begins. "He was always making the designers re-do things. 'Nope, that's wrong there.'"
While not disputing the moniker, background designer Kenzo Kanzaki chimes in to note that it was perhaps due to Nomura's push for perfection that the team managed to achieve such good results. "It's really thanks to him that we achieved very realistic motion," he explains.
Nomura himself describes the importance of capturing the "typical, everyday motion" of characters as a means of expressing character, laughing that "That's where the character's personality comes out, after all. So yeah, I stuck my nose into everyone's work there."
He goes on to describe the process of creating each character, recalling how he created each character from scratch once a "basic idea" was settled upon. "No one told me 'draw him this way' or anything like that. Every character in FF7 is one that I designed just how I wanted to."
"The first characters we had were Cloud and Barret. From there we kept talking, and as we worked our ideas out, new characters would come up. All the characters were created in the course of discussing our ideas for the game. None of them were created after the fact, as in 'Oh, let’s make this kind of character.' As we brainstormed about the game, we’d realize a character was already there in our minds."
Animations in games have come along quite far since FF7's 1997 release, with the Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy being lauded for its stunning visuals. But without the original FF7, there would be no remakes, and without Tetsuya Nomura's retake-heavy approach, perhaps those classic visuals so many have come to adore wouldn't have been so memorable.
Take a look at where FF7 falls on our list of the best Final Fantasy games.
