One of the biggest highlights of this year's Summer Game Fest was none other than the reveal of Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, the third part of the JRPG remake from Square Enix – a part that'll apparently stay as true "as possible" to its 1997 predecessor.
Or, at least, it sounds that way. Director Naoki Hamaguchi tells tells VGC as much in a recent interview, confirming that Square Enix is pressing on with its philosophy to live up to the PlayStation original's memory – even if the developers themselves feel as though axing a certain cutscene or two might work as they're "less important." After all, they might not be interpreted as less important by the fans… and they're who matter to the devs.
"Even for me personally, I might consider some things as less important, but fans might not think that way. So the goal is to keep as much as possible from the original," as Hamaguchi says – but that doesn't mean Square Enix isn't shaking things up at all.
Much like it did with Remake and Rebirth, the studio is altering some of the story timeline so that the order better fits the new trilogy rather than the old PlayStation game.
"That being said," Hamaguchi explains, "there might be some changes that we apply, an example being the sequence of the story beats." He cites the Rocket Town story as an example here, stating that it should've been a sequence in Rebirth instead of Revelation… had the devs chosen to stick to the original's timeline.
Instead, in the remake, it doesn't – or, perhaps more accurately, won't – happen until "the second half of Revelation."
The lead concludes: "We did make some adjustments in terms of the sequence, and the order of how one of these story beats would happen in the game, but again, the general idea is not to make any changes or omit anything. The orders might be shifted up a bit, but in that sense, I think we were able to keep everything as close as we can, so I think the team and I did a pretty good job at that."
That's reassuring to hear. Seeing as Hamaguchi himself is "pretty confident that we were able to remain true to the original," I have a feeling we might see many of the pieces missing from the first two halves of the remake… but I suppose we won't know until 2027.
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