back to article Ready to go again, soldier? Final Fantasy VII remake revealed

Game studio Square Enix has announced it is remaking the groundbreaking role-playing video game Final Fantasy VII. An unmitigated sensation upon its 1997 release, Final Fantasy VII sold 2.3 million copies in Japan within three days. Retailers worldwide struggled to meet the subsequent demand, and as of March 2015 the game had …

  1. Major N

    20th anniversary release, I bet ya. Just hope the initial PS exclusive doesn't leave me waiting a year for the PC release like with the original

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Will Tifa still have huge breasts?

    1. ratfox
      Paris Hilton

      I might be wrong, but I believe that FF7 was the first 3D game to have such a "huge" success…

  3. PassiveSmoking

    All together now

    This guy are sick!

  4. The Lingster

    Take my money!

  5. Paul Westerman
    Happy

    Wark!

    Time to dust off my chocobo breeding guide

    1. astrax

      Re: Wark!

      They better put in a Rainbow Chocobo so we can finally fight the Onyx Weapon. Believe.

  6. Aaiieeee
    Thumb Up

    A fantastic game

    I think I completed it thrice.

    Personally I hope its just a graphical update with bug fixes; I thought the story and pacing in the original were just right.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A fantastic game

      > I think I completed it thrice.

      Me and a buddy played through it. We bred the gold Chocobo to access some of the otherwise off limits parts of the world and picked up the bonkers knights of the round materia. We spent ages farming XP and agonised over who to take into the final battle.

      What we hadn't quite realised is that we'd gone way above what the game expected us to do and poor Sephiroth got totally kerb-stomped. It was rather an anti-climax...

      1. What of IT?

        Re: A fantastic game

        I LOVED Nights of the Round. Plus lots of the other summons... Bahamut was good, as was the Hades one and the one with Odin. I forget all the names, but recall all the WOWs that was said when first used. I had it on Playstation (the first) and now have it on PC. Might have to fire it up tonight now.

        1. Richard Wharram

          Re: A fantastic game

          If I remember rightly you could pair knights of the round with a quad(?) materia which made it go off 4 times. Given that it was a super-long animation anyway I could pop to the off-license and back or have a shit, shower and shave whilst it did its business.

          1. astrax

            Re: A fantastic game

            I might be wrong but I don't think you could pair KoR with Quad; I think it only went up to Bahamut Zero. However, you could still do all that while KoR went off even just once :)

            1. GreggS

              Re: A fantastic game

              Pretty sure you could, you could also pair that with the materia that allowed you to repeat the last one used (can't remember it's name) so in theory, all your party could do the same thing (my memory is not what it was when i first played this game)

  7. FartingHippo
    Unhappy

    Aeris' Death

    Just been cutting onions. That's what it is. *sniff*

    Still have a vivid memory of that green pearl bouncing down the steps...

    1. astrax

      Re: Aeris' Death

      Dude, I feel your onions. That green pearl was Holy; as in Holy crap I'm crying like a Fifa official at a court hearing.

    2. dan1980

      Re: Aeris' Death

      Was I the only one utterly unfazed by this?

      My first playthrough - where I just played, letting the story take me - I barely even used Aeris. I found her annoying and so could never understand the subplot love story there because I was on team Tifa. Give me the spunky one over the mopey one any day.

  8. RyokuMas
    Childcatcher

    Let's hope they keep the SD character feel of the original... forgetting everything else, FFVIII was spoiled for me by the attempt to go to realistically-modelled characters.

  9. Sir Runcible Spoon

    Sir

    "Whether the remake can provide anything new to encourage a similar success or if it will simply be an attempt to cash in on the nostalgia of its initial fan base is yet to be seen"

    There are *some* games that definitely need to be updated with new graphics, maybe some new things added (as options) but the original gameplay should be kept intact.

    For instance, if Nintendo released a machine with updated specs and all they had to run on it was Ocarina of Time (updated) then I would pay good money just for that.

    1. Kane
      Thumb Up

      Re: Sir

      "For instance, if Nintendo released a machine with updated specs and all they had to run on it was Ocarina of Time (updated) then I would pay good money just for that."

      3DS if you haven't already, it's worth a go.

    2. dan1980

      Re: Sir

      There's something about FFVII's graphics that really works and part of it is the low-res nature of the characters.

      Watching the promo video, it looks too real - too much like Advent Children, which loses some of the fantastic nature of it. Yes, Midgard is dark and industrial and a little bit realistic, with cars and trains and helicopters and sliding doors and machine guns and neon signs, but the combination of the art direction, the pre-rendered scenes and the blocky characters went to make it all seem somehow less so. (Which is good!)

      For example, the soldiers you face early on probably should look like they do in the remake promo (i.e. - like real soldiers) but that they don't allows you to maintain the feeling that this is a different world, unlike our own.

      I hope the remake manages to update the graphics without destroying the other-worldly feel.

  10. Graham Jordan

    Nervously excited

    I remember reading an article a while back as to why a remake wouldn't work and one of the key parts that stuck in my head was all the weird random shit.

    Remember when Cloud dressed up as a woman to infiltrate the Don's Mansion? If you did all the extra bits he jumped in a hut tub with a bunch of gay wrestlers. Bloody hilarious for its time but in an age of high-def gaming with fantastic voice acting, will this translate so well or will it be left out?

    Also I'm a little nervous about Square's passion for over the top cut scenes where our heroes can scale entire sky scrapers in one jump or knock down buildings with a swing of a sword.

    This could be the greatest game since the original or feel like my youth has been raped and not in the good way

  11. What of IT?

    Da-da-da-daaaah Da-da-da-da-daaaah

    That is all!

  12. astrax

    'bout time.

    I think the last decent Final Fantasy RPG was ten (FF14 ARR is excellent but it is a different genre).

    It's a no brainer that Squarenix would payroll this remake; fans on FF7 have been banging on about it for years (myself included). It's one of those strange situations where I don't want them to change anything major such as the materia system or the TBS, I just want them make sure the story is as engrossing and well paced as it was in the original.

    Prediction: During Aeris' death scene (yes I know it's Aerith but god damn it I had the UK release!) I reckon she'll roll to the side just before the Masamune hits and then give it "I got Bronchitis! Ain't nobody got time for dat!".

    1. jamesb2147

      Re: 'bout time.

      " think the last decent Final Fantasy RPG was ten . . . It's a no brainer that Squarenix would payroll this remake . . ."

      This.

      Anybody else notice that after the Enix merger Squaresoft's games went to shit?

      The story in Kingdom Hearts, for example, was confused but cute. The story in all subsequent entries in the series were absolutely impossible to follow without a master's degree in Kingdom Hearts. Similar observations apply to every game released by Squeenix.

  13. Mephistro
    Thumb Up

    "...regularly requiring 40+ hours to complete..."

    It took me closer to 100 hours of gameplay to finish the game, completing most of the optional missions and playing and replaying the mini-games for hours. Thanks to that, I smashed Sephirot flat into the ground in a few minutes without any effort.

    I think I got really close to developing a bad case of OCD, but it was worth it! :-)

    1. GreggS

      Re: "...regularly requiring 40+ hours to complete..."

      If you wanted to get Aeris Break Limit before she ***SPOILER ALERT*** dies, then it took an awful long time. Then take into account chcobo breeding and maxing out your materia (then maxing out the newly "birthed" ones) you're talking WELL over 100 hours.

      Kids today, they don't realise what games are really made of!

  14. Paul Westerman
    Thumb Up

    Report card

    Last completed it March 2013:

    = All characters level 99, ultimate weapons and max limit breaks (except Aeris - anyone manage it?)

    = Ruby and Emerald Weapons done

    = All Enemy Skills

    = All sub quests done

    = Two gold chocobos (one bred, one from the Kalm Traveller)

    = Two sets of Master Materia

    = Over 20 million gil

    = About 120 hours

    Glad I did it, don't want to do all that again in a hurry

    1. GreggS

      Re: Report card

      I managed to get Aeris limit break the last time i played through it. It's a big grind getting there but worth it in the end, it is actually one of if not the best limit break of all the characters.Oh and just for smugness, i had three sets of master materia, one for each character taken into combat.

  15. Kane
  16. Kev Beeley
    Thumb Up

    Count me in as interested. I never finished the game as the SCSI card I was using at the time threw a major wobbly, and crapped all over the windows partition of my PC (but mercifully left all the primary Linux ones intact). Play time had been in excess of 55 hours at that point, and I just couldn't stomach restarting it.

    I probably would have been done with it if I hadn't spent hours trying to breed the Gold Chocobo. When I came back to it a couple of years later, it would install, but would never run due to the intense shonkiness of the port...

    I'll echo what others said, though, and hope it's treated with a light touch - Square could quite easily polish this one with a turd-smeared cloth if they're not very careful.

  17. Swarthy

    I fear this

    I fear a re-release of FFVII - for two reasons.

    Reason the First: As said above "Square could quite easily polish this one with a turd-smeared cloth if they're not very careful." It would be an utter travesty if Square mucked about too much and destroyed the things that made this game great.

    Reason the Second: I fear that Square won't muck it up, and I will lose days/weeks/months to playing it.

    Either way, I'll be paying my money and taking my chances.

  18. Mephistro
    WTF?

    Out of curiosity...

    ... Elreg, what is this article doing in the Hardware section?

    Thank you!

  19. stucs201

    My own recollections are rather less nostalgic

    Admittedly I never played more than a demo, but that was because that was enough to illustrate just how bad a console title lazily converted to the PC could be. I seem to recall my main gripes were:

    1) Badly scaled console resolution backgrounds instead of re-doing the for the PC. Net result being that the real-time 3D models looked better than the pre-rendered backgrounds since they were at least at full pixel resolution.

    2) Terrible user-interface, which may have been necessary on a console, but not on a PC with a mouse available.

    Maybe I'll give it a second chance this time around, if they make a better job of it.

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