When Square Enix quietly revealed that the Final Fantasy 7 Remake would be a "multi-part series," the honeymoon was over. Fans came down from years of expectation, wondering how and why the monolithic experience of the 1997 original would be portioned out into individual entries. Square Enix isn't willing to say much about the "how" yet, but Final Fantasy 7 Remake producer (and original Final Fantasy 7 director) Yoshinori Kitase spelled out the "why" in a post to the company's blog:
"The biggest reason why we haven’t done a remake until now is because it’s a massive undertaking to reconstruct Final Fantasy 7 from the ground up with the current technology," Kitase wrote. "Producing a proper HD remake of Final Fantasy 7 that maintains the same feeling of density of the original would result in a volume of content that couldn’t possibly fit into one installment."
CD Projekt Red might disagree about whether it's possible to fit a heaping helping of RPG stuff in a single, great-looking game. Though, to be fair, The Witcher 3 doesn't have minute-long summons cutscenes or a submarine combat minigame. Kitase goes on: "If we were to try to fit everything from the original into one remake installment, we would have to cut various parts and create a condensed version of Final Fantasy 7. We knew none of you would have wanted that."
Given some of the reactions I've heard to FF7 going episodic, I'm not so sure about that last part. Would you rather Square Enix cut some of the more arcane bits (do you really need Yuffie?) if it meant getting the main story up front? Take the poll and let us know.
We now know that Final Fantasy 7 Remake has a part 2, which is officially titled Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.
