The Risks Posed by a Final Fantasy VII Remake

Final Fantasy VII is the best-selling Final Fantasy game of all-time, and the favorite entry in the series for many gamers. With almost ten million copies of the original sold, hundreds of thousands of digital copies downloaded, and thousands of fans clamouring for a remaster for years now, it makes sense for Square Enix to remake this masterpiece. Or does it?

Rumors of a Final Fantasy VII remake started surfacing when Square Enix announced The Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, a collection of four games and one movie that would expand on the Final Fantasy VII universe and which was released in 2002. When a tech-demo of Final Fantasy VII was shown at Sony's E3 2005 conference, demonstrating the graphical capabilities of the PlayStation 3, the remake seemed pretty much confirmed. Every year since that appearance a remake announcement has been heavily rumored in the run-up to E3. And, each year, fans have been left disappointed.

PC and PlayStation 3 gamers got a chance to play the original game in 2009, when the title was re-released as a digital download, but a remake was still nowhere in sight. Square Enix regularly commented that there was no remake in development, and that there were no plans to make one. In February 2010, Yoshinori Kitase (the director of Final Fantasy VII and producer of the remake) stated in an interview that creating a Final Fantasy VII remake would be too difficult to be practical:

"But even Final Fantasy XIII has taken over three and a half years to create. If we were to recreate final Fantasy VII with the same level of graphical detail as you see in Final Fantasy XIII, we'd imagine that that would take as much as three or four times longer than the three and a half years it has taken to put this Final Fantasy together! So it's looking pretty unrealistic to happen!"

Kitase went on to say that a Final Fantasy VII remake would take over 10 years to create on a previous-generation graphical level, but the company seems to have finally changed its mind since the release of the PlayStation 4. There are two possible scenarios I'd like to explore for the development process of such a remake...

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