Twenty-five years have passed since the debut of the original Final Fantasy VII and we know that, to celebrate the anniversary, Square Enix has unveiled the plans involving both a return of Crisis Core and the next round of the Remake trilogy, called Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth .
While we’re waiting to find out more about both – with the first coming this winter and the second coming this winter – details continue to arrive from the retrospective on Final Fantasy VII Remake . on Amazon), the first appointment with the remake of the adventure starring Cloud.
Asked about this, battle director Teruki Endo revealed that the authors had a hard time making Tifa in the game. The reason? His of hers unique fighting style , since she is the only character devoted to hand-to-hand combat and therefore to close range. All this, added to the fact that Tifa is very agile and fast – and therefore also complicated to manage in combat dynamics.
As reported on the official Square Enix website, Endo explained that «we wanted to create a system of combat where the player could have fun in many different ways, changing characters as he fought ». This, of course, required particularly ingenious solutions.
While it was easy to differentiate the other party members, so that switching from one to the other gave satisfaction, it was all much more complicated with Tifa:
«For comparison, it was easier to differentiate Cloud, Barret and Aerith, but we had to think a lot about what unique features Tifa should have .
I think we finally managed to add depth to its mechanics by linking its abilities to the explosion system, which for us is one of the beating hearts of combat in Final Fantasy VII Remake ».
Of course, it was also complicated to design the battles to always allow players to switch to a character in the other. Assuming that many would use Cloud primarily was a safe bet , but FFVII Remake , for Endo, had to remain enjoyable even by controlling mainly the other protagonists.
“We put the battles together expecting players to use Cloud a lot, since it’s at the heart of the story,” said the author. «However, which character the player chooses to use changes according to their play style and other preferences: we created the combat system so that it could work no matter which character you prefer ».
Final Fantasy VII Remake is available on PS4 and, in its Intergrade version, also on PC and PlayStation 5. The events told in this first episode will resume with the future Rebirth , which as anticipated by the developers will be the penultimate of the makeover – and could also take other poetic licenses, than the ones we have already seen.
The appointment, in this case, is set only on PS5 for the winter of 2023.
