Square Enix didn't exactly release the best news to build upon the momentum of the new trailer that was released this past weekend at Playstation Experience for the highly anticipated remake of Final Fantasy VII.
In a press released given out on Sunday to the media, some information was given regarding the game itself. This little excerpt managed to catch my eye rather quickly:
SQUARE ENIX® debuted a new trailer for FINAL FANTASY® VII REMAKE, the full remake of the award-winning role-playing game, FINAL FANTASY VII. The new trailer features the first CG scenes as well as gameplay footage. FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE will be told across a multi-part series, with each entry providing its own unique experience.
Well....that's disappointing.
We've seen the "episodic launches" before, mainly with the Telltale Games series involving games such as The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones.
Before you ask the obvious question as to why this game is being split up, some answers have been provided by the company. Kotaku reached out to Square Enix to get clarification and essentially confirmed our fears. This excerpt is taken from the Kotaku's article:
“From the beginning, we thought a Final Fantasy VII remake would be bigger than a single release,” the game’s original director Yoshinori Kitase told Dengeki Online.
“If you did get it into a single release, there would be things we’d have to put into a shortened compilation,” Tetsuya Nomura, FFVII’s character designer, added. “Since we thought there would be stuff we would probably have to pare down and supplemental things we probably couldn’t add, we decided to divide it up, concluding that we have to do a remake that’s fully packed with content.”
So there you have it. Final Fantasy 7 will be released across multiple episodes. We have no clue how many, nor do we know if it will follow the format of the original three discs that came with the game in 1997. What we do know is that it's incredibly upsetting. One could perhaps argue that a game like Mass Effect or even Xenosaga was done as episodes, but the situation is different given that those were fresh titles and we knew there would be several titles in each of those IPs. This is a game that has already been created and released on different platforms. Imagine if the original launch of the game had been done as episodes. Remember how the first disc ended? Yeah, THAT happened. (Spoiler free, of course....even though it's been twenty years.)
We don't have a launch date for what we now have to expect is just the first episode of what could be a minimum of three episodes with a maximum of who knows how many, but this is extremely disappointing news after such a strong showing from Square Enix.
