007with the right rhythm of the story, and
the transitions and obviously how the
battles would fit in, how the character
growth would work as one overall full
game. And then once we’ve written
a certain amount of that and we
fleshed it out, we’d send it back to
Mr Nojima, he’d adapt the scenario
and the story writing to work around
that and flesh it out a bit more, and
there’d be this back and forth between
the two of us until we worked out a
really good balance of content and a
nice transition through the games so
it really did feel like a solid story in
its own right.
OPM: We’ve already seen that
Remake incorporates elements that
were originally later on in the game,
such as some Summons and
Sephiroth. How hard was it to decide
what to bring forward and
reintegrate into this game?
YK: I mean certainly to start we’ll
talk about Sephiroth. The way we had
with Sephiroth in the original Final
Fantasy VII was we deliberately kept
world construction of a game where you can,
for example, do a little bit of the story, then go
somewhere else, and do something else, and then
come back again, that would really affect the
tempo and the kind of pacing and the direction
of the story, different players would experience it
in different ways. We really wanted to focus on
having that story at a really nice, really cinematic
pace. And so we went for a more story-driven
approach, rather than an open world approach,
along the lines of recent really good story-
driven games like Uncharted or God Of War,
for example. So this isn’t an open world game
because of that very good reason of: we need to
have the story told as best we can.
Of course, having said that, on the other side,
we are very much aware that if you can only
proceed with the main story and there’s nothing
else to do outside of that the games tend to feel
quite linear and there’s obviously a lot of people
who criticise games for that. So the approach we
took for that – while not damaging that story
progression and that tension and that direction as
it was – was to find the correct points in the
story to be able to take that time out and go
along those side branches. For example, when the
team travel to a certain town or location they
find, okay, now we’re going to stop for the night,
we’re going to maybe take one day out and then
carry on to our next objective once we’ve rested.
And that would be the perfect place to basically
slow the pace down and have all these side-
quests that you can accept within that area.
Obviously, some players can choose to do them,
some players choose not to do them, and that’s
allowed. So by keeping that the number one
priority of the story progression feeling right,
but also finding the right places that have
these side activities, I think we managed to
get a really good balance there.
him from appearing early on in the game, we held him back, so
we could build up this picture and this image of him as this really
big, really evil threat by hiding him and implying about how bad
he was. Obviously, for the remake though, most people now know
who Sephiroth is, what kind of character he is, so we felt it wasn’t
quite as effective trying to hold him back in the same way.
So obviously with people knowing about who Sephiroth is now
and we wanted to inject that feeling of him being this big, evil
presence throughout the whole of the Remake project, and we felt
it would be a good idea to have him in this first game to feel and
give that impression, so you really can feel his presence within the
overall story arc and really understand that he is this overlooking,
real big, evil presence. So that was something we wanted to do to
slightly change it round a bit.
OPM: As part of expanding on the Midgar section how have you
opened up the setting? Have you incorporated any open world
elements or side-quests?
NH: Okay, so first of all the overall concept of how we handled
the game design and what we felt was really important about
Final Fantasy VII is that story – and the characters who take part
in the setting, but really the story that they tell. And an open
INTERVIEW
The fleshed-out Midgar
feels like a real city, not
just a setting.