Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth's most painfully boring minigame was originally twice as tedious, but at the last minute Square decided "it might be stressful"
Apr. 16, 2024Square Enix “put in a lot of work” to make mako vacuuming “feel satisfying” and, well, at least they tried
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Square Enixtried really hard to makeFinal Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s mako vacuuming minigame more enjoyable than the painfully tedious practice in masochism that it is by all measures. In fact, it was originally a lot worse.
Fortunately, andvery light spoilershere, you only have to do it a couple of times in the early part of the game before you leave Midgar, but the sequences where you’re forced to lumber around with an unwieldy giant vacuum and suck up mako gas are the only times I earnestly considered throwing in the towel entirely.
Granted, I have the attention span of caffeinated Chocobo, but a quickGooglesearch provesI’m far from the only onewho would rather vacuum out the wilted Taco Bell lettuce from under the seat of my car on a hot Summer day in Phoenix, Arizona than spend another agonizing minute sucking up mako gas in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.
Naturally, the developers who very intentionally added this to the game don’t see it the same way, bless their hearts. In aSquare Enix news article, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi said the minigame is designed to turn mako into a more tangible thing that players can actually interact with.
“By letting players suck up the gas themselves, it directly shows what kind of substance mako is and what Shinra is like,” he said. “It throws them into the world much deeper than if we just told them about it because they get to touch and experience it themselves.”
Not content with letting a necessary piece of worldbuilding feel mechanically boring - they’d never - the developers spent plenty of time testing out the feature to make sure it didn’t elicit the exact reaction it has.
“We put in a lot of work to make the act of sucking up the gas feel satisfying,” Hamaguchi added. “We had lots of different tests in terms of the visual effects, the sound, the level of vibration and so on. It took a lot of polishing in order to get right.”
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I’ve obviously been exaggerating what is actually just a mildly cumbersome minigame that appears precisely twice in the beginning of the game, but as it turns out, there was once a version of the game where it was a lot worse. Hot damn, it sounds like it was a bonafide mako sucking bonanza in there!
“In fact, this section originally had a lot more gas coming out than the final game,” Hamaguchi said. “There were six points on the ground that you had to clean up - and it was this way for most of development. Then, about two weeks from final master, I was looking at it and thought, ‘it might be stressful if the player had to such up so many,’ so I knocked it down to three!”
Knowing now that the situation could’ve been a lot worse, I’d just like to now say: Thank you, Hamaguchi and the rest of the Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth development team. Thank you for your mercy.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s director is struggling to decide how to kick off the JRPG’s final installment.
After scoring a degree in English from ASU, I worked as a copy editor while freelancing for places like SFX Magazine, Screen Rant, Game Revolution, and MMORPG on the side. Now, as GamesRadar’s west coast Staff Writer, I’m responsible for managing the site’s western regional executive branch, AKA my apartment, and writing about whatever horror game I’m too afraid to finish.
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