OG FF7 director says thanks to the remake "half of Final Fantasy 7 [...] is now owned by the fans"
Dec. 7, 2024“It belongs to them as well as us”
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Remakes need to appeal to original fans just as much as they need to capture new ones, especially in the case of a titan likeFinal Fantasy 7, and according to the original game’s director, the remakes have given the fans as much ownership over the game as the developers themselves.
He notes that plenty of fans are just as, if not more attached to the characters than the developers. “Essentially half of Final Fantasy 7, or maybe even more, is now owned by the fans. It belongs to them as well as us, specifically in terms of their attachment to the characters. I realised we needed to be cautious in not caning those characters by turning them into different kinds of people.”
This was one reason for the inclusion of the Whispers in the game, with Kitase describing them as “a kind of unspoken message to the fans.” He notes that they represent that while some things change, others stay the same, and declares that this kind of relationship between a creator and their audience is “only possible in a remake like this.”
Take a look at how the remakes stack up in our list of thebest Final Fantasygames.
Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
Alex has written all sorts of things for websites including VideoGamer, PCGamer, PCGamesN and more. He’ll play anything from Tekken to Team Fortress 2, but you’ll typically find him failing to churn through his backlog because he’s too busy playing whatever weird and wonderful indie games have just come out.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake director had to swap his inspirations from The Last of Us to The Witcher 3 to make Rebirth’s open world
Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi “deeply moved to be back on Xbox” with Fantasian, 17 years after dropping his last under-appreciated Xbox 360 JRPG
Doctor Doom is emperor of the world – but the insurgent Iron Man is coming for him in “new, deadly” armor
