Careful what you wish for, Final Fantasy fans. Potential future remakes of other games in the series would probably require even more individual parts than the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy – at least, if they were remade in that same style – according to Final Fantasy 14‘s Naoki ‘Yoshi-P’ Yoshida.
The MMORPG’s director said as much during a panel at Fan Fest Berlin – with Final Fantasy 7 Remake lead Naoki Hamaguchi also in attendance – warning folks that the wait for an entire remake of Final Fantasy 6, for example, would be even more painfully long than what we’ve become accustomed to.
“Of course I understand the feelings of the players, but you gotta think about it,” Yoshi-P says, per a translator, of fan requests for future series remakes. “Look at Final Fantasy 6, it’s such an incredibly huge game. The scale is just immense.”
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But the same argument is true for other games in the series, like Final Fantasy 8 and Final Fantasy 9, he adds: “So, of course, now because you are working on the Final Fantasy 7 series, I do get that people would be asking for remakes of other titles. But if we did remake those other titles, we’d probably end up having to release them in four or maybe even five installments.”
Final Fantasy games used to be absolutely huge in their scope because the developers couldn’t render everything in excruciating detail as they can now – nor did they need to. Final Fantasy 6 was able to fit 14 playable characters, a huge world map that dramatically changes throughout the adventure, and countless epic fights onto a humble SNES cartridge. You can imagine how doing all of that in a game with Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s production value would be tricky.
Ahead of Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, Hamaguchi himself made clear that a hypothetical remake of Final Fantasy 6 would be in better hands with another developer anyway. He seems more keen on doing something new after Revelation ships.
At Fan Fest, Hamaguchi explained that he felt incredibly lucky that so many developers stayed together for all three games in the FF7 Remake trilogy, back to back. “That’s why I can’t just sit here and go, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll remake [FF6],’ because it’s not quite that easy.”
Perhaps the way forward for Final Fantasy remakes is the upcoming Final Fantasy Resonance, a gorgeous pixel art game with turn-based combat, rather than the giant world of the FF7 Remake games.