Square Enix: new Final Fantasy games "take precedence" over Final Fantasy 7 remake
But admits there's "much desire" for it.
New Final Fantasy games "take precedence" over the potential Final Fantasy 7 remake, Square Enix has said.
As part of a Final Fantasy 7 retrospective in Japanese magazine Famitsu (translated by Gematsu), Final Fantasy character designer Tetsuya Nomura admitted there was a desire from fans for a Final Fantasy 7 remake, but confirmed Square Enix's focus is now on making new titles.
"There are a lot of people who want a remake of Final Fantasy 7," he said. "However, new titles take precedence. We work our hardest to make something that might be even better than Final Fantasy 7."
He added: "The new Final Fantasy must overcome the Final Fantasy of the past."
Nomura believes Yoshinori Kitase, current Final Fantasy producer, is the true successor to the FF series.
Developers at the Japanese company have surged hot and cold on the idea of a FF7 remake for many moons, ever since a PS3 tech demo of the opening Midgar sequence was produced for Sony's conference at E3 2005.
In November last year Square Enix said if it were to remake the Japanese RPG it might not be able to resist the temptation to make significant changes to the original game.
"If I may speak as a game creator, if we were to produce a remake of 7, for example, I would be really tempted to delete things and add new elements, new systems or whatever because if we were to make exactly the same thing now, it'd be like a repeat," Kitase said.
"It'd be an issue of repetition and not as much fun to make such a game. So I'd be really interested in rearranging games or reshaping games into something slightly different even though it's supposed to be the same game."
However, he conceded that such an approach might not be too popular with certain sections of the franchise's fanbase. "If we did that, the fans might be disappointed or [say] 'this is not what I was expecting' so in that sense maybe some might say that it's better to let memory be memory.
"When we play the games we made years ago, sometimes we think 'oh, that is not really cool' or 'that probably should have been a bit better than that' and that sort of thing," he continued.
"But on the other hand, those slightly negative features and bits, for some of the really enthusiastic fans of these titles, that gives the game extra flavour or personality or whatever. So maybe they would rather we didn't do anything about it and we just leave it in as it is. It's very difficult to decide what we should we keep in and what we should take out."
In 2010 Square Enix boss Yoichi Wada gave fans hope when he said the company was "going to explore the possibility" of developing a FF7 remake.
And before then ahead of the release of Final Fantasy 13, Kitase provided some insight into the development challenge such a project would present.
"If we were to recreate Final Fantasy VII with the same level of graphical detail as you see in Final Fantasy 13, we'd imagine that that would take as much as three or four times longer than the three-and-a-half-years it has taken to put this Final Fantasy together!" he said.
"So it's looking pretty unrealistic to happen!"