The Final Fantasy VII Remake just came out a few weeks ago, taking the gaming world by storm. This time around, Cloud Strife's big debut was handled by Tetsuya Nomura, a character designer on the original game. Recently, the director of the 1997 original game, Yoshinori Kitase, spoke out about what it was like to recreate some of the game's key scenes.
While he took a backseat on directing this time around, Kitase still played a major role in Final Fantasy VII Remake's development as a producer. One of the first things Kitase did was identify key, fan-favorite portions of the game that couldn't be erased from the remake.
One of those scenes was the famous bit of Cloud posing as a woman to infiltrate Don Corneo's mansion. Kitase said, "members of the staff poured their all into recreating and reimagining this scene," but he also wanted to take a more modern and respectful approach. He added, "In the 23 years from the original launch, society's values have changed significantly, so we tried to preserve the humor of the original, but we approached the encounter and outcome so that the depiction is now more natural and respectful for all."
Kitase said, "By making sure we were very thorough and took great care in depicting these elements, I believe we were able to make these feel very modern and timeless so they will meet expectations of fans new and old. There are quite a few members on the development team who were fans of the original, including co-director Naoki Hamaguchi, so they took on the challenge to recreate [these scenes] with the utmost respect."
Final Fantasy VII Remake is developed and published by Square Enix. The game is available now on PlayStation 4.
(via Esquire)