The Final Fantasy 7 Remake is well on its way, with the first episode going gold only a few days ago and preparing to hit store shelves on April 10th. However, on the long process that eventually led to the highly anticipated remake coming to PS4s, the originally intended battle system was much different from the finished product.
According to Producer Yoshinori Kitase in an interview with Stevivor, Final Fantasy 7 Remake was originally supposed to have a combat system closely resembling that of Kingdom Hearts. However, as PS4 players can test in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake demo that was recently released to download off the PSN, that battle system is not what made it to the finished product.
It was actually Final Fantasy 7 Remake's Director Tetsuya Nomura that eventually made the decision not to make the game into a fully action based title. This decision reportedly came out of an attempt not to alienate players who would be returning from having played the original Final Fantasy 7 back in 1997. The result is a hybrid combat system that is more than a sum of its parts and goes far above and beyond the original, with its Active Time Battle system that Square Enix pioneered at the time.
Actually, when we were discussing this and I proposed I wanted to take it full action, our director Nomura Tetsuya said, ‘no, I don’t like that idea.’
While plenty of Final Fantasy 7 has been change, like the removal of Red XIII as a playable character, the improvements made on the combat system is intended to appease fans of the original. This report on the original combat system even matches up with early gameplay footage from when the game was first announced, that showed the gameplay resembling Final Fantasy 15. Many players assumed that this was actually due to the direction of Nomura and his experience with active combat in the Kingdom Hearts series, but it would seem that the opposite of that is true.
From how the game plays in the build available in the recently released demo, the hybrid combat system is as perfect a pairing of the classic gameplay Square Enix could have made with modern combat. It seems that the idea is for the Final Fantasy 7 Remake to be something that can be equally enjoyed by both veteran fans, as well as newcomers to the series. As a result, that means a lot of changes to Final Fantasy 7, but those changes appear now to be for the better, rather than for the worse.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake releases on April 10th, 2020, for PS4.
Source: Stevivor
