When it comes to remakes, the last thing you want to do is make a subpar one. It’s easy to bank off nostalgia, but if you can’t deliver something that makes it worthy of the remake title, you have a problem. Square Enix had proven that this wasn’t an issue when they brought Cloud Strife and crew back into the world by completely remaking their beloved RPG from top to bottom. The game was a shining example of how remakes can/should be done, and they decided to keep going with it by making Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion. This title is a remake of the PSP game that acted as the prequel to the RPG classic.
However, unlike their previous and upcoming remakes, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion will be multiplatform. Even the Nintendo Switch is getting the game! But how is that possible, and why are they doing this? The answer is Unreal Engine 4, which is what runs the game. The team did an interview/FAQ for the game, and one of the biggest ones was making the game work across all the platforms:
“As the specs for each platform are different, we measured the respective processing burdens and set the optimal resolution and frame rate for each platform. Even after doing that, there were still some events where the processing burden was high, so we made further adjustments on a cut-by-cut basis for these.”
In other words, they took each version of the game in stride and fixed them on a need-to-do basis. So while some, like the Switch version, may not run or look as good as the next-gen game versions, it’ll still be a functioning port.
Another big question was about making the graphics accurate to the original while also upgrading them for the new generation of systems:
“We paid special attention to adding in a volume of extra information to the graphic data to realize the fine details that could not be depicted with the PSP’s screen and data size.”
Another reason that they wanted Unreal Engine 4 as their engine for the game wasn’t only because it supported multiple platforms but because it used C++. When they made the original title for the PSP, they used C++ to code it. So doing the transfer from one to the other was made more straightforward.
We’ll see how well the team did when the remake arrives on December 13th.
Source: Nintendo Everything