From the moment Final Fantasy VII Rebirth came out on PS5, gamers have been diving into this new interpretation of Gaia and trying to figure out what’s been kept from the original and what’s been changed. We all know that the PS5’s graphics have been doing wonders for the character models, battle effects, and the ability to seamlessly go from one part of the world to another without loading screens. But for the dev team, they had to talk about what parts to keep, what parts to delay until the third game, and what to expand upon now that they had the time and space to do so.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Director Naoki Hamaguchi did a special Q&A that was documented by Rappler, and in it, he was asked about what it was like trying to keep the “essential” elements of the game together:
“It’s really hard to nail down just one section because everything is important, but there are some scenes that are definitely engraved deeper into the user’s memory. For example, Rufus’ ceremony, Cosmo Canyon where Red XIII finds out about his father. And also the scene with Barret and Dyne. But if you played Rebirth already, you might have noticed that the detail of the storyline might have changed. But what I wanted to keep is to be able to convey the same emotion with these scenes by adding details, but I didn’t want to change these emotions that the users will feel from these important scenes.”
It’s true that thanks to better graphics, voice acting, and more, gamers are able to feel different emotions as they watch through the scenes. They can hear the pain in Red’s voice as he finds his father or the wonder of Aerith as she does her big singing number, which is a new part of the title.
He was also asked about the ability to switch out party members within combat itself instead of just swapping outside of the fight. This feature was improved between the remake titles. Still, the director noted that because of the various parameters of the characters and battle sequences, it would seriously change the difficulty if you could swap on the fly, so they didn’t include that.
In contrast, he noted that bringing in more scenes with characters from other games, like bringing back Zack Fair, was important to him because it helped expand upon the story in a way that they couldn’t do before. The results, as they say, speak for themselves.
