Recreating a Video Game Classic with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's Naoki Hamaguchi, Yoshinori Kitase, & Teruki Endo
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In ANN's exclusive interview, the team behind Final Fantasy VII Rebirth reveals the wildest fan theories, streamlining its technical aspects, and what they think of the mixed reactions to its conclusion.

An interview with the directors and producer. Here’s a few snippets that I found interesting.

  • With reports that the Remake game sales underperformed, are there plans to change the console exclusivity window for the next installment of Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy?

KITASE: Regarding the strategy of the [console] release, there’s sort of nothing we can comment on regarding that. But overall, we are looking forward to more players enjoying and playing this title. So we wish for that to happen.

  • Is there another cinematic sequence in Rebirth that takes the crown for the greatest challenge?

HAMAGUCHI: So actually, the most difficult scene in Rebirth, I believe, was Rufus’s Inauguration Parade.

I’ll go into why. First, we had to look for a person that understands parade formations. [Someone with that experience] was very rare to find. Then, we had to find actors who could perform these various sequences. So, with both of these [requirements], we had to look and have all of them before we started motion capture. It took a while to find these people.

An interesting story I’d like to share is that in that scene, all the soldiers, including Cloud, have guns in their hands while they’re doing the parade. To mimic this, we created real gun models for all the actors to hold while doing the sequence. But then what happened is the gun models we made were so heavy, and it was impossible to move, you know, twirling around and doing all of those motions. So it became a problem. In the end, even though they made those models, they used umbrellas.

  • What is the wildest fan theory you’ve seen about the trilogy so far?

[Everyone laughs.]

HAMAGUCHI: After the panel yesterday, we were chatting with the voice actors over dinner, and this exact topic came up, funnily enough. We were talking about Chadley, which is that character who supports Cloud in Rebirth. And we were talking about how, like, some people think that he’s actually evil and will turn out to be the last boss in the final title. We were cracking up about that.