Producer defends episodic approach to Final Fantasy 7 Remake

Earlier this week Square Enix offered new details on Final Fantasy 7 Remake, following the reveal of a new trailer from PlayStation Experience. Final Fantasy 7 Remake's producer Yoshinori Kitase and director Tetsuya Nomura announced that the highly anticipated remake would not be released as one game, but instead as a multi-part game.

According to Nomura, Square Enix decided to take this route instead of cutting content from the game, as each part of Final Fantasy 7 Remake would be the size of a full-game. The announcement of turning Final Fantasy 7 into a multipart series in the remake was met with mixed feelings by the community. Some fans displayed trust in Square's decision, while others openly displayed their disdain.

In defence of the decision, Kitase has written an update on the Square Enix site looking to explain the reasoning behind the decision. Unfortunately, the 'explanation' is everything we heard before:

The multi-part format enables us to expand the original story and turn it into an epic experience for fans and new gamers alike.

One thing that we wanted to be clear about during this weekend to accompany the new trailer was the scale of this project. We wanted to tell you this now and not in the future so that you’d share our vision for what we want to deliver.

The biggest reason why we haven’t done a remake until now is because it’s a massive undertaking to reconstruct FINAL FANTASY VII from the ground up with the current technology. Producing a proper HD remake of FINAL FANTASY VII that maintains the same feeling of density of the original would result in a volume of content that couldn’t possibly fit into one instalment.

We’ve seen everyone’s comments and reactions to the news that FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE will be a multi-part series and many have speculated correctly as to the reason why we have made this decision. If we were to try to fit everything from the original into one remake instalment, we would have to cut various parts and create a condensed version of FINAL FANTASY VII. We knew none of you would have wanted that.

While an explanation is great, it would be great to hear about how many parts there will be and how much they cost.