Maybe the Final Fantasy VII Remake’s Development Isn’t a Total Trainwreck
Despite reports of a development reboot and a complete absence from Square Enix’s disappointing E3 2018 conference, director and belt aficionado Tetsuya Nomura recently assured fans that the game is coming along.
Nomura told The Verge that the game is being developed “in parallel” to Kingdom Hearts III, which he is also directing. Although this has worried some fans, Nomura claims that he’s putting an equal amount of effort into both projects.
“It’s not just in the early concept stages,” he said of the Final Fantasy VII Remake. “We are actually in development. So right now, I’ve been putting 100 percent into Kingdom Hearts and 100 percent into Final Fantasy 7 and 100 percent into Kingdom Hearts and going back and forth.”
Of course this means longs hours, but Nomura doesn’t mind. In fact, he prefers it to socializing.
“I don’t get fatigued by that at all,” he explained. “It’s really fun for me to do. I actually don’t like human relationships more than just work, so I just want to focus on work and creating things if I don’t have to deal with human relationships. It’s actually a little bit easier for me to do than not working.”
Nomura also said that fan expectations are a big support.
“I do need fans to play my games, to be able to create it, and so fans are definitely a factor to motivate me to keep on going.”
The Square Enix director also touched on Kingdom Heart III’s delay to January 2019, which he assures was not due to time constraints.
“We were told by many people, including hardware manufacturers, sales teams, marketing teams, that it just wasn’t good timing in the year,” he said, adding that Square Enix believes a holiday release could be a problem. “For Kingdom Hearts III, the Western offices requested to release the game as simultaneously as possible between Japan and America, so we no longer were able to just think about Japanese issues and retail situations.”