Square made many changes to the series, beginning with Final Fantasy VII. FF VII was originally in development for the Nintendo 64, but cartridge technology didn’t have the storage capacity for CG cutscenes. Square decided to move their franchise from Nintendo’s cartridge-based consoles to Sony’s CD-ROM-based PlayStation. Square also changed the North American numbering of the series, and kept Final Fantasy VII as game number VII, which seemed like a statement saying: “From now on, all the games we make are going to be rad, and are getting released in North America, because everyone will want them, because they’re rad.”
There were also lots of personnel changes, in addition to Hironobu Sakaguchi being Producer, and Yoshinori Kitase being Director/ Writer. Kazushige Nojima co-wrote the story with Yoshinori Kitase. Nojima is known for writing many games for Square, including Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X-2, Crisis Core, Kingdom Hearts, and the Final Fantasy CGI film, Advent Children. He’s wonderful. I love all those games, although I will admit that his stories can get very convoluted sometimes, and that’s not entirely the fault of Japanese to English localization. Sometimes Nojima’s scripts fall somewhere between David Lynch plotting (not a bad thing, but some like things simplified), and European heavy metal t-shirt lyrics. What I mean by this, is that sometimes, plot or dialogue can be hard to follow when it doesn’t have to be; the result is usually mysterious, poetic, or just plain strange. Watch the conversation at the beginning of the Kingdom Hearts III E3 2015 trailer, and you’ll have an idea of what I mean. It’s like the characters are telling you something really important, but really not telling you anything at all.
The other major personnel change, that Square made, was to its character designer. Longtime series character designer Yoshitaka Amano was replaced by Tetsuya Nomura. Again we have a great, being traded for a great. Yoshitaka Amano is known for his costume design-like illustration for the Final Fantasy series, Vampire Hunter D novels, the Sandman comic Dream Hunters, and the anime films Angel’s Egg and Amon Saga. Tetsuya Nomura is now well known as the director of the Kingdom Hearts game series, as the original director of the forthcoming Final Fantasy XV, and the director of the forthcoming Final Fantasy VII remake. As much as I love Yoshitaka Amano’s art style, the character design in Final Fantasy VII is second to nothing. The design of the game is what led many consumers, including myself, to being interested in the series to begin with. The spikey haired, neo-anime, cartoony yet realistic, diverse, cool-as-shit character design, on classy white packaging, is just so appealing! Cloud’s gigantic sword! Tifa’s gigantic… Tifa was so hot! Amazing design… just amazing.
These articles will be released every month on COGconnected, and split up into 4 weekly parts: The Intro, The History, The Review, and The Verdict. So here ends The History. Next week: The Review!