http://www.polygon.com/a/final-fantasy-7
A very lengthy feature, a long time in the making. I'll maybe add some bullet points to this opening later, as I'm still reading it myself, but I've heard great things about it. Some neat insights even years later that people may not have known.
"Ideas spilled in every direction, and over the course of two years the company took three distinct attempts at getting the game off the ground.
The first of those three was a direct 2D sequel to Final Fantasy 6 for Super Famicom." (In reference to FFVII)
"At that early point we were all still going back and forth about what the story should be. Nothing had been clearly decided on yet. … [In] the first plot treatment that Sakaguchi-san wrote, it took place in New York, there was an organization there that was trying to destroy the Mako Reactors and a character named Detective Joe was investigating them. There were other characters involved, too. One of the members of this organization trying to destroy the reactor was the prototype character for [eventual FF7 main character] Cloud."
"When Square released screenshots from Final Fantasy 6: The Interactive CG Game in 1995, some magazines jumped the gun and reported them as the first look at a game for Nintendo 64 (under its early name "Ultra 64"). Those reports turned out to be incorrect."
"You don’t? But you designed him! [Laughs] Anyway, we made a 2,000-count polygon version of Behemoth for the Nintendo 64, but when we rendered and animated it, the framerate was way too low. To properly display Behemoth with that technology, we needed 2,000 polygons, but it was a little too much for the hardware. That was part of the problem with choosing Nintendo."
"All this work was toward — I think they called it the Shoshinkai, Nintendo’s Space World [trade show in Japan]. And here I am coding, kind of being able to do lead dev work for this Space World demo. Then I think it was near the end of the year. Sakaguchi-san just gathers everybody in the middle of this gigantic floor where we had a bunch of devs working in the middle of Meguro. And he just casually announces, “You know, we’re not developing for Nintendo anymore.” … So all my work at that point kind of went down the drain."
"Square was a bet-the-company kind of company. It was a big risk to put Final Fantasy 7 on the PlayStation. … Nobody had confidence in PlayStation. Nobody knew whether it would work, and most people thought that it wouldn’t. And the early pictures that came out, when it looked like a toilet bowl, confirmed everybody’s suspicions."
"While many people speaking for this story point to this often-told story about the differences between CD-ROMs and cartridges as the main reason for Square’s shift to PlayStation, some say hardware horsepower differences and communication between Square and Nintendo also played a key role in the decision. Kawai says he believes Square has focused its public comments on the disc versus cartridge debate over the years out of respect to Nintendo."
***just some quick, choice quotes I pulled, from the early goings***
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