Why Square Enix Needs to Change Their Approach

A remake of Final Fantasy 7 was made available on steam a couple days ago and I approached it with cautious enthusiasm. The price wasn't bad, and my copy of FF7 for the Playstation had been lost to the march of time, so I picked it up. Square has spiffed up the graphics a notch (so Cloud looks like a SMOOTH blonde version of Popeye) but that is about it. There are still many of the translation issues lingering from the original (Just where is that weapons shop over Tifa's Bar?) and the inclusion of a "Character Booster" feels like a vestigial addition at best (Though options are never a bad thing).

It feels like Square missed an opportunity to introduce the newer among us to a classic in the RPG genre. Why not update the graphics/interface with their more modern counterparts to appeal to the prospective buyers and have the option for a classic graphics setting for the nostalgia seeking ones? To their credit, they do have a "Original Graphics Mode" but this (like margaritas) amounts to whether you like it smooth or chunky. Even in-game there are some textures that have been re-done (the movable trains in the train graveyard for example) in stark contrast to what appears to be the original backgrounds in their full 1997 glory. The game is still locked in a 4:3 ratio, so get used to the black bars. A few modders have taken a stab at this a while ago and made an HD Remake of it for PC (can be found over at moddb). It has its flaws, but it's ambitious and brings a new perspective on an old classic.

In short, I can't tell whether this is another quick cash infusion for the Square Enix coffers, or a well intentioned olive branch to placate us after having released FF13 and 14. I have loved Square since I was a kid (especially that music) but they need to change their methods when re-releasing older titles. I want to believe in them, but the addition of cloud saves (which can take a lot longer than locally, though it is optional) is not going to sway hearts and minds back to your cause.

Cause doing that would cost money and chances are they did not think they would get that money back in sales. Everyone says they want a remake of FF7 but when it comes down to it how many people would buy it?

they would have to make the whole game. FFX is easy to put into HD but for FFVII they had to change everything. Also I rather want newer games than play the same games over and over again. So I really do not care^^

PS: I think FFVII is one of the worst FF games anyway sop my opinion is mostly biased I guess^^

Wasn't the steam version of FF7 just the PC port that came out some months after the PS one?

I'm not sure why you are calling this a remake. All they did was make sure it works on new hardware configurations. It's just an updated re-release of the original PC version, much like System Shock 2.

It is, though to my knowledge it's actually improved a bit and allows for controller support. The original PC release was terrible in that the only way to play the game was with the keyboard numerical pad. I know this from experience because I actually did that back in the day. You have no earthly idea how insane it is to play that motorcycle chase sequence with two hands cramped over that keypad. Whoever designed the original port was crazy.

All right, now I'm curious. How exactly did any of that work? I'm looking at my numpad now, would that make 8 up, 4 left and 6 right or something along those lines? What were the face button equivalents?

As I recall, and it's been many years, 8, 4, 2, and 6 were Up, Left, Down, and Right. Other buttons surrounding them were mapped to the face and shoulder buttons. It was a confusing mess; so much so that the game actually came with sleeve to slip around the numerical pad that displayed a legend for which key did what. It was ridiculous.

I don't know about completely re-doing the graphics, but re-doing the translation would have been appreciated. At least they've included controller support.

I might buy this for super-cheap over the summer Steam sale, but I don't want to pay $12 for it.

@balabalalde: it wasn't a remake. It was just the PC port that was made years and years ago put up on steam.

Cause money. You wanna know why any game company does anything? Cause money.

They said they were looking at doing a remake, but that they didn't want to do it unless they could absolutely surpass the original. They don't want to touch their perfect child unless it is 100% going to be better. They also said that they have other projects they want to get to first before they start thinking about that.

Not going to look up the interview.

People who constantly clamour for a FF7 remake need to think long and hard about what they're asking for. To remake a game the scale of FF7 with production values comparable to FF13 would be a ridiculous financial undertaking for Square-Enix, and would go a long way towards bankrupting the company just for the sake of a nostalgia release that would be lucky to sell half as well as the original.

Seriously, if you can't appreciate games for the period they were made in then maybe you should stop playing them.

Way to go buddy; that port was made not long after the game's original release; even I knew that there was a PC port, since a long time ago.

That said, I think Brad also has the view that they should create a FF7 remake; no matter what it would sell ridiculously well and help them with their financial situation.

Also btw... the title of the thread seems rather inaccurate; it's more "Why isn't the FF7 port better?" and it isn't a reason for why they need to change their approach.

I still dont know why people keep buying FF remakes .... such obvious cash ins and well , never mind you still will get em :/

@evilnights: I think it'd sell pretty well, and if they used the existing graphics engine for whatever numbered Final Fantasy they were on, it'd reduce the cost. Not to mention no need to pay for writing or art direction. Reduced need for game design. I'm not as sure I want a remake as I was a couple years ago, but I don't think the numbers are as stupid as you suppose, especially if they do it well. And it's not hard to see why the game could use the update. Its graphics have aged the worst of any Final Fantasy (but there are mods for the PC that help. a little.)

It's an exploitative cash-in. Simple.

But it is cool they made a decent version available on Steam for a decent price.

Guys the original PC port barely ran if you were lucky enough to get it to launch. But at least it was 5 bucks for a long time..

I assume the Steam version will sell like hotcakes, and considering all the new management at Square, I honestly wouldn't be surprised it they were using this as a measuring stick for "remaking". That said the more I replay FFVII the more I realize how unlikely and impossible it would be for a company to spend years and money remaking what is a massive, massive, massive game. They'd have to to do a 1.5-remake type thing. There's no way they could do it all in 3D, it'd still need pre-rendered backgrounds or something.

An anecdote: at a BBQ on Thursday on told my friend FFVII had just come out on PC and without 1 seconds hesitation he took out his phone and bought it. So, yeah, if I had to guess, this will sell well.

Well, let's dismiss for a moment that that's technically FFXV, costs of which are probably astro-fucking-nomical...

According to VGChartz (who admittedly aren't exactly rock solid), the original sold close to 10 million copies.

Squeenix are all over the place on the details, but FFXIII supposedly sold around 6 million copies (VGChartz gives it closer to 3m). Despite any nostalgia value FFVII has, expecting a remake to sell significantly more than this would be naive: again, it's a nostalgia release, with the primary audience being fans of the original who have taken on a heap of responsibility in the last 15 years and aren't chomping at the bit to play a 60+ hour game. Considering a game like Tomb Raider sold over 3m and was considered a failure, I really doubt this is a viable idea.

Despite what you say regarding the reduced need for game design, that doesn't mean that writing and art direction are already done. A remake would need extensive voice-acting, which would inevitably lead to rewrites of the script, and every character and backdrop in the game would also need to be completely redesigned and modelled in 3D with an up to date poly count. The cutscenes would have to be redone from scratch. Also, there'd need a be a rearrangement of the soundtrack which contains over 80 compositions, nevermind that the original guy doesn't work for the company anymore.

Of course, there's a way of doing it on the cheap. Assuming the original scene files for the backdrops still exist (which is a pretty big if, considering hard drive space was such a commodity back then) they could be rerendered in a higher resolution, you could update the character models without doing too much, sharpen up the textures (a lot of it was gouraud shaded anyway), and put it out like that. However, it'd still be 4:3, wouldn't be anywhere near on par with its contemporaries, and people would undoubtedly complain again.

So you'll just have to make do, I'm afraid.

@daneian: I rebound my keys so that 8,4,5,6 were movement, ,7,9 were shoulderbuttons, + was menu, enter was accept and the right arrow was cancel/run.

Played the entire game with one hand. XD

Wait a REMAKE was released on steam?
How rude, all I got was re-release with some changes made to it (so we don't have to mod it all to hell ourselves to support higher resolutions)

@balabalalde: because square, like many japanese company I have worked in, are kind of inefficient when it comes to decision making. Think American politics in company form. There are obvious exceptions to the rules but company environment in general in asia are still not great.

I have never work at sqaure but base on my experience. Decisions on projects and direction of said project are often left up to the director/supervisor and they in turn often have to leave the ultimate decision to their boss. Seems normal enough but a big company with little to no delegation is as bad as too little oversight. So that's why a lot of "obvious" improvement/opportunity takes forever to discuss and then decided and then approved and then orders/changes are given and then work starts. Base on what we know about FFXIII art assess, I think Sqaure is also working this way. It just seems inefficient but of cause I am but a lowly grunt, what do I know.

I bought the Steam re-release, then dragged the folder out of the Steam directory and modded the hell out of it with bootlegger and Qhimm forum mods.

Remastered music, normally proportioned characters on the field map, hi-res backgrounds, fixed translation... Yeah, it's pretty great. If you have an itch to replay this (or do so for the first time), just do what I did and I guarantee you won't want a full remake anymore. The mods remove enough of the ugliness (like weird chibi characters that break immersion and pixelated backgrounds) to make the game enjoyable even without the rose tinted glasses.

I honestly didn't have any trouble running it on my PC, but my machine was a then-brand-new PC I had gotten for college. Voodoo 3! So high-tech!

How is it "inefficient" to decide to release an ancient PC port of one of their most popular games on a popular PC storefront? That's not inefficient. That's easy money.

Uh, the originial PC port worked just fine with controllers. I bought it when it originally came out in the ugly-ass Tomb Raider style trapezoidal box. There was even a coupon that came with it for a PS1 style gravis gamepad, that I bought and then played the game with.

I was referring to @balabalalde saying he thinks Square miss an opportunity here to draw in new players by doing slight quality of play bumps (interface lift was the example he used). So I explain that the decisions are often than not up to the supervisors and higher ups, and it takes a long time for the order/message to get back to the team. In that type of work format, suggestions and advice the team members may have had are always lost during transit (hence the inefficient part).

So instead of the programmer taking to the graphic design guy going "Hey I think if we just add like a slight interface upgrade to make it more modern, it wouldn't add that much time to the port" they then talk to the project manager. He agrees, boom done.

Instead, they pitch the idea to the project manager, he goes to his supervisor, his supervisor draft a proposal to his boss (for an interface lift?). You kind of see the drag on process here? and what type of supervisor would waste their boss's time by handing him a proposal for something small like that, that will most likely not result in more sale. That's what I was talking about.

I hadn't played this in about 10 years so I downloaded it yesterday.
Within 5 minutes I got graphical glitches and I suddenly realized that I'm totally over random encounters. $12 well spent.

To get the true meaning, that scene should always be in the original Japanese:

FF7 was on PC in the 90s (I've got the box in storage, I remember it having a weird MIDI support just for the music...). As more or less a straight port, it was pretty ugly and I'm pretty sure unsellable to most but the most ardent fan.

I would buy the hell out of a remake of FF7. But a real one though, not some HD nonsense. I think maybe that's the problem with FF7 - it would have to be a real remake, and that's got to be expensive. I have to admit that I've never finished the game - I started out with FFVIII and when I went back to play VII it was hard to deal with the interface (and playing it on my PSP probably didn't help!)

The amount of money it would cost to bring out a HD level game is a bit higher than the number of fringe fans that can support.

At this stage I'd rather see a FF7-2 than a remake. If they are going to dump money into such an expensive project they might as well make a new game.

You got it bro!

But, in the interest of speculating the possible audience for remakes of games that were insanely popular during 1997, let's look at how the Goldeneye remake did...

http://www.vgchartz.com/game/70751/goldeneye-007-2010/

Not bad, until you realise that's about 2% of Wii owners everywhere. Of course, third-party software generally doesn't do so well on the Wii! So how about if they released it on a console with a better attach rate for third-party games and a healthy appetite for first-person shooters?

http://www.vgchartz.com/game/54576/goldeneye-007-reloaded/

Oh.

You are honestly using vgchartz as a citation? I have no idea what your point is.

VGChartz? You do realize that means absolutely nothing, right?

I want to point out that character models don't even have texture maps. They're just colored polygons.

If you want to get outraged about anything Square Enix has done, get upset about their cloud save service forcing me to play FF7 for 6 hours straight while I wait for the servers to come back up so I can stop.

The one thing that caught my eye immediately was the unusualness of the 11.99 price point. 9.99 is one of the most commonly used price points for downloadable games. It seems like they wanted to charge more but were afraid that 14.99 would scare too many people away as it is the "next level" up, so to speak, in prices. So, they decided to tack on a couple extra dollars in hopes that it would still make new players want to buy it and wouldn't seem like too much for those fishing for a bit of nostalgia. Considering this should have been 4.99 max, as it is a rerelease of a 16 year old game that barely had any extra work put into it, it seems like a money grab. Don't you have more important things to do? Like:

1. Lightning Returns: FF XIII - I know a lot of people don't like this series, but I am really enjoying it and would like to see a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy. Hopefully they'll polish it up real shiny for it's release in early 2014. I'm looking forward to it. That battle system looks very interesting if anything else.
2. Final Fantasy XV - I'm sure everyone expected this, but for the love of god Square...FINISH. THIS. GAME. NOW!

And please just stop this douchery...just...please stop. *starts sobbing because FFXV may never get finished*

@hailinel: Well I did admit they were hardly rock solid, but if anyone wants to pull NPD figures or some other source out of their ass that absolutely proves said game sold gangbusters, by all means be my guest.

@toxeia:

The bootlegger app converts it back to the '98 PC version, which just strips off the DRM and cloud saves. Now you can save locally AND install fan made updated art and music.

Why are you even bringing the GoldenEye remake into this discussion? That's not the game we're talking about and is only superficially anything like the N64 game.

Because the announcement and commercial failure of the Goldeneye remake is a perfectly reasonable analogue when it comes to gauging the potential sales and viability of a FF7 remake. They both have huge fanbases and are considered landmark releases in their respective genres, however in Goldeneye's case when Activision tried to capitalise on nostalgia it failed miserably. Why would a FF7 remake be any different?

No, it's not.

The GoldenEye remake wasn't a true remake of the original game. Just a Call of Duty-style FPS with the GoldenEye name and characters. And while its levels do feature the occasional call-back to the Rare-developed game, the levels in total are completely different. Multiplayer is also nothing like the original; once again, its Call of Duty with Bond-trappings. It wasn't so much a "remake" as it was Activision making a game with the GoldenEye name as a way to lure fans of N64 game.

In the event that Square Enix were to remake Final Fantasy VII, you can bet that it would remain far more faithful to the original source. And it would be far easier to market than Call of Duty-as-GoldenEye-sans-Pierce Brosnan.

They can't possibly win though. Especially if they make something "faithful to the original source", because they're stuck making a 60+ hour game primarily for people who already played it fifteen years ago, and they're incurring a much higher cost for an inevitably smaller audience. How is that cost-effective? As I said earlier, just because the PS1 game exists doesn't mean 50% of the work is already done.

Every Japanese dev needs to change their approach. Overall they have failed to put out a consistent quality product this gen. Yes they have put out one or two games a year that isn't crap but it seems now they just put out minor updates to old games like Final Fantasy whatever.

If they want to stay relevant in the next gen, they better really really change their approach.

I'm not saying that it wouldn't be expensive to produce. There are business realities that have prevented a remake from being made; Square Enix reps have said as much. But in the event that they do go ahead with a remake, your argument is not one that I would cite in trying to argue why it's a bad idea.

Keep in mind that while some of us would like an updated looking game too, there's probably plenty of people who would like to play it in as close an experience to the original 1997 experience as possible. Except on PC.

I mean, I've best enjoyed it on emulators anyway, and I always aim for recapturing the original experience.

@sins_of_mosin: Japanese developers mostly design games that work around Japanese gamers, they are as relevant as they need to be in japan. They have been having issues breaking out in the west but they will remain for their own culture, we don't even see large amounts of Jap games as they aren't localized in english, they wouldn't sell to the wests culture.

Even if they remake the game, the old translation has to stay.

I really, really, really want those lines voiced.

Fine, but I really don't see how any potential audience for such a project outweighs the cost of making it, which as we all know is how games get made in the first place. I don't believe for a second that such a game would get a higher market share than FFXIII did, and don't you find it the least bit disturbing that for a series that traditionally doesn't bother with direct sequels, Squeenix's course of action has been to iterate on FFXIII *twice* before moving on to FFXV?

I feel like Square's best games have been coming out of the western studios while the eastern studios have been doing very little of what we've seen out of them recently.

That's the main reason I'm terrified of a remake. I can't see a way they can handle Barrett and Cid's dialogue that won't be a disappointment in some way.

@evilnights: You forget that FFXV has been in development for years as Versus XIII. They also hadn't originally intended to make XIII-2 or Lightning Returns; that only came about in response to the criticism that XIII received. It helped that assets existed making the development of those games easier, but between Versus XIII/XV, KH3, the complete redo of Final Fantasy XIV, and Square Enix's western projects, it's not like they haven't been willing to build whole new games as of late.