I’d argue that there was probably no greater poisoned chalice in games than taking on the job of remaking Final Fantasy 7. Hyped for years before it was announced, its reveal part of the so-called ‘E3 of dreams’, and it is of course a reimagining of one of the most important and beloved role-playing games of all time. Even if it was brilliant, there would inevitably be grousing from some quarters.
It’s an ongoing battle, but after two games it’s fair to say that Square Enix has been remarkably successful in their approach to reinventing a classic. The man at the tip of the spear of that remarkable operation is Naoki Hamaguchi. Hamaguchi is a Square Enix veteran, his first credit 2006’s Final Fantasy 12 – but at the same time his rise from programming roles to overseeing the direction of the entire Remake trilogy is as explosive as the success of the original FF7 itself – a game that was released before he entered the industry. Now, he’s a development celebrity criss-crossing the globe from convention to convention while juggling continued work on the hotly anticipated third and final part of the trilogy.
He’s also humble, funny, and clearly still a programmer first – a practical, tools-first director, setting him apart from many of Final Fantasy’s more narrative, cinematic, pie-in-the-sky leaders over the years. He’s clearly laser-focused on getting results – but not by necessarily taking the easy path, as evidenced in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth undertaking a structural overhaul compared to its predecessor – and with the final part, he intends to surprise again.
I caught up with Hamaguchi in the middle of one of his tours to find out how his team is progressing with the third and final part, the philosophy behind FF7 Remake’s narrative and gameplay design, and thinking to a future even beyond part three. Here’s our chat.
Eurogamer: Before we started here, we were talking a little about the creators behind the original game… so let’s briefly talk about the original. What’s the attitude, working on the Remake series, in terms of referencing old planning documents and the like from back in the day? Are you looking at stuff and thinking about reviving old ideas? Or just for reference? Or indeed – how much of that stuff even still exists? I know back then, material preservation wasn’t exactly a priority…
Hamaguchi: I mean, you probably expect this knowing as you do about game development back then. We’re talking about the mid ’90s… There’s almost no documentation left over from that period at all, practically none.
Game development back then was a lot more Wild West – a lot of material was just not kept. Data management wasn’t done to modern standards, so yeah, there’s basically nothing. There’s some character design sketches I think we’ve still got and obviously anything which was published separately, so the Ultimania guides have a few of the original documents in there but in terms of stuff like… for example part way through development written documents, design documents, etcetera… Yeah, there’s practically nothing to work on.
Before we started, we were talking about the legendary creators who worked on the original game. Certainly that reminded me there was one very important thing that I remember I made quite a clear decision on when I was given the role as director for the remake series. That’s – what I really want to avoid here is basically because I am such a big fan of the game. Because of that, what I’m not doing is trying to overwrite the original game with my own fan perspective version of it and create a new version of the game which is essentially a fan fiction of it.
“Game development back then was a lot more Wild West – a lot of material was just not kept.”
If there was an amount of that design documentation left over from the original games, that probably might make my job there in avoiding that problem a lot easier! Because I could just obviously look through that documentation and go, okay, this is what the original intent was, it’s all down here. I’ll just try and copy that and any changes will be based on that. As I said, unfortunately, none of that documentation is around. But what really has helped me and kind of makes up for that is the fact that a lot of those legendary creators that you mentioned are very much still involved in the project.
Obviously Mr. Kitase [Yoshinori, FF7 Director], Mr. Nomura [Tetsuya, FF7 Artist], Mr. Toriyama [Motomu, FF7 Event Planner], Mr. Nojima [Kazushige, FF7 Writer]… They’re all still involved in the remake projects and they’re available very easily so I can go and check things against them.
Every time I may be concerned or worried about – okay, is this really what’s at the core of Final Fantasy VII? Is this what the original intent was? How do I change that? Should I change that? I can very easily go and talk to these guys and they can let me know and give me the outlook from the original creative team perspective. So I think that really does help actually because once I know that, okay, we’ve got a good understanding that’s been passed down from the mouths of the original creators, then we can work out okay how we reimagine that and re-present that in a new game presentation for a new audience.
I think that is perhaps one of the big reasons why it’s been such a success, really. So I really am grateful about having them on hand. Even if there’s no documentation, we can kind of get it from the horse’s mouth.
And iteration must play a big role in that too, right? Especially with the story. I imagine you guys are adjusting and showing things around the team to make decisions about how far you’re going to push something, how much you’re going to change. And I know it’s not something that you guys love, but one of the things about coming out on PC is you’ve got fans who go digging and discover bits left over from early versions of scenes and the like.
So in that spirit, I’m curious if you can speak to the level of iteration that you have to do on some of these important scenes. I’m thinking especially about the scenes at the climax of Rebirth… What was that process like, going from the initial thought through to the final thing?
Hamaguchi: Yes, of course there’s iterations. The idea of a ‘retake’, I suppose, to use film terminology… the idea that if we created something and then we feel it’s not quite up to scratch or if it doesn’t communicate what we wanted to do and then achieve what it’s supposed to do in the game, we will go back and will create a new version of that. So obviously there is a certain level of that in the game.
“If you have too many people putting input into these things, it becomes a decision by committee, and it can lose the creative vision.”
I think in terms of overall and how that fits into the overall design of the game, I think there are studios and games out there where in terms of story developments, scripting, and how the basic bones of the story will be – they decide that by iteration, testing lots of versions to work out the best one. But in terms of those kinds of discussions on the overall storyline, my team doesn’t actually do many whole team discussions on that. There’s a very good reason for that. I think that if you have too many people putting input into these things, it becomes a decision by committee, and it can lose the creative vision. I think I much prefer having a single artistic vision with a story writer and showing what they want to show.
The final authority on that in our case is Mr. Nojima, the story writer. If he wants to express something in the story, if he wants to show something, essentially we will be saying ‘yes, we have to show that’. There is a bit of leeway, obviously… He puts down a decision of what he wants to show, and then we try it out, and then we look at the end result and assess if it’s working or not. If the feeling is that it’s not getting across what he had in mind with his original script, to elicit the right emotional reation… we can obviously adjust, try to change it, try different versions, different approaches, until we get to that right version of it. But in terms of iterating on the story, we try to avoid that to keep one solely creative vision.
But yeah, I think maybe part of the reason for that question is because, yeah, we did leave some of the older versions of the script in the game. And I think obviously people picked up on them and it maybe led to a bit of unnecessary speculation about what could have happened, what it could have been. I think also, yeah, fair enough, you got us. [laughs] I think we need to try harder to keep those out of the game!
I think in some ways it could be fun, though, if you don’t take it too seriously! It gets people’s imaginations going. They might think, ‘the game could have been this, it could have been that’. So if you look at it in that respect, I think it’s harmless fun if you’re just imagining what it could have been.
I think it is a fairly unique challenge for this game. A lot of people love looking at cut and changed content from games, but FF7 built this community of people… I was one of those guys in the 90s, sitting up past my bedtime in the glow of a CRT PC monitor, reading theories about bringing Aerith back to life, the ghost in the church, the cave entrance you can’t access… I grew up in that! That and trying to get the Triforce in Ocarina of Time.
But those fans are still around, older, more skilled than ever, digging into your game. I still talk to some of those guys! [laughs] I’m one of those people who wrote thousands of words analysing Rebirth’s ending…
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Hamaguchi: [laughs] Yeah. I get you. You know, I’m feeling as well how this is kind of a sign of the way times change. In some ways, we’ve kind of lost that aspect to entertainment.
Like you say, back in the day people didn’t know the official information… it was very difficult to find these things out. So you speculate about these things. ‘Oh, if I maybe did this I’d be able to bring this character back, or if I do this special series of actions I can maybe get this thing that you normally can’t get’. Obviously ultimately you couldn’t bring them back and you couldn’t get it, but to see people speculate about it and that kind of discussion and theorizing among friends was kind of a part of the way people enjoyed it back then.
I think nowadays obviously with the internet you can go and check straight away what is really just a weird rumour. And you know that straight away. So I think it’s a sign of the changing times. It’s a bit of an aside really, but I do think that people don’t enjoy things in that way anymore.
Just to keep on the narrative thread… within the parameters you’ve laid out above, led from the top… just how much of your narrative in the Remake trilogy is on a pre-set path? So if we go back to 2015 – alright, it was different that far back since at that stage CyberConnect2 was involved and the like… but to go back to the start of the Remake project, did you guys know the shape of things? The cliffhanger at the end of the first game? How Rebirth ends? The grand finale that you’re working on now? How much was pre-determined, and how much is based on fan feedback, figuring stuff out game-to-game?
Hamaguchi: In terms of the overall plot, how the story was going to go, and the overall themes and direction for the Remake… that was very much all down at the beginning when we started the project. Obviously the details of how specifically that’s going to be presented, how that’s going to be shown in game, that wasn’t there yet. It was very much a rough outline, a basic plot summary, really. And again one other thing we hadn’t decided at that stage was where we would cut the three parts. The story was all there but where each game would start and end was still up in the air at that point.
It was very much a plot outline. None of the details were in there and obviously some of the big themes of the gameplay and some of the other scenes were very much able to be changed and tweaked around as we went through working on the series.
I think one example of that is in Rebirth we’ve got the scene where Aerith is singing the theme song in the Gold Saucer. That wasn’t in the original planning, that just wan’t in there. But then partway through the development on Rebirth, Mr. Kitase actually came up to me and said ‘well, if we’ve got this theme song I’d really like to have that as something in the game where they actually sing’. He really pushed to have that included which is why we did it but that wasn’t in there at all from the original plan.
I’d assumed that had come from Mr. Nomura, given we know he has a taste for musicals!
Hamaguchi: Yeah – I mean, I can really remember that episode so well because it was quite sudden! It was quite late in the development, actually. We were just discussing with Mr. Uematsu after he finished the song… it was the first version – a great song, by the way. I think that’s part of why Mr. Kitase wanted it in there, because it’s such a great song. He just came out saying, I want that in the game, that has to be in the game, do something about that – and we had to all rush to get it made very quickly! [laughs]
What about from a gameplay perspective? From my viewpoint, obviously you are reacting and thinking about current trends and stuff like that probably a little bit more than you are with story from game to game. So Rebirth is quite different to Remake, and I sort of expect the third will be different again. Have you been thinking about, in the broad overall structure while making these games, how they will feel for someone who inevitably plays them all back to back in years to come?
Hamaguchi: First of all, this is a great question – thank you. The difference between the story and the actual gameplay experience we went for, that was indeed quite different in terms of we didn’t have a plan from the beginning of the first game what kind of gameplay experience we wanted to do for the subsequent games.
I think what we’ve done with the gameplay side of it, which you’ve observantly picked up on with the question, is that there are different trends people prefer, different things people look for. This is a 10 years or more development – there’s a lot that’s going to change in those 10 years and people may be looking for a slightly different direction on the gameplay for the future games in the series.
“If we just tried to make three of the same game with a continuing story… I think there’d be a lot more fans who would drop out and become bored”
So, the way we generally handled that in terms of the timing and when these decisions were made – the first game was planned out, and then development was carried out. And just about the time when we finished setting down the map, we roughly knew exactly where we were with the first game in terms of the gameplay experience and where everything would fit together. We had a good idea of what it would look like. That was when we started thinking about, what do we change for the second one? What do I want to add? What do I want to expand upon? What completely new experiences do we want to put in there?
That’s then very much the same for the third game, as well. So when we were wrapping up on getting the basic pattern down for Rebirth, and we understood what the gameplay was going to feel like for that, then I started looking at what new experiences, what new kind of emotional impact, et cetera, that we want to put in there into the third game.
Essentially it was a process of we started thinking about that while we were in the middle of developing the previous game and wrapping up on the development of that. But obviously we had the idea of what the current one, which would be then the previous one, would look like when we started work on that.
Additionally, I think this is something that we haven’t actually seen before in game development – the idea that we’ve got an overall story and then within that story we’ve got a certain portion of that story that’s going to become one standalone game in its own right and then be released before we then move on. I don’t think anyone’s ever made games in this way before.
So part of the thinking behind that, and I think maybe that’s one reason why we’re seeing the series be such a success, is because we felt we really had to have that feeling that the series, as a series, would evolve and change and become new and exciting and basically keep people’s interest. If we didn’t do that, if we just tried to make three of the same game with a continuing story… I think there’d be a lot more fans who would drop out and become bored with it if they didn’t have that feeling that it’s going to continue in a different direction, it’s going to change, it’s going to be exciting, we don’t know what to expect.
I think i feel that we really have succeeded with this approach in terms of having to make everything different – well, not everything different, but to try to change it and show evolution in the games. If you look at this specifically in terms of the actual examples from the first game to the second game in terms of the overall themes of the game – the first one is obviously a story-driven experience, a very good story-driven experience. If the second one was exactly the same and was driven in the same way, with the same story-driven approach, then as soon as people play the second game they would think ‘well, the third one is going to be a story-driven game as well’ and they wouldn’t have that feeling of excitement and expectation about what could come next
What you put in there to evolve it, change it, take it in a different direction… it could have been a lot of different things. What I personally chose, because I wanted to try that, was to decide on a more open world structure to the game. Ultimately that worked well too. There’s that idea that it’s basically setting out shop and saying: you can expect the game to keep changing, to keep it fresh and give you new surprises. It’s not going to just fall into the same pattern again.
I think now we’ve done one and two, Remake and then Rebirth, that kind of works in our favour because people now know that they can expect new and exciting things from the third game, which we are working on right now. So I’m very happy that we did that and I think that was essential – that philosophy of not just planning it all out and making the same all the way through. I think that was a really key part of our success.
Obviously officially you’re here to talk about the Switch 2 and Xbox versions of FF7 Remake, which are out in January. And you’ve confirmed those platforms will get the rest of the trilogy, too. So let’s do the boring technical question. I’m curious as you expand to more platforms you’ve got a wider range of performance footprints. In particular you’ve got Switch 2, Series S, Steam Deck… all of which tracks for Remake, which essentially is a PS4 game, but surely becomes more complex for Rebirth. Can you talk a little about how you’re approaching that larger game on those platforms?
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Hamaguchi: Okay, so I’ll first give you the textbook answer and then I’ll go into a little bit more detail about the specifics of it. But the real answers to all those problems came when we started working on the PC version of Rebirth. Obviously in order to do that we have to accommodate a number of quite a wide variety of different levels of PC spec that the players will be playing on.
What we did was create a dedicated rendering pipeline, a development environment which can automatically scale the graphical output to fit with the different levels of PC that the game could theoretically be played on. Obviously that put us in a very good stead for adapting the game and having that flexibility towards different consoles with different levels of spec and graphical fidelity as well.
That makes us sound really cool – we’ve got this really great system so we can quite easily port to any system with no trouble, it’s all really easy. It’d be great if I could say that, but unfortunately the real situation is that there’s a lot of hard work needed after that as well. And it’s a very good thing to have, having that baseline there to achieve a set level of baseline of quality when doing that initial port-over. That was a really big strength of our development and allowed us to do it a lot more by building on that. But there’s a lot of hard grind to get the individual optimizations for each individual platform after that.
“People now know that they can expect new and exciting things from the third game”
So for example the Xbox Series S obviously has that comparatively lower memory to use than other platforms. So we had to work out specifically how to get around that for the version to run on Xbox. For Switch 2 as well, the difference with that one is when you go between the docked mode and the handheld mode, the system itself lowers some of the graphical capacity so it can save battery, etc. So we had to work out the right way of optimizing the graphics for those. That was a lot of hard work and a lot of effort to do but it was absolutely essential to get the absolute best quality on each system.
But like I say, having that baseline there with the development environment that we created, specifically for Steam Deck actually, was very much a big part of adopting the original PC version to be able to run and get the verified badge on Steam Deck. And so having that environment and that development pipeline in place to get the basics done quickly, that really paid dividends.
I’m wary of time, but I just want to say that I could talk to you about design for hours. But I wanted to finish up by asking a bit about you, really. You’re becoming a very important figure for Square Enix, and for Final Fantasy. And therefore to RPGs in Japan in general. But your most famous work at this stage is obviously adapting something which already exists. So I’m curious to know… you’re looking down the sights on finishing part three. Do you have things that you want to make from scratch originally at this stage. Are you thinking about that much?
Hamaguchi: I’m on guard now because I know these kinds of questions! [laughs] It’s not your question, it’s not your fault. If I answer these in the wrong way, people are going to misinterpret this and it’ll go around the world and end up with quite a bit of misunderstanding.
The forum threads saying ‘this is Final Fantasy 17’, yes. [laughs]
Hamaguchi: [laughs] Yeah. So, I think looking at the trends in the game industry and what’s gone before up until now, very much the core of gaming, what’s supported the industry, what has been the bread and butter has been – I think you might call them ‘premium games’, like high-quality rich experiences… there’s various genres of various levels of popularity – things like RPGs, action games, shooting games. But it’s generally been those rich single-player storytelling styles of games that have been in some ways the core of gaming up until now.
So what I really feel is, and again, maybe we’re talking about the last five years, maybe pushing to the last 10 years, although 10 seems a little bit long for this. I think one of the big trends that we’ve seen is a change over, maybe not a change over, but certainly an equal rise in the popularity of service-based games. The idea that this isn’t a solo play experience, you play on your own, this is more of a collaborative or cooperative experience, a game played with other people where you share that gaming experience. That kind of game and that kind of approach to gaming has really grown in the last at least five, maybe 10 years.
So yeah, this is not just limited to the next Final Fantasy VII Remake, the last part of the series. I spend a lot of time thinking about what I want to make in future, what kind of games I’d like to do. I do keep coming back to this idea that I think those kinds of live elements in games, if done right, will be very important in future. There’s a lot of people who are looking for those kinds of things in games.
However, having said all that, I think we’re also kind of seeing a reverse trend starting up at the moment as well. I do believe there’s a lot of things that only that kind of live game can do in the way that you communicate with and link with other people in the game. That facilitates the kinds of experiences that can only be had in that kind of environment. But I think we’re starting to see in a lot of regions around the world people looking and they’re getting maybe a bit fatigued, a bit tired of these kinds of live service model games, and they’re maybe looking more back to more traditional premium games. They want to play something on their own, maybe with a story, not have to worry about dealing with other people. I certainly see this in Europe, in America, also very much in Southeast Asia, in China especially, I think we’re starting to see a reverse trend going on here as well.
Ultimately, I’m not going to answer the question, so sorry about that. [laughs] But there’s a lot of things I’m thinking about in terms of where I want to take my creative talents next. I’ll have to factor all that in there and see what comes out the other end, but for the moment, nothing I can say…!
