Format: PlayStation
Release: 1997
Publisher: Squaresoft
Developer: In-house

"This was undoubtedly the game that changed everything.” Yoshinori Kitase, director of the most important RPG ever, has cause for hyperbole. “We felt a wind of change inside the company during the development process. There was this incredible feeling I’ll never forget: we were making a new thing… making history. Imagine.” He pauses. Imagine.

At the time there were many doubters, but Kitase’s instinct proved right; Final Fantasy VII eventually propelled the high-production RPG into one of the most popular videogame genres worldwide. The first demo of the title, creatively bundled on an extra disk with Square’s first 32bit offering, Tobal No.1, stunned the world with its steam punk setting, achingly melancholic score and arresting visuals. And it bore evidence of a huge team working on a title with aspirations not yet thought possible in the medium of videogames. “There were a huge number of people we had never worked with before. Up until that point Squaresoft’s teams had only ever dealt with the traditional 2D medium. All of a sudden we had new people coming in working with software like Power Animator and SoftImage that we had never heard of before. From an industry point of view, it was unbelievable what we were trying to achieve. That is why we all had this strong feeling; this great enthusiasm.”
 


As the software houses were jumping from the 16bit systems to 32bit hardware, Squaresoft made the headlines for choosing Sony over previous soulmate Nintendo. The story behind the split is yet to be explained, though the two companies have since kissed and made up (with the departure of warring Hirosohi Yamauchi from Nintendo and Hironobu Sakaguchi from Squaresoft) we’re unlikely to any time soon. Kitase is predictably diplomatic, “We had a big decision to make in terms of which hardware to use. Nintendo was not one step behind in terms of hardware. In fact, the N64 was quite attractive, actually. But as our goal was to develop the next-generation RPG we came to the conclusion that only a high capacity mass storage media would facilitate what we wanted to achieve. This meant CD was the only option and so from that perspective, PlayStation was the only choice.”

There was great pressure on the team to maximise the benefits of the new medium. “At that time Sakaguchi [Square’s founder] was the series’ producer. Right from the time the decision to go with CD was made he set down a ground rule for the team saying, ‘If the player becomes aware of the access times, we have failed.’ So we tried many tricks to circumvent the issue, such as offering animation while the game was loading data, and so on. The constant fear for us having worked with cartridges for so many years was that the player would feel bored while waiting for loads. However, only CD media was able to facilitate more than 40 minutes of FMV movies, so we virtually had the decision made for us.”


_{^{Compared to its peers, FFVII's translation was very good. The western release was eventually repackaged for Japan as FVII International}}

Graphically, Square was trying things only hinted at in the first generation of 32bit titles. Using polygonal characters on CG backgrounds and interspersing the action with streaming FMV was a bold aesthetic decision. “We were keen that the distinction between the in-game graphics and the CG movies sequences was not overly pronounced: something we could not have done on N64. The change of dimension into 3D was a massive one for the Square team. You could see the game with maps and angles that only 3D could offer and in terms of game characters, we were able to offer far greater, detailed animations, so they would look more real, more alive on screen. But it was a daunting task.”

The change from Final Fantasy VI to Final Fantasy VII is as graphic a demonstration of the transition between 2D to 3D as one will see. Just how apprehensive was Kitase about this sea change? “It was during development that I realised the impact that 3D realistic CG visuals had on overseas players. In Japan, you have the manga culture with the traditional deformed style world design and characters that live through a story with very serious themes. Overseas, you don’t have this. To be honest we were pretty confident that FFVII’s characters and graphics would be accepted overseas and ironically I was much more anxious to see how Japanese users would respond.”