New Friends & Foes - Inside FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH - Episode 3 (Characters, Combat, Localization)

I played FFVII as a fan when I was a child, so I have my own image of FFVII that I don’t want changed. Certain aspects are sacred to me, and I wouldn't want them altered. I didn't want it to be completely one-to-one. It's a difficult balance, but it wouldn't have meaning otherwise. FFVII REMAKE ended with the tagline "the Unknown Journey Will Continue," We felt it should feel new to even players who are familiar with the original. We went with that tagline to let people know it's not going to be

a simple extension to the story that they all know, and to give a sense that they're in for a journey filled with surprises. The overall narrative flow of the original game and the overall structure were something we didn't want to change, and we felt by narrowing the changes made within this otherwise familiar story, users would feel more excitement, and perhaps apprehension in a good way. We felt something like that sort of remake might resonate more. With REBIRTH there are a lot of quests fo

r each character aside from the main story, and when you play the quests that highlight these individual characters, you’ll be able to see some entertaining behaviors, hidden thoughts, and other revealing episodes. There were no voiceovers in the original. In REBIRTH, you hear everyone's voices for the first time, so I would think, "That's what he was saying," or, "That's what Vincent's personality is like," and found out things I never knew about him. His personality was unexpected. Vincent has

a dark past, we tried to reflect the darkness and sadness in his heart in his voice and the way he spoke. He's mysterious and handsome while also embodying an element of horror, and is a character who draws you in with his bewitching qualities, but with voice acting, you realize... he has a humorous side that wasn't apparent in the original. With Cid, I feel like there's a gap between how he's perceived and his actual status. He may seem a bit middle-aged, but he's actually quite young, and in

his early 30s. So we were very conscious of this when working on his face. Specifically for things like the length of his facial hair and how it grows, we discussed with Nomura-san many times, and with that I think we were able to create the current version of Cid for REBIRTH. In keeping with Cid’s we gave him a southern accent. And this trait was kept intact for REBIRTH as well. Yuffie’s charm lies in her cheerfulness, and she is of course a very spirited ninja girl, For events and other produc

tion aspects, we may try to include a clumsy element, For example…I hope it's okay to say this. Like falling down in the middle of the event, or having that kind of clumsy element during the event. Also, for example, she often hums or sings a lot outside of events, but even then, she'll sing with her whole being instead of nonchalantly. I think Yuffie is a very emotionally intense character, Especially in her interactions with Barret, Yuffie's brazenness, and light-hearted nature came through we

ll, making it very fun. so when in battle, she moves around non-stop. She has ninja-like movements which makes for a very responsive, fun experience during battle. She's a character who feels great to play, and has people coming back for more. With Red XIII, because he was held captive by Professor Hojo in the Shinra Building for such a long time, when he was finally freed, when he was finally freed, I think he just really wanted to go home. In REMAKE, we mainly see a serious side to Red XIII’s

character, and REBIRTH shows more of his comical side. Similar to tigers and lions, it's hard to discern their full range of emotions from their expression. Their eyebrows don't move as much as humans, so you could tell if they were really angry or just neutral, but outside of that, sadness or joy are very hard to convey. These elements are very important where it concerns Red XIII, so we deviated from reality here a bit and gave him clear facial expressions that could easily be read by players.

Red XIII is a playable character, so along with others, he has to climb a ladder and perform field actions, as well as sit on a chair. As for riding the chocobo, Nomura-san requested not to have him in a "sitting" position. and it was a must for him to hold the reins in his hands, so from there we made several pose variations which we had Nomura-san review, and he said, "That's the one," about that pose. We really didn't think it would be picked, honestly. It was hard to say. I made some variat

ions of the poses just to mess around, and I think they were all pretty funny. Besides that, unlike the other characters, even if he's attacking with his hands, the quadruped stance is his basic pose, so to have an incredible number of attack variations as with other characters, and distinguishing them, was very difficult. When we found out Red XIII was going to be added alongside the existing cast of characters, we wanted to create a completely new play style for him. We didn't have a defense-b

ased character, whose skills branched out from that role, so we finalized his combat settings keeping that concept in mind. Another thing is the bond of the party overall. not just between Cloud and a specific character. Stories have always been a major focus of every FINAL FANTASY game, and the characters are beloved, so we wanted to bolster those aspects from a combat perspective, and felt we needed something that can link these elements even tighter and deeper together, which was how we came

to incorporate the synergy element. There's something called party levels which express the bond of the overall party itself, As the bonds between the party members get stronger, the capabilities of the characters from a game perspective also expand. We designed the game so that as this happens, your options to synergize them during battle also grows. So, when users go, "Which party members do I want to travel with?" The idea is they can choose whoever they like. In terms of character combinatio

ns, we knew that people will, of course, have favorites they'd want to play with. Inevitably, there might be instances where players might have a favorite character, but they don't like the accompanying style of action. But, if we made the characters too similar to avoid this, the tradeoff was that the battles would lose some of their depth, so we intentionally went with establishing distinct styles for each character, based on their individual features. In terms of how fighting styles can chang

e drastically depending on which characters you pair up, we wanted players to feel empowered to master other characters in order to fully utilize their favorite characters. Based on that idea, we did focus on creating very distinct differences between them. We wanted to allow for that synergy across all characters, so that all users have an equal chance to be happy playing the game with the characters they really liked. So we allocated cost and resources to such areas in development as well. We

have quite a bit of character combinations all of which can be very useful, but one that feels very quintessential FFVII to me, is the combination of Red XIII and Cait Sith, which is a really adorable synergy skill. Cait Sith embodies some feline characteristics while still speaking and conversing normally, so we were careful not to make him too human. And since Cait Sith is a cute character the actor incorporated some comical movements and I believe this lead to a great performance with the mov

ements themselves being expressive. In terms of size, compared to his Moogle, Cait Sith is small and harder to see, so we wanted the Moogle to be very expressive, with unique moves and poses. We paid attention to giving their combined versus individual actions a different look and feel and aimed to create an experience where users can enjoy switching between the two as they play. In writing the scenario for REMAKE and REBIRTH, we added a lot of scenes that weren't in the original to expand the s

tory. These were tied to developing a character further, and where their emotions had been simplified in the past, we wanted to portray some proper drama there, especially in terms of what I felt as I developed this game, is that the first chapter of this game starts in Nibelheim, in a flashback. So, you play as Sephiroth and spend time with young Cloud exploring the Nibel Reactor, but during those moments, Sephiroth still has a very human quality to him. He's not the typical embodiment of evil

who's out to destroy the world from the get-go. Through various circumstances, he fell into darkness. He isn't simply a "bad guy," and was originally admired by our protagonist, or perhaps, was a colleague with some friendly rivalry, but a certain incident leads him to become the enemy. Once he becomes the enemy, there's a more hostile sense of rivalry there. In the first installment, we gave Sephiroth distinct appearances and engaged with him which was important, because he leaves a stronger im

pression and ignites a need to go after him. To better understand Sephiroth and to get a feel for him… I didn't want him to be an unrelated, third party. I wanted to pull him in as one of us. So, allowing players to get a feel for Sephiroth as a playable character I felt was a very important point. As the enemy, that powerful enemy was once an ally, and getting the player to get a firm feel for that, I believe those elements are integral to FINAL FANTASY VII, and so Sephiroth was a must. Similar

to the last entry, the voice over for this title was localized into three languages -- English, French, and German. Subtitles were localized into 10 languages, including Western and Asian languages, and we've made every effort to ensure that players in each country can experience the same world as the Japanese version in their respective languages. It was true for REMAKE as well, but Aerith's lines were challenging to localize. Her gestures and manner of speech are very unique, where there are

often long pauses in her sentences, For example, even if in Japanese it was one sentence, if three pauses occurred in that sentence, for overseas versions it would sound more natural rhythm-wise, to split it into 2 or 3 sentences. This limited the options available to us in terms of language, and proved to be surprisingly difficult. To sum it up, it’s hard to make a good localization without considering a ton of different things, all while trying to balance the meaning and feeling of the Japanes

e. A scene from REBIRTH that was particularly memorable for me, is the first scene in Nibelheim. It's an important part of the story within the series, and shows a different side of Cloud's personality than we have seen before, so translating it was fun, and the recording was quite exciting. and I think it turned out to be a very good scene, very different from the usual characterization of Cloud. REBIRTH has massive amounts of text and voice, even in comparison to games of a similar volume, I'd

say the localization time for this title skewed longer. Surprisingly, even though we're faithfully recreating this 25-year-old story, and the memorable scenes are often recreated as-is, they still feel so real. With the addition of voiceovers and music specifically created for these scenes, the memorable moments become even more poignant. Whether the party members are talking to themselves or the supporting characters, there are tons of witty retorts, funny jokes, surprising developments, and t

earjerking exchanges in this game. Aside from the story, enjoying freely exploring the expansive world, and seeking out different quests to see how each character acts within those quests, are all elements we've crafted for people to grow even fonder of characters that they've loved since the original. I hope everyone enjoys it. I'd love for players to run all around the world, visiting various towns multiple times, and see every last corner, but for me, I worked mainly on battles, so I'd love f

or them to enjoy battles the most and would hope for players to view every single synergy ability. This is a game where users have the freedom to explore this world map as they want, deciding where they want to venture, and what they want to do, with a game design that really allows the player to choose their actions. I want people to experience it first-hand, this world of REBIRTH. And what players ultimately take away once they've gone through their journey is probably going to differ dependin

g on how their individual journeys unfold, so I hope players look forward to that.