Random Roar: Final Fantasy VII Re…ally Taking Forever (Summer Flame Day 2022)

Two years after the controversial Final Fantasy VII Remake was released and turned out to only be a reimagining of the opening Midgar section of the original game, Square Enix has finally revealed their plan for the rest of the project.  Apparently, the second game is coming in “Winter 2023”, which could mean it’s not coming until very early 2024.  If that’s the case, then the final part of the project might not arrive until 2028.

While each part seems to have had only a few years to develop and release, what Square Enix has done here is take the remake originally announced in 2015 and turn it into what is essentially going to be a thirteen year development process, unless they can somehow speed things up for the third part.  This is now the longest development time of any game the company has ever released, even more so than Final Fantasy XV‘s ten year development process (not counting all the DLC they had to develop to fix the game’s story) and is longer than Kingdom Hearts III‘s development process, since it wasn’t in development for the entire fourteen year period between the second and third game.

It also took a couple years before we even found out what Square’s plan was going to be for the next two games, which tells me that the company wasn’t entirely certain until now if they were even going to be content with a trilogy or if they were looking to do more.  Granted, this is a company with a track record for actually finishing the games they announce and not leaving cliff-hangers unresolved, so if something releases with a stated or implied “to be continued”, it’s likely that the other parts will come out.  Square Enix is not and never will be Valve.  But Square’s biggest problem has been that they announce more projects than they can conceivably complete in a reasonable time frame.  It has always felt to me like if Tetsuya Nomura hadn’t been in working on Final Fantasy Versus XIII, the Kingdom Hearts series would’ve been further along by now.  It also feels like, with the increase in what video game technology is capable of, the temptation is there to cram as much as they can into their games, which prolongs the development process.

Square Enix doesn’t seem to be able to finish projects within a reasonable time frame, although when I say this, I’m referring to the parts of the company in charge of the Final Fantasy franchise, and those franchises related to it, like Kingdom Hearts.  The rest of the company doesn’t seem to have that problem, since Dragon Quest games aren’t bloated messes with controversial development processes, but when it comes to new Final Fantasy (and related) projects, I’ve gotten used to them taking what seems like forever.  To be fair, cutting a game into parts does seem to be a good solution that at least puts something in the hands of fans after a few years, but it still means the complete experience will take more than a decade to come out, and the mention of Valve earlier was not by accident.  One of the most notorious examples of this sort of development process not working is their Half-Life project, with both Half-Life 3 and Half-Life 2: Episode 3 not happening despite the story not being complete.

It should also be noted that other games the company makes, like NieR Automata, aren’t big, aren’t bloated, and aren’t a mess.  (We’re not going to get into games like Balan Wonderworld, which was developed outside the company and was only published by Square Enix.)  It’s mostly the Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts games that give the company their unfortunate reputation.

When it comes to lengthy development, the one exception seems to be Naoki Yoshida, known affectionately among players of Final Fantasy XIV as Yoshi-P.  Yoshi-P began his time at Square Enix as the director of a few Dragon Quest arcade titles before working on Dragon Quest X.  Then, when the original version of Final Fantasy XIV was a disaster, he was brought in to fix the game, even though it’s been suggested that he was not familiar with Final Fantasy at the time.  However, clear communication between him and the team working on the game meant that it only took about two and a half years to release Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, and this was while also working on patch content to improve the original version and introduce plot threads that would lead into the new version.  I also wouldn’t put it past him to have locked himself in his office for a month with a copy of every game in the series in order to marathon his way through, so as to better honour the legacy of the franchise in the MMO.

After the game’s release, several expansions have followed, meeting a regular release schedule that only a pandemic could disrupt, and in 2020, Final Fantasy XVI was announced, with the Final Fantasy XIV team working on it, too.  Ordinarily, this would be a recipe for disaster, since Tetsuya Nomura couldn’t seem to juggle Final Fantasy Versus XIII and Kingdom Hearts III, but Yoshi-P isn’t the kind of producer to break under pressure.  A release date of summer 2023 has been announced, suggesting that the man is able to start a brand new game in the series from scratch and complete it within three years while also working on another project at the same time.

Come to think of it, wasn’t there another game in the series that only took three years to complete?  (I’m sure there were multiple games that took three years to complete, but I’m specifically referencing Final Fantasy VII here in a deliberately coy manner.)  Interesting that the remake project, which shouldn’t have required as much time to develop since the story was already written, took five years to “update” a very small percentage of the original game.  Final Fantasy XVI is definitely a return to the kind of development process that Final Fantasy VII used to have, instead of the kind of process its remake is experiencing.

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