Speaking to OXM, Final Fantasy XIII-2′s producer Yoshinori Kitase said he’d find it difficult to develop a remake of Final Fantasy VII without making significant changes.
Kitase clarified that it wasn’t simply because what sold a lot more than a decade ago might not sell today, but for the development team’s satisfaction, too.
“If I may speak as a game creator, if we were to produce a remake of VII, for example, I would be really tempted to delete things and add new elements, new systems or whatever because if we were to make exactly the same thing now, it’d be like a repeat.
“It’d be an issue of repetition and not as much fun to make such a game. So I’d be really interested in rearranging games or reshaping games into something slightly different even though it’s supposed to be the same game. But if we did that, the fans might be disappointed or ‘this is not what I was expecting’ so in that sense maybe some might say that it’s better to let memory be memory.”
He further explained that modern design decisions would likely clash with fan expectations.
“When we play the games we made years ago, sometimes we think ‘oh, that is not really cool’ or ‘that probably should have been a bit better than that’ and that sort of thing,” he went on.
“But on the other hand, those slightly negative features and bits, for some of the really enthusiastic fans of these titles, that gives the game extra flavour or personality or whatever. So maybe they would rather we didn’t do anything about it and we just leave it in as it is. It’s very difficult to decide what we should we keep in and what we should take out.”
Square Enix had announced back in TGS this year, that a HD iteration of Final Fantasy X is in development for PS3, and Vita. No word if they plan to make one for Final Fantasy VII as well.