world.

After years of speculation, the company officially revealed that Final Fantasy 7 was getting

a remake.

The announcement trailer was less than two minutes long and didn't carry a release date,

and since then, there's been almost no news about the in-development RPG.

Years after that big E3 reveal, we still don't know when the game will hit consoles.

So, what's taking so long?

Here's why the FF7 remake hasn't been released yet.

More than a remake

We've seen Square Enix remake Final Fantasy games before.

The first six games in the series have been ported multiple times from their original

forms on Nintendo's systems to handhelds, phones, and newer consoles.

Sometimes the remakes have added brand new scripts, 3D graphics, story tweaks, and voice

acting.

Aside from these tweaks, the actual game mechanics didn't really change.

It's different for Final Fantasy 7.

As director Tetsuya Nomura old Famitsu,

"FF7 is special, and we cannot surpass it just by making it look pretty."

Instead, the company is rebuilding the game from the ground up.

Episodic epic

One of the few things we've heard about the remake is that it will be released episodically,

with the story broken down into multiple parts and doled out to players in pieces.

In a since-deleted blog post, producer Yoshinori Kitase explained,

"If we were to try to fit everything from the original into one remake installment,

we would have to cut various parts and create a condensed version of Final Fantasy VII."

But that quote doesn't tell the whole story.

Apparently, the remake isn't going to be a single game chopped up into pieces, like Telltale's

The Walking Dead or Square Enix's own Life is Strange.

Instead, it's going to be a series of complete stand-alone games that together retell Final

Fantasy 7's epic plot.

According to Kitase, each FF7 installment will be about the same size and length as

Final Fantasy 13.

Yes, the whole fifty-hour game.

That's huge.

Even if the remake only ends up being a couple of installments, that's still a couple of

full-sized Final Fantasy adventures.

No wonder it's taking so long.

Listen to my story

Final Fantasy 7 isn't a short game, but if it's going to be stretched out to multiple

full-length titles, they're going to have to add some new material.

That means expanding the plot.

The FF7 remake won't add any new characters to game's already extensive cast, but there

will be new story elements, in addition to a bunch of revamped and fully-voiced dialogue.

The transition between the old and new material should be fairly seamless.

According to Japanese game magazine Dengeki, the original game's co-writer Kazushige Nojima,

will be returning to help flesh out the plot.

A new way of fighting

The story isn't the only part of FF7 getting a major overhaul.

Its battle system will be different this time, too.

From the footage released so far, it's clear that the original's turn-based battle system

is gone, with something more action-oriented taking its place.

It's still not entirely clear how battles will play out, but Kitase told Game Informer

that the remake team is looking to the fighting game Dissidia Final Fantasy for inspiration.

That fast-paced fighting game lets characters move freely around a 3D world.

Depending on the environment, the player will have opportunities to perform situation-specific

actions like diving for cover, while enemy attacks can change the battlefield layout,

forcing players to switch up their tactics.

It's all very different from what came before, and Nomura admits that the changes may not

sit well with the original's dedicated fans.

It's another example of the way the company is re-creating the classic game from scratch

and how much work the company still has to do.

Help (still) wanted

You can't make a game without people, and it looks like a few jobs are still open at

Square Enix.

As recently as April 2018 nearly three years after the game was announced Square Enix was

still seeking to fill key positions on the remake's development team.

Some of the people they're still looking for include "battle planners" to help design the

game's new battle system, and "level planners" to devise new game locations.

Those are pretty fundamental tasks, and that the positions haven't been filled yet indicates

that there's still quite a lot of work to be done before the FF7 remake hits consoles.

Who's making this thing?

In 2015, Square Enix said that it was farming out some of the remake's development to third-party

contractors, including the studio behind the .hack series and various

Naruto titles.

But two years later, the company changed course, giving control of the game back to its in-house

developers.

On one hand, this shift shows that Square Enix is taking the remake seriously, but it

also raises questions about how much work got done by those outside contractors.

The company probably isn't starting everything over from scratch, but it sounds like there

were some problems with the outsiders' approach.

For fans, that's going to mean an even longer wait.

The director takes his time

Final Fantasy 7 isn't the only game that Tetsuya Nomura has in development.

He's also been hard at work on the very long-awaited Kingdom Hearts III, development on which started

in 2010.

Before that, Nomura was tied up for years with Final Fantasy Versus 13, which Square

Enix announced in 2006.

Though Nomura and his staff worked on the game for seven years, they never got the game

anywhere close to completion.

Final Fantasy Type-Zero director Hajime Tabata ultimately took over the project, and the

game was redesigned as Final Fantasy 15, finally making its way to fans after a ten-year development

cycle.

Could it be that the FF7 remake is the next game to be subject to this crushingly long

development?

It's starting to look like it.

All gamers really want is for the game to be good but if it doesn't take a decade to

create this time, that would be nice, too.

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