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Tetsuya Nomura, the director of Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII remake, didn’t know he’d landed the job until after production had got underway.
Nomura was the character designer of the original game, a new version of which was announced during Sony’s E3 press conference last week. He’s also in charge of the still in-development Kingdom Hearts III.
As preproduction went along and I offered my opinions on what I thought should be done, [original FFVII director] Mr. Kitase would asked me how the individual elements should be adjusted in fine detail,” Nomura told Famitsu, as reported by Kotaku. It was very perplexing.
Then one day, as I was checking the internal company presentation video it said ‘director Tetsuya Nomura’ at the end. So I called up Mr. Kitase and said, ‘It says that I’m the director for some reason’ to which he replied, ‘of course it does!’.
Nomura has previously promised that the new version won’t simply be the old game with fancier graphics, saying that it is not a simple remake” as that would not surpass the original version”.
Change is needed, he said, because the 1997 release by now of course feels dated – although he acknowledges that some of these design decisions are intrinsic to what the game actually is.
