Square Enix: Final Fantasy VII Remake is ‘multipart’ because that’s the only way to ‘fit everything’

Final Fantasy VII Remake is getting a “multipart” release, and now Square Enix is explaining why it made that decision.

The publisher published a blog post today from Final Fantasy VII Remake director Yoshinori Kitase where the developer defends the decision to distribute the game over several releases. He claims that they made this decision because that is the only way the company could put everything from the old game into something built with modern visuals and gameplay.

“The biggest reason why we haven’t done a remake until now is because it’s a massive undertaking to reconstruct Final Fantasy VII from the ground up with the current technology,” wrote Kitase. “Producing a proper HD remake of Final Fantasy VII that maintains the same feeling of density of the original would result in a volume of content that couldn’t possibly fit into one installment.”

Kitase doesn’t fully explain this reasoning. After all, Final Fantasy VII did come as one installment when it debuted in 1997. And we’ve certainly had massive games on today’s consoles. Does Final Fantasy VII really make Fallout 4 or The Witcher III look tiny? Not exactly.

But remaking a game of that size with high-resolution graphics is absolutely time-consuming and expensive work. And releasing it in parts is potentially the only way to make a project like this economically viable. Kitase goes on to almost confirm that.

“We’ve seen everyone’s comments and reactions to the news that Final Fantasy VII Remake will be a multi-part series and many have speculated correctly as to the reason why we have made this decision,” wrote the director. “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. We knew none of you would have wanted that.”

So, basically, Kitase is saying it is in parts or nothing at all.

Square Enix announced that the Remake is a multipart series in a quiet press release on Sunday night. Fans weren’t sure exactly what to make of this news, but the publisher tried to explain that each one of these episodes will have content equivalent to a full game — although it specified what it defines as a “full game.”

The company also noted that it would use this new release structure to focus on different parts of the Final Fantasy VII story.

Beyond that, this is all still a mystery that we’ll probably all need to experience first hand to truly understand.