Fans have been eagerly awaiting any news on the remake of Final Fantasy VII and were quite disappointed when there was nothing new announced during Square Enix’s 2018 E3 livestream a few weeks ago, making it the third year in a row with nothing shown about the game. In response to this anticipation, on Friday, Italian website Multiplayer posted an interview with game director Tetsuya Nomura about Kingdom Hearts III, and of course, the Final Fantasy VII Remake was brought up.
When asked about the remake, Nomura-san admits that it was announced very early and states:
“I am aware that we announced it very early, but in the industry, word was starting to spread that we were working on the game, so we decided to stop keeping it a secret and to reveal it officially.”
Nomura-san also mentions that nowadays many important projects are leaked, especially nowadays in which outsourcing is very widespread. It’s even worse when a false rumor starts spreading, and developers have to decide whether to respond and deny or not. He prefers to announce the game officially, over having it leak. This is why the Final Fantasy VII Remake was announced back in 2015.
The same thing applies to Kingdom Hearts III when the game was originally announced back in 2013, but as we learned at E3 this year, it will finally be released for PS4 and Xbox One on January 29th, 2019 in the west, but it will be released a little earlier on January 25th, 2019 in Japan.
In recent months, there has been some information revealed about the Final Fantasy VII Remake including an interview in April with Art Director and VFX Director Shintaro Takai about the updated version as well as a small glimpse of the game via a tweet last month. Hopefully, more will be revealed soon.