The ongoing documentary series entitled Inside Final Fantasy VII Remake has released its third episode online. It can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube. The episode is completely in Japanese, so you’ll have to turn on YouTube’s closed captioning service if you don’t speak the language.
The episode can be viewed in the player below.
The game’s creators go in depth on how the battle mechanics for the game work. They wanted to create something that blended the modern style of action adventure gameplay, like something out of Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy XV, with the turn-based ATB system of the original Final Fantasy VII.
“The battle system in this game is an amalgam of the action and menu-based battle mechanics,” Naoki Hamaguchi, the co-director of game design and programming for Final Fantasy VII Remake said. “It really is not the case that this system came from wanting to do an action based battle system. It emerged when we considered how Final Fantasy’s classic ATB battle system would be, if it was created in the modern era.”
The producers then went onto say that they listened to fan feedback regarding the combat system, adapting to certain concerns that arose after they first showed the game off at E3 2019.
A number of players had noted that since they were not very good at action games, they would likely not be able to play the new game.
The development team responded to this by creating a new combat mode called Classic Mode.
In Classic Mode, physical combat attacks and movement are automated, with the player selecting various action and magic commands, as one would in the original game.
They also went into great detail on the limit break system and how that was adapted for this new adventure.
The other main topic that this episode focused on was mini games. There are a number of mini games in Final Fantasy VII Remake, from the iconic squat challenge of the original to some newer games like darts or a pull up challenge.
We see Cloud taking part in the darts mini game while Tifa is conquering the pull up challenge.
This ongoing documentary series has been a great look behind the curtain of how this remake came to be. The first episode is mostly about how the process got started and the initial idea behind the remake. The second episode does a deep dive on all of our major characters.
