Final Fantasy VII Remake
is a 2020 action role-playing game developed and published by Square Enix for the PlayStation 4. It is the first in a trilogy of games remaking Square's Final Fantasy VII, originally released for the PlayStation. An enhanced version, was released for PlayStation 5 and Windows in 2021, followed by ports for the Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series X/S in 2026.
Set in the dystopian cyberpunk metropolis of Midgar, players control the mercenary Cloud Strife. He joins AVALANCHE, an eco-terrorist group trying to stop the powerful megacorporation Shinra from using the planet's life essence as an energy source. The gameplay combines real-time action with role-playing elements, an overhaul from the original turn-based combat.
Final Fantasy VII Remake was announced in 2015 following years of speculation. Several key staff members from the original game returned, including Tetsuya Nomura as the director, Yoshinori Kitase as the producer, Kazushige Nojima as the writer, Motomu Toriyama as a co-director, and the composer Nobuo Uematsu. The staff redesigned the characters to balance realism and stylization.
Final Fantasy VII Remake received positive reviews, with praise for its graphics, gameplay, narrative, and music. Critics praised the expanded story and the updated battle system for its strategic elements and visual flourishes, but the linearity and repetitive side-quests received criticism. The game was one of the fastest-selling PlayStation 4 games, selling more than 3.5 million copies in three days and more than 7 million by September 2023. The second game in the remake trilogy, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, was released in 2024. The third entry is currently in development.
Gameplay
Final Fantasy VII Remake is the first in a planned series of games remaking the 1997 PlayStation game Final Fantasy VII. It covers the first section of the original game, set in the metropolis Midgar.Players control Cloud Strife, a former Shinra soldier turned mercenary who joins the eco-terrorist group AVALANCHE to fight the Shinra Corporation, who have been draining the planet's life energy. Every element has been remade, using real-time polygonal graphics as opposed to the pre-rendered environments of the original. The story includes major expansions to character development and some notable plot additions.
Exploration and battle mechanics both take place in real-time, like Final Fantasy XV. The game features an altered Active Time Battle system from the original, which gradually fills up slowly, or can fill faster with attacks. Once it is filled, the player can halt the action and use special abilities such as magic, items, and special moves. The player can assign these special abilities to shortcut buttons, allowing them to play in real-time without pausing. Each special ability uses up a segment of the ATB bar. The player can switch between party members at any time during battle. Each party member has their own individual skills, such as Cloud's close-quarters melee attacks and Barret's long-range distance attacks. Players are able to use magic and summons of large creatures, and a Limit Break gauge allows characters to perform more powerful attacks once charged. While the game has more real-time elements, strategic elements still remain, such as selecting weapons and magic for each character to wield.
Plot
is a former member of SOLDIER, the elite warriors of the Shinra Electric Power Company. Shinra uses Mako, a refined form of the Planet's spiritual energy harvested by massive reactors, to power the metropolis of Midgar and develop cutting-edge technology. Disillusioned with Shinra, and at the request of his childhood friend Tifa Lockhart, Cloud takes a mercenary job for AVALANCHE, an ecological resistance organization led by Barret Wallace. Barret believes excessive Mako harvesting harms the planet and leads a bombing attack on Mako Reactor 1. Cloud is continuously haunted by memories of Sephiroth, an enigmatic former SOLDIER, and meets florist Aerith Gainsborough in the aftermath of the bombing. Strange ghost-like entities, who alternately help and hinder Cloud throughout the game, cause him to be recruited for another attack on Mako Reactor 5, but he goes missing in action. Cloud meets Aerith again and protects her from Shinra forces. After reuniting with Tifa, the trio learns that Shinra plans to collapse a piece of the "plate" onto the Sector 7 slums. AVALANCHE fails to stop Shinra's plan, and the plate falls. Aerith helps most of the population, including Barret's daughter Marlene, evacuate in time, but is captured by Shinra.Cloud, Tifa, and Barret infiltrate Shinra headquarters and rescue Aerith from being used as an experiment by Shinra scientist Hojo. She reveals that she is the last descendant of the Cetra, a near-extinct precursor race who resided in a "Promised Land," which Shinra covets for its boundless Mako reserves. The group meets a talking feline-like creature called Red XIII, who explains that the ghostly entities are called Whispers. They exist to ensure that the course of destiny is not altered by correcting any deviations from this course. Meanwhile, Sephiroth infiltrates Shinra and steals a mysterious entity known as "Jenova," connected to the extinction of the Cetra.
In a confrontation at the top of Shinra headquarters, Sephiroth murders the president of Shinra. Shinra's son Rufus assumes control of the company and fights Cloud, but is defeated. Cloud and his allies flee the scene via the Midgar Expressway but find Sephiroth waiting for them at the end. After defeating Whisper Harbinger, an entity formed by an amalgam of Whispers, Cloud's group battles Sephiroth. Sephiroth separates Cloud from the group, asking him to join him and defy fate. Cloud refuses and fights Sephiroth, but is defeated, although Sephiroth spares him and departs. Meanwhile, as Cloud's group leaves Midgar to stop Sephiroth, SOLDIER Zack Fair ends up alive and defeats an army of Shinra forces, and departs with Cloud to Midgar.
Intermission
Shortly after the bombing of Mako Reactor 5, Yuffie Kisaragi, a ninja working for Wutai, arrives at Midgar and meets up with her partner Sonon Kusakabe in order to steal Shinra's "Ultimate Materia." With the help of a local AVALANCHE cell, Yuffie and Sonon infiltrate the lab under Shinra headquarters and fight through Shinra's forces before discovering that the Ultimate Materia is not yet complete. As they try to escape, they are confronted by a Shinra supersoldier named Nero. Outmatched, Sonon sacrifices himself to ensure Yuffie can escape. She leaves Shinra headquarters just in time to see the Sector 7 plate fall. Sometime later, Yuffie has left Midgar and muses that to achieve her desire to see Shinra's downfall, she will need a team to help her.In the post-credits scenes, Cloud and his group arrive at the town of Kalm after hitching a ride with Chocobo Bill, while Zack enters the Sector 5 church in Midgar to reunite with Aerith, only to find a group of locals in mourning.
Development
Background
Final Fantasy VII was developed by Square for the PlayStation console and released in 1997. Its staff included producer, co-writer and series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, director and co-writer Yoshinori Kitase, artist Yusuke Naora, character designer and co-writer Tetsuya Nomura, and writer Kazushige Nojima. The game was a critical and commercial success, and established the Final Fantasy series as a major franchise. It was expanded through the multimedia project Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, comprising additional games, films, and other media.In the early 2000s, Square announced a remake for PlayStation 2 alongside Final Fantasy VIII and IX, but nothing further was heard of the project. It was abandoned because of the increased challenge of developing on new hardware and would have necessitated cutting content. The staff were preoccupied with developing Final Fantasy XIII and its sequels, and Remake would have been an equally large or larger project hard to undertake at the same time. Once the XIII series ended, the team was free to pursue other projects. Kitase claims that since XIII, he had been asked multiple times about developing this game. Co-director Naoki Hamaguchi was originally just a fan of the game, and stated he was glad about his inclusion into the core development team.
Demand for a remake grew following a PlayStation 3 tech demo at the 2005 Electronic Entertainment Expo, showcasing the opening of Final Fantasy VII with Square's new Crystal Tools engine, which was at the time known under its codename, "White Engine". Further demand came during the game's impending tenth anniversary in 2007. On both occasions, Square denied that any remake was in development, for reasons including their focus on new games, the necessity to cut elements to make a remake manageable, the difficulty of developing for modern hardware, and the amount of development time it would require.
The Remake project began when Final Fantasy producer Shinji Hashimoto broached the subject to Kitase, Nojima, and Nomura. All three were reaching a stage of life that they defined as "that age": all felt that if they waited much longer, they might not be alive to or would be too old to develop a remake, and passing the project on to a new generation did not feel right. Another reason for developing the remake was that Square Enix was creating a growing library of PlayStation 4 titles, and the team hoped to increase the console's popularity. Nomura was appointed as director when the remake was initially greenlit, but he was busy with the development of Kingdom Hearts III at the time.
Design
The game entered full production by late 2015, led by Business Division 1, an internal production team within Square Enix. While Nomura was involved with the project from the start, he only discovered he was the director after seeing himself credited in an internal company presentation video; he was surprised by this, as he had expected Kitase to fill the role. Nomura filled the role of director for both Final Fantasy VII Remake and Kingdom Hearts III concurrently. Another project leader was Naoki Hamaguchi, who had previously served as a programmer for Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, and as project lead for Mobius Final Fantasy. Square Enix approached developing Remake at the same level as a main numbered entry in the Final Fantasy series.While the team had the option of simply remastering Final Fantasy VII with better graphics as many fans had requested, they noted that its graphics and many of its mechanics had become dated by modern standards. With this in mind, they decided to do a full remake, rebuilding the game systems to suit contemporary tastes and using current gaming technology to recreate the world. An overarching goal of the project was to make the game feel both "new and nostalgic" for players of the original game, while exemplifying the idea of Final Fantasy VII for new players. This decision led to the creation of Remake action-based battle system, which draws from the action-based style of Dissidia Final Fantasy. Teruki Endo, who had previously worked on Monster Hunter World, served as battle director. The team aimed to retain all of the gameplay mechanics popular in the original game, including Active Time Battle, while merging them with the action-based system.
Rather than using the character models and graphical style of Advent Children, which by that point had been developed using ten-year-old technology, the team decided to create new designs and models for characters: Nomura wished to balance the realism of Advent Children with cartoon stylization. Nomura was in charge of the revamped main character designs, while designer Roberto Ferrari was in charge of designs for secondary characters. Character modeling was supervised by Visual Works, Square Enix's CGI development branch. Cloud Strife's initial redesign for Final Fantasy VII Remake departed more dramatically from the original's, but was later altered to more closely resemble Nomura's original concept. Tifa Lockhart's original appearance was changed to make her look more realistic, as the developers realized her design would not fit fight scenes.
Instead of creating a new engine, Square Enix licensed Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4 to develop the game, with Square Enix and Epic Games Japan working together to optimize the engine for Remake. The team received technical assistance from the developers of Kingdom Hearts III, as it had been developed using the same engine. The game's lighting is augmented with the lighting engine Enlighten. To help with the action gameplay and video quality, Square Enix originally partnered with video game developer CyberConnect2, with the two companies keeping in close contact due to different development styles.
In 2017, the game's development focus shifted from being developed with external partners to being a primarily internal project. When the company first started the Remake project, the team had to decide the entire scope of the project. There were two directions presented initially: they could expand upon the original with multiple releases, or include the entire scope of the original game in a single release. The team started to investigate what were the essential parts of the original and what parts are what the fans absolutely had to see; they quickly decided that there were so many parts that are considered essential, and fans would be upset if the team had to cut out anything. A single release with more depth would not be possible without cutting out parts of the original story. In the end, the team decided the best option for the project was to go for the highest level possible with an expanded story in multiple releases. Each game is planned to be on a similar scale to Final Fantasy XIII. The first part focuses on the city of Midgar due to its iconic status among the Final Fantasy community.
Regarding the scope for Remake, Nomura mentioned that many were worried about how the company would be able to make a whole game based solely on Midgar, but he didn't think it would be a problem. The story and scenario writer, Nojima, also added that stopping the game at the end of Midgar would also allow for an adequate amount of story scenarios to be put in as well. Nomura further added that level designs would have to change again after the party leaves Midgar, and that they would also have to split up other scenarios.