‘It’s not about cutting content’: Final Fantasy 7 Remake director explains ‘concise’ Part 3 comments
Final Fantasy 7 Remake director says he wants to make Part 3’s story pacing ‘feel right’
Final Fantasy 7 Remake series director, Naoki Hamaguchi, has elaborated on comments he recently made about the upcoming Part 3, in which he said it would be “more concise” than Rebirth.
Speaking to Screen Rant earlier this month, the director was asked about how some fans criticised the second game in the Remake trilogy for having some story sections stretched out.
Hamaguchi responded by saying that Part 3 would feel “more concise” than Rebirth, which many fans interpreted as an intention to cut content from the final entry in the Remake series. However, speaking to VGC in a new interview, the director clarified that this wouldn’t be the case.
“Just to explain, the original question I was asked there was, they said that there are some people who played Rebirth, the second game in the series, and they felt that because we’ve added in new story content, which wasn’t in the original Final Fantasy 7, to them it felt like the story was being stretched out,” he said. “So they asked whether we were considering doing anything related to that in the third game.”
Hamaguchi reiterated that he was satisfied with how Rebirth turned out. “I feel that the pacing, the content, and the balance in Rebirth is exactly as I wanted it. I personally don’t feel it’s been stretched out; it doesn’t feel unnecessarily long. To me, I think I got that right, and I think a lot of people would agree with me.”
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However, the director acknowledged that there might be some people who feel differently, and that their feedback was worth taking on board. Thus, Hamaguchi is looking at improving the pacing of Part 3, he said, but that doesn’t involve cutting content from the original FF7 story.
“For the third game, in terms of what I said about that and the way I’m looking at that is about improving the pacing and making sure that, to achieve an even greater level of immersion in the game, we make sure that the story developments move forward in a fairly speedy manner and with the right pace essentially, rather than feeling slow and drawn out,” he explained.
“I think that may have been misconstrued by people; they may have said, ‘OK, that means they’re going to cut down on the volume and they’re going to remove story content, it’s going to be a shorter game, they’re going to cut it down’, and that’s not what I’m saying at all.
“It’s about making sure the pacing feels right, it’s not about cutting out content, it’s making sure that it feels right, the speed that the story progresses at feels right, and it is fairly quick and feels like you can get through it at a reasonable pace. But it has to feel right, so that’s what I mainly intended to say there.”
Later in VGC’s interview, the director again touched on the ongoing development of Final Fantasy Remake Part 3, which he said he’s “very confident” about and hopes to deliver in the “not-too-distant” future.
