#FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE DESIGNER FULL#

It’s hard to precisely nail what Final Fantasy VII Remake’s style is, but it definitely has a retro-futuristic vibe. Helping tie these elements of the city together are supplementary aspects like the fashion and technology in the world. “We wanted to give each individual location its own unique visuals and game design.”

#FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE DESIGNER FULL#

It’s an urban oasis, full of flower gardens and even a waterfall.

When you venture to Aerith’s home in Sector 5, you’ll find one of the only patches of green in the whole city. Sector 7 has a grungy feel, while the Wall Market - a sort of red-light district - is vibrant and colorful. Since players would be spending so much time in the city, given it’s the only location in the game, it couldn’t have the same vibe throughout or else it would become monotonous. “We didn’t approach this with the idea that we needed to change anything, but that we had to create specific roles for each area and town to play within Midgar and the vital functions within those towns,” says Hamaguchi.Īnother important element was making sure each area felt distinct. The bar is huge, one of the largest structures in the sector, and a number of smaller businesses extend from there, including a vibrant street food district, small-scale apartments, and other essentials like a general store and weapon shop. In the Sector 7 slums, for instance, a focal point is the 7th Heaven bar, the home base for environmental activist group Avalanche. That meant not only making areas larger and denser, but also thinking about how they functioned. Hamaguchi says that the team didn’t start from the perspective of changing the original city rather, they wanted to expand it in a way that made sense. Read next: Final Fantasy VII Remake review There are multiple scenes where you can see the vast expanse of the slums below, and the game also reveals new details, like massive lamps that serve as artificial suns, that add to the realism. This was always part of the original game, but the remake expands the scope of the city and makes it more believable. When you play the game, this discrepancy is always apparent in the slums, you can see the columns and plates pretty much everywhere you look. The upper class lives in the regions on top of the plates, while everyone else is stuck in the slums below.

At the center of the city is a massive central column, with eight additional support columns that hold up gigantic plates that house much of the population. “It was a challenge for us to balance these elements, which were at times contradictory, with its realism,” Takako Miyake, environment director on Final Fantasy VII Remake, tells The Verge. Because of this, the developers at Square Enix had to greatly expand the scope of the city to make it a larger, more believable place without sacrificing the offbeat personality that fans remember. In the original game, the city was the focus for the opening hours, but now it has become the centerpiece of an entire 40-hour experience. But in the new remake, the most important might just be a place instead of a person: the futuristic megacity known as Midgar. Final Fantasy VII has no shortage of memorable characters.

Final fantasy vii remake designer