The memories it evoked weren’t physical, weren’t of a younger me playing FF7 in my Reebok Classics they were more like sense-memories of a time before I had to do all this troublesome growing up. It’s an exceptional piece of music, and it spoke to parts of me I’d all but forgotten. I kept trying to click a button to start, but ended up, well, not. It says something when my first fifteen minutes with the Final Fantasy VII Remake were spent grinning like a child as the title screen music played.
#FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE INITIAL RELEASE DATE PROFESSIONAL#
I’ve tried to stay impartial, to take the Remake at face value and be as professional and unbiased as possible – but I was simply not prepared for just how much it would matter to me again. It’s the reason I haven’t played demos of the Remake, why I avoided trailers and spoilers as much as I could. I’m telling you this because it’s important to know that the original game is special to me. I never went back to Final Fantasy VII, but it had cemented in me a love for games and gaming – and in particular RPGs – that has endured for the last 23 years. For most of a year it was the only thing I played besides the odd bout of Street Fighter with my brother, until, eventually, I moved on. But it was a gateway game for me, the first one I ever fell for, the first one I ever played for over a hundred hours, the first one I rinsed every drop from, the first one I played from start to finish more than once. It wasn’t as accepted back then, wasn’t something you shouted from the rooftops as much as hid behind a forced love of football and biking. I played it for the first time on Christmas morning in 1997, when I was 16 years old. It was more like the subtle bloom of changes that take place without you really knowing it, like when you’re in a relationship that you won’t realise is significant until it’s over, and it leaves you knowing things about yourself that you weren’t aware existed to know in the first place.
But I don’t mean it changed my life the way a death in the family would, or a terrible accident, or a sudden windfall. Hopefully this extra month will be time well spent, as players have been waiting so long for Final Fantasy VII Remake, and it is doubtful that anyone would prefer a March release over an April release if the trade off is a superior final product.Sounds dramatic, doesn’t it? And I suppose it is, really.
Today it is an outstanding MMORPG, but those initial few years following its release serve as a perfect warning to all developers who might want to rush a game. Square Enix eventually did the right thing, but this meant scrapping the troubled game and all but restarting from square one. The game had suffered several development issues in the five years leading to its release, but rather than delay its launch the game was released, and players and critics alike were savage in their reaction to being given a shoddy experience ranging from an old physics engine to most of the core gameplay being broken in one way or another. The most infamous example of rushing an unprepared game must be the original release if the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIVin 2010. RELATED: Marvel's Avengers Has Been Delayed To September Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendo is often cited in this regard for his stance about delayed games, saying that “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” A short delay of only one month might ensure that Final Fantasy VII Remake hits all the right marks in a way that pleases new and long-time fans of the original game, and it would be a terrible shame to release a bad remake of an outstanding game.