Final Fantasy XII Remaster Discussion

It has nothing to do with tech, age, or programming, and everything to do with time and money due to the MASSIVE size and scope of those specific games.

6 and prior are simple tile based games with a low amounts of content. They are simple to recreate from scratch in 2D or 3D.

10 and newer are full 3D, lower content games, and they can easily be remastered just by switching to a higher resolution and remastering some or all of the assets.

7, 8, and 9 are completely different. 7 especially. It's made up of tons of low resolution pre-rendered images for the areas, and literally hundreds of unique characters and objects.

All the areas have unique detail in them. There are no existing full 3D areas, they are all setup just to be still shots. The areas didn't have to make sense or flow or obey the laws of time and space. This screen leads to this screen, etc...

So now all the areas have to be remodeled from scratch, and they have to be though out so that they make sense. They will have to obey the laws of time and space, fill in the empty areas that were off camera, and maintain the old gameplay flow at the same time.

In the first 45 minutes alone there is a massive train setup. An entire Shinra power plant (that needs to be animated to explode), a large train station. A market square (that also needs to be animated to explode), another train system, a giant collapsing shinra district, a train graveyard, a sewer system, a small slum town and the buildings in it. An inn, a bar. A flashback area, etc....

Fast forward an hour later and you've seen a ton of midgar neighborhoods. A brothel, a mansion, shops, another sewer system, a church, a rooftop scene, Aeris' house, and at least a dozen places I have forgotten.

This didn't matter back then. They had (for argument's sake) 256 unique pre-rendered backgrounds they could use however they wanted. Clever camera angles could hide things, or imply much bigger areas.

Now when Aeris and Cloud run across the rooftops to the church, we need an entire functioning neighborhood to allow that to happen. You can't imply a big area, that area has to exist and be functional. You can't just have some vague rooftop objects hanging on the screen that somehow transition to the inside of a church when you reach the end.

Now what about characters? There's a massive amount of unique characters with speaking roles. That means that they all need unique models and textures. Unique faces. Some of them even swap costumes. At least dozens of voice actors.

What about all those near 30 minute long conversations? You can't just have the characters standing in place doing very basic keep alive animations the whole time. They must be fully animated, and some of these are very complex, spanning multiple locations, and destructible environments.

Compare this with newer games. They have small casts. Few speaking roles (relative to 7). Maybe only 2-3 dozen different areas. Everything is already modeled and animated in high quality and only requires some touch up work and high resolution textures. They are also relatively future proof in that the technology has matured and stabilized.

FF7 made to modern standards without compromising anything is a massive cost and time prohibitive project. I can only imagine how many copies they would have to sell just to break even, and is that going to happen with a niche remake title?

It's just not realistic right now.

/r/FinalFantasyXII Thread Parent