Eager fans of Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII Remake (now its official title) got a lot to chew on at this past weekend’s PlayStation Experience presentation in San Francisco. In addition to the gameplay trailer above, Square announced that the game would be broken up into multiple parts, and released episodically. The decision was made in order to more fully adapt all of the content of the original, according to the remake’s creative team in an interview with Dengeki Online (via Kotaku).
Final Fantasy VII was first released on three discs for the original PlayStation in 1997. It featured crude, polygonal characters in pre-rendered, 2D environments, which was much less resource-intensive to develop than the modern 3D graphics in the trailer. “If we took everything that’s in the original game and remade it at that quality, we couldn’t get it all on a single release,” original game’s director Yoshinori Kitase told Dengeki.
Epic in scope, the game spends a whole long and complicated act just inside the city of Midgar before even opening up to the traditional Final Fantasy world map. As was typical of RPGs from that era, play times averaged 40-60 hours, and could go upwards of hundreds of hours for real completionists. Doing a single release of modern quality would necessitate cutting and condensing a lot of that content, which would likely irk fans. It would also leave them with even less wiggle room to introduce new ideas. Splitting the remake into episodes allows Square Enix to adapt the entirety of the original into something that honors its depth and scope, without being restricted to just the highlights.
Square Enix previously made clear that the remake would be changing many elements of the game, starting with this weekend’s revelation of the episodic structure and the trailer’s more dynamic combat. Another potential change that many fans have been curious about since the remake’s announcement was also addressed in a recent Famitsu interview (via Gematsu). The notorious Don Corneo cross-dressing quest will remain a part of the remake.
Cloud dresses up as a woman early in the game in an attempt to get close to a mafioso-type and then threatens him for information. The whole quest is played for laughs, largely at the expense of men dressing up in women’s clothing. Now that the culture at large has a much greater sensitivity to transphobia, many people questioned whether the section could or should be included in the remake. Depending on how Square Enix handles the quest, we may get to look forward to the now-standard back and forth of online criticism, defense, and name-calling whenever gender politics come up in gaming.
Final Fantasy VII Remake is currently in development for PlayStation 4. There is no word on a release date or any particulars of the episodic release schedule.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.