Entwicklung von Final Fantasy VII Remake geht voran

Happy new year from H.H., a former S.E. employee. Here's some informations on the main upcoming titles S.E. is going to announce over the course of the year 2018.
IMPORTANT: please keep in mind that not every thing in this list is set in stone, and changes aren't unlikely to occur, especially for the farthest-planned titles.

- Right now, almost all of SquareEnix's Final Fantasy-related staff is concentrated on Kingdom Hearts III, Final Fantasy VII REMAKE (Episode 1) and (to a way lesser extent) Final Fantasy Type-1 (currently known as "Final Fantasy Type-Next").

- KH3 will be released in 2018; FF7R part 1 in early 2019 (if everything goes well, there's a slight chance it could even happen before 2019); as for Final Fantasy Type-1, it will be a PS4 title right from the start, but there's no telling when it will be completed.

- After KH3 and the first chapter of FF7R are released, the next big projects will be: Final Fantasy VII REMAKE (Episode 2), Final Fantasy Versus XV and Final Fantasy XVI.

- After FFVersusXV and the second part of FF7R are released, development of Final Fantasy VII REMAKE (Episode 3) and Final Fantasy XVII will start.

- Final Fantasy Versus XV will start development right after KH3 is done, and it will release on PS4. Final Fantasy XVI is already in development (FFXV development changes once forced the work on FF16 to be put on hold for a long while and it's been resumed very recently), and will release on both PS4 and PS5; Final Fantasy XVII is only in the early concept stages, and will be only for PS5.

- There are absolutely no plans for a Final Fantasy X-3.

- SquareEnix is considering the possibility of a new Final Fantasy Tactics and/or a new Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and/or a Final Fantasy IX remake, but right now there are no concrete plans for any of that, and the chances of those actually happening are still very slim.

- Final Fantasy VII REMAKE will consist of 3 episodes: the stealing of the Tiny Bronco will mark the end of Episode 1 and the beginning of Episode 2, while the return (parachuting) to Midgar will mark the end of Episode 2 and the
beginning of Episode 3.

- The game structure will be halfway between a modern open-world and an old world-map style: technically speaking is just open-world in the sense that everything is seamless and fully explorable, but while leaving a town the visual will
gradually zoom out and your speed of movement will greatly increase in order to give the player the impression of navigating through a classic world-map when they're on the overworld; conversely, while entering a town your speed will
decrease and the camera will zoom-in; this kind of transition also happens during random encounters.

- In order to move faster in the open world, you'll have the same motorcycle you used to escape from the Shinra Bldg..

- Because of space reasons, the diplacement of some locations has been slightly altered. For exemple: Midgar is way bigger (in relation to the world map) than the original, and will fill almost half of the entire Midgar Area; Junon too

underwent a similar bloating, to a lesser extent; Mt. Corel has been moved slightly south-east, and enlarged to occupy almost the entire mountain region of Corel Area; the biggest change regards the Great Glacier: it's been moved

south-east of Icicle Inn and will occupy almost the entire snowy region of Icicle Area; this means you have to traverse it before enterting Icicle Inn, and the snowboarding track will take you directly at the feet of Gaea's Cliff instead.

- The battle system will feature an ATB turn-based system like the original "superimposed" on an action combat like KH's one. In more detail: you can freely move around, jump, attack and defend too, all in real time like in any action game; meanwhile, however, you have a time gauge that fills as time goes on like a classic ATB bar. When the bar is full, a command menu pops up where you can select the desired commands like Magic, Enemy Skill, Summon, etc. like in the original, but without interrupting the flow of battle. And since every character has its own time gauge, even while constantly being in control of a single character, you can easily input commands for the others too when their gauge is full (you can still switch between characters, however). This system has been called "Action Turn Battle" and, if it's well received, is planned to become the "signature" combat for every future mainline FF from now on (just like the original ATB was from the older entries), with only some slight variations from title to title.

- This time, there are no truly missable elements in the entire game: if you forget to gain some object, or materia, or whatever, you can still obtain it through the Bone Village excavations.

- This time, you can re-enter Forgotten City (the underwater part of the Forgotten Capital) whenever you like (you still can't revive Aerith, though...).

- There are 2 new materia called "Water Materia" (that enable the user to cast the magic Idro, Idro2 and Idro3) and "Wind Materia" (that enable the user to cast the magic Aero, Aero2 and Aero3).

- The Weapon that attacks Junon is now called "Sapphire Weapon"; you'll have to fight it.

- The events and characters of the FF7 Compilation (like Angeal, Genesis, Hollander and so on...) will be hinted in some optional dialogue with some NPCs or some secret cutscenes: it's implied they happened, but will bear next to no weight to the main plot.

- Final Fantasy XVI's game cover will return to a mere white background (or maybe black) with the logo on it; the logo will be a big rose on the left with lots of petals scattered on the right, and some thorned vines coiled around the
letters; its colour will be a deep red that turns to green towards the edges.

- A big part of the soundtrack will be composed by Nobuo Uematsu.

- The original concept from FF16 was shown in the "Agni's Philosophy" trailer, but since then it has been completely changed to the point that almost nothing of it remains now. However, it could still be present in the game, in some
form..

- FF16 will be set in an almost entirely fantasy world, with some occasional steam-punk elements. The starting locations will be inspired by medieval/renaissance Europe, with the main town resembling in part Altissia, in part Tenebrae
from FFXV, but most of the game world will be based on various asian cultures, with some areas inspired by ancient Arabia, many inspired by ancient China and India, and even some by imperial Russia.

- The game is supposed to be massive in nearly every aspect: the world will be the hugest in the series, surpassing even FFVersusXV's one and will include over 40 different locations including towns and caves; the main plot alone will
take almost 150 hours (not including the numerous side-content), and feature over 50 plot-relevant characters.

- There will be relatively few side-quests, but a huge load of secret areas, monsters, objects, etc...; also there will be a lot of mini-games, including: chocobo-racing, dragon mounting, 4 different card games (1 similar to FFIX's
Tetra Master, the other 3 are played using classic poker-like cards) and a 2d-side-scrolling minigame where you play as a moogle.

- The main character will be a little girl with long curly blonde hair and a flaming red gothic-lolita dress; she fights with a rapier. Sources of inspiration from her design are Chaika (from Chaika The Coffin Princess), Amy (from the
SoulCalibur series); personality-wise, she will be vaguely similar to Lightning.

- The second main playable character will be a tall middle-aged man with a brown coat, a fedora hat and a big shotgun; he will be somewhat of a Shinji-like character. The main party will also feature a very old witch dressed in purple
that will be the group's black mage, and a furry boy with a
somewhat cocky and arrogant attitude, that fights with his bare hands but also can learn enemies' skills like Gau from FF6.
A lot of other story-important characters are also planned, that might or might not be party members: for example there's a sort of mad-scientist-looking character with grey hair and a white lab coat; also there's a woman that looks
like a slightly more mature version of Aerith with bigger chest, but dressed in green; then we have a black man in a white cape somewhat resembling Zasalamel from Soul Calibur, and a young and handsome soldier with blonde hair and shiny
light-blue armor; the woman shown in Agni's Philosophy will be present too, but she'll look way different.

- The game structure is planned to be the same of Final Fantasy VII REMAKE (i.e.: open-world/world-map hybrid); in various points during the story you will be able to use a variety of vehicles and mounts, such as: ships, airships,
chocobos, dragons (including a flying one), also there's some sort of "train" that allow you to fast-travel between some determined locations.

- The game battle system is plannet to be a slight variation of FF7R's one (see above)... that is, if it gets well received.

- The character growth system will resemble FFX's Sphere Grid, but will be way more complex: there will be 3 types of sphere grids (that's obviously not the system's actual name): an individual one (each character will have its own one,
like FFXIII's Cristallum), a weapon-based one (one for each weapon, unrelated to the characters, that will determine the weapon's abilities), and a collective one (shared between the various characters like the one in FFX); the latter
will allow characters to learn team tactics and combined attacks.

- The gambit-like system of FFVersusXV will be present here too.

- Final Fantasy XVII's logo will be a big spiral galaxy; its colour is dark blue, shifting to pale yellow near the center of the galaxy.

- FF17's main concept is that of a "space-fantasy": the game, while set in space, is still planned to have an entirely fantasy look and atmosphere (even down to the character design, that will abandon the realistic look of the later FFs
to return to a vaguely super-deformed and "anime-ish" style). The main sources of inspiration, stylistically-wise, are Final Fantasy IX and Final Fantasy IV.

- The game will feature a lot of different planets (possibly up to 20), some huge, some very small like moons or asteroids, also there will be a lot of differently sized spaceships, space stations, etc.. To travel between the various

planets/stations you'll have to do some sort of Gummi-Ship-like mini-game, like the one seen in Kingdom Hearts, while each individual planet is explorable in his own special way: some will be entirely open-world, others will have lots
of small separate areas, etc...; a lot of the game's story, however, will be set in space.

- The game, while still being single-player and plot-driven, will feature a lot of online multiplayer elements, in a similar fashion to Xenoblade Chronicles X or FFXV after its "Comrades" expansion.