Questions For Our Next Podcast With Night Sky Prince

I don't mind the remastered tracks, but I do agree that having the entire soundtrack being orchestral is a bit of a letdown. One of the things that I liked about the original game's music was that there were a few techno beats here and there that served as frosting on the cake. I don't like it when the techno beats completely overtake the track (as was the case with Laguna's fights in FFVIII), but I do wish that the Remake would just add a little bit of techno and/or mildly electric rock elements to match the industrial setting (but nothing as heavy as in Advent Children).

Do you feel that SquareEnix will make a trend out of remaking other Final Fantasy titles in this nature? Overall I’ve enjoyed similar remakes like what Capcom did with Resident Evil 2’s remake and RE3 looks to be pretty similar in quality. I’m excited to play VII remake I just hope it doesn’t become the thing everyone does like with the HD remasters of the previous gen(I mean it’s great for those that haven’t played it) idk just my thoughts and curious about y’all’s thoughts as well. Still looking forward to the remake and for more videos on the channel 👍🏻

It’s a good point on Lucas, many have made this point before, but it’s worth noting that he seems to be much better when he’s creating the overall story, but not handling the actual writing. I think that’s why some of the arcs in Clone Wars are so good. Lucas was reportedly very involved in the story planning, but none of the writing. Which, honestly, gives us the best of both worlds. Not a knock on old George either. The man had an incredible mind of world building, he just cant really do dialogue.

The comparison to George Lucas is spot on as he is a great story planner and producer, but not a very good storyteller/Director. People forget that of the original star wars trilogy, he only directed Episode IV, A New Hope. And even that film was famously "saved" in the editing process. Obviously without him Star wars wouldn't have happened, but it took a lot of other talented people to take his vision and properly translate it in order to make those concepts into good films. So when he took both the creative and director role for the prequels they didn't turn out as well. Likewise, Nomura/Nojima have both the creative and directorial control now and it's seems it's up to the others to pull them back and real them in. Kitase often seems reluctant to do that. So we'll see how FFVIIR turns out.

Yeah, this was less for where FF is at now, but something that I’ve been thinking about that was spurred by their discussion of Sakaguchi. It made me also think about Lucas and to a lesser extent Jk Rowling, people who all have revolutionized a genre or medium in some way, and who all ultimately had a moment where they seemed to completely miss or lose everything that made people fall in love with their creations to begin with. Lucas with the prequels, Jk Rowling with her constant tinkering of the HP lore and the Fantastic Beasts films, and Sakaguchi with the FF movie. It made me think about creativity as a whole, and more about how humans handle achieving and losing greatness. Are we all doomed to reach a point where we no longer have “it?” Does every creative inevitably go through this, just as every great athlete inevitably ages and loses their abilities? Not sure on the answer, but I’ve been musing on it a lot lately.

I think the opposite is the case with Final Fantasy nowadays. I think the problem with Square Enix now is that the series is being helmed by a bunch of concept artists and scenario creators (e.g. Tetsuya Nomura and Kazushige Nojima) who have a terrible habit of getting lost in their creations--they keep getting their heads stuck so far up their own arses that they completely forget that nobody else is on the same page as they are. This is a common problem among artists in general--hence why so many of them say "no one understands my work." Philosophers are also prone to this, which is why Jacques Derrida is so often misunderstood by people who claim to be post-structuralists/post-modernists (see here: https://newdiscourses.com/2020/03/reconstructing-derrida-poetics-nonsense-rule-cool/) Basically, the Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts series are being run by a bunch of visionaries who know how to CREATE a story, but they have almost no idea how to TELL one properly. This is exactly what happened to George Lucas with the Star Wars prequels, and nearly every film that the Wachowskis have made since Matrix: Reloaded. It also explains the shoddy direction of Kingdom Hearts' writing and cutscenes, FFXIII's poor execution and almost complete lack of world-building, and Square Enix' frustrating tendency to chop their stories up into bits and pieces and then sell half of that content seperately through books, movies and other pieces of media--it's their way of saying: "We have no freaking clue how exposition works."

Yeah. I strongly suspect that the decision to split the game into a multi-part saga is simply Square Enix' own attempt to cash in on the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (in addition to making a Marvel game of their own).

My question would be the one I sent to you on Twitter about the fall of creative innovators, and if all great innovators are at some point doomed to hit the point where they no longer have “it.”

One of the biggest turn offs in this remake for me is definitely the re-orchestrated music. The whole atmosphere created by the original OST feels completed lost in the background through this melting pot of rearranged familiar tunes. There was something very unique about Uematsu's MIDI orchestrations that seamlessly blended medieval or minimalistic pieces and hard rock tunes for epic battles. For example in FF7, Midgar's squalidness was reflected through his choice of gloomy percussions and melancholic keyboards and so far it doesn't seem the remake is taking that approach at all... How would you guys port these classic OSTs to the lastest gens without making them sound too "hard rock" with real guitars, or too classical with symphonic orchestras? Something about these instruments being fake/MIDI at the time really worked and now feels a bit lost. That is not to say the new arrangements are bad, they just don't stick out anymore, a great example would be the boss tunes that were meant to have that classic Uematsu electronic/trance/rock style. Cheers all :) PS: Another valid point is that the music had now shifted to the background to leave room for the voice acting. What do you think of that in a series that is as known for its music as it is for its storytelling?

What're the most likely 'problem areas' SE are going to run into when trying to remake FF7 ignoring the most obvious one (breaking the single game into parts). Personally doing the cross-dressing sequence is my major concern (but I haven't been watching the news that closely so I don't know if they've said it will remain the same in the remake). I loved that portion of the game, the break in the pacing, and getting to know just how weird and awesome Aeris was (yes I still say Aeris, FIGHT ME!) and I can see them completely butchering something like that. I also worry they'll let you revive Aeris as well since that could be a nice micro-transaction to throw in there for an easy $10.

Frank Smith

This isn’t so much a question, but rather a point I want to bring up that may or may not be useful for the discussion: One thing that has come up several times when discussing what we know about FFVIIR, is the various changes that are being made to the story. (Sephiroth being shown or referenced more prominently in Midgar, the strange Ghosts things that only Aerith can see, Jenova boss fight moved up into part 1, new scene showing Shinra as primarily responsible for the destruction of the Mako Reactor, plot points from the Compilation being mentioned early on, and now a vision of Meteor apparently being shown to Cloud in part 1.) There are plenty reasons to be skeptical of how these changes and revisions could affect how the story is received, but I think it’s important to point out a couple of things. 1. Splitting the story into multiple parts, which was likely a decision that was dictated to the developers by corporate, will drastically change the way the story needs to be formatted in order for each game to have it’s own satisfying narrative. So already, the situation behind the development process is going to dictate some changes to the story. (Sephiroth being shown earlier in Midgar being the best example of this). It’s fine to criticize the company business model for dictating those changes, but that’s not really something that the developers can really control. They are the people that have to create a different version of the same story in 3 or more parts. They have to play with the hand that has been dealt to them. 2. Secondly, I’m not really seeing much discussion regarding how NOT changing the story would be very disappointing to the developers at this stage of their careers. How creatively unsatisfying do you think it would be for Kitase/Nojima/Nomura to spend hundreds or thousands of working hours over the next several years to just end up creating a graphical/gameplay update of a story they already told over 20 years ago? Even if that’s what many of us OG FFVII fans really want, we're not the ones putting in countless hours of work to make FFVII Remake happen. We can probably beat the game in a week or less, but the developers will most likely have to spend the next 4+ years of their careers on this project. Analogy: Imagine if in 10-20 years from now, there are drastic improvements to special effects in Film. Because of this, Warner Bros. somehow convinces Christopher Nolan and his original film crew to come back and “Remake” his entire Batman trilogy. Do you think Nolan would just recreate all of the exact same scenes, shot-for-shot and line-for-line with just different actors and/or special effects? Would he keep all of the same dialogue, set design, and story planning exactly as it was? I highly doubt it. He’d probably ask the studio for a lot of creative freedom or they could go find themselves a new director. He’d probably take the same characters and plot and change them in a way that is more satisfying for himself and his team. He’d probably add new characters or even use different villains altogether if he thought it would make the story better. Likewise, if Peter Jackson got the chance to “Remake” his Lord of the Rings Trilogy, would he really spend all that time filming on location down in New Zealand just to have new actors play out the exact same scenes, so better special effects could be added in post-production? Would that be creatively satisfying for him? Back to FFVII: The ability to make at least some story changes to FFVII is probably important to the original creators even being involved in the first place. Otherwise, the project would likely still be in the hands of Cyberconnect2, with Kitase/Nomura just in a more supervisory role. Maybe us OG FFVII fans don’t like that. Maybe what we really wanted was just a high-quality remaster of the original game with no major story changes. But I think once the company approved the Remake project as multiple modern AAA games, with all the long work hours and huge budget that is required to do that, the creators making changes to the story became inevitable. Not just for narrative reasons, but for personal-creative reasons as well.

Do you think that the experience of the field will be able to be the same when remade (field as in when you're not in a town and you're travelling across the world)?

illynilly

What absolutely must carry over from the original for this to be a success in your mind? Story beats, gameplay systems, equipment, etc.