Yet more information about the Final Fantasy VII Anniversary is surfacing from this month's issue of Gemaga magazine. This time it's an interview with Yoshinori Kitase (the FFVII director and scenario writer), Yusuke Naora (the FFVII art director), and Tetsuya Nomura (the FFVII character desinger).
The three men discussed the original development ideas for Final Fantasy VII. Interestingly enough, the original FFVII story was going to be a "detective story, with characters such as: a detective named "Joe" and an accoplice named "Nicholas the Needle" ...

About the development of FF7: Kitase says the sudden change to 3D and the new PS hardware was a big deal which made the work important. Nomura said it was exhausting, but that the experience for him was wonderful. This is mainly because, back when working on FFV and FFVI, he had a lot of ideas that got rejected. With FF7, he finally had some freedom to do what he wanted.

Regarding Nomura's rut as a "30% batter" (because about 3 out of 10 ideas he submitted were accepted), he was rejected even when taking his ideas straight to the team. He approached Kitase who was producing an event, saying things like, "I don't really like this," or, "I'd like to try it this way". In the end, the characters Setzer and Shadow came out of this. He always had a lot of ideas, even going back to FFV, where they reflect on an idea he had for the ending that was thought to be unsatisfactory.

Because of all this, when starting work on FF7, Kitase decided to go straight to Nomura for character designs at the start, and Nomura produced results.

One of the first plot ideas Sakaguchi wrote for FF7 was VERY different from how it currently is. It was something of a detective story. One character was a hot-blooded detective named Joe. Though the setting and story weren't great, it's where the idea for a city with bright lights came from. There would be a point where the main character was running from Joe, and set off an explosion, which ended up being adapted into the final FF7 plot.

Nomura: I saved the first character illustration I drew for Sakaguchi's early proto.

Kitase: Back then, it wasn't Cloud?

Nomura: It wasn't Cloud. But we did have a protagonist for the early stages.

Kitase: Wasn't he a train robber?

Nomura: No, but at the establishment we did have stuff with explosions. Besides, there was a detective. After that, I remember drawing the concept art for the protagonist's accomplice, "Nicholas the Needle."

Naora: I remember that name!

Kitase: Didn't Nicholas end up as Barret?

Nomura: No, at that time he wasn't like Barret. If I remember correctly, the protagonist and Nicholas the Needle joined up because the detective was chasing after them thinking they had been involved in a train bombing.

To start there was just ideas and discussion, between the three of them (Kitase, Sakaguchi, and Nomura). After coming up with diagrams for characters and settings, Nomura moved onto character designs. Most of the setting and things like the Turks and Shinra were Kitase and Sakaguchi's doing. One of the things he was involved with was Cloud's relationship with Sephiroth, and Nomura wanted Sephiroth to be a hero of the past that Cloud would be chasing after. The whole Lifestream and other related world concepts were Sakaguchi's creation.

Zack was created to answer the riddle about Cloud's memory loss. He was a character that suddenly popped up one day, and Nomura was in charge of those events. Because the stuff with Nibelheim wasn't completed until the end, it was largely a secret even to Nomura and Nojima.

One thing they did was constantly add more mystery to FF7, with anticipation for what would come next. Because the scenario developed like this, a character relation chart was created to keep track of the interweaving plot points.

The need for different models for battle and field graphics came from difficulty in animating them for the different actions. The characters hands would end up going through their heads!

Miss Razz via forums.crisis-core.net »