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Twenty-five years later, a remake of Final Fantasy 8 looks unlikely, but that hasn’t stopped the game’s director from suggesting a big change to one of its defining features if Square Enix ever decided to resurrect it.
Speaking to IGN, Yoshinori Kitase explained that he’d rework Final Fantasy 8’s Junction system in a remake, as he believed that it was a “difficult system” for people to understand at the time.
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“I think you may remember we had the Junction system in Final Fantasy 8,” Kitase said. “And the thing about that system was the enemies leveled up in line with what the player’s level was. And obviously you had to then use the Junction system and how you customize that to overcome the challenge there. And I think it was a very difficult system for some people to get into. Depending on player skills, sometimes they just didn’t work out the best way of doing it. So I think I’d want to return to that and really rework the battle system on [Final Fantasy 8] and make it something where that level of difficulty and approachability for some fans was a lot better balanced. So I think that’s the thing I’d look at most if I was going to look at remaking it.”
Final Fantasy 8’s Junction system was a wild departure from Final Fantasy 7’s focus on Materia, as with the right build and stock of spells, players could create specialized characters. This fit with the game’s cast being comprised primarily of teenage mercenaries, as characters could inflict status ailments, absorb elemental damage, and deal devastating amounts of damage if their magic was properly junctioned.
But as Kitase explained, a remake of Final Fantasy 8 would be a monumental undertaking as those classic PS1 JRPGs offered a significant amount of content. “It’s such a massive investment of time and effort that we really have to think very hard about taking on any kind of project like that.”
Meanwhile, the second chapter in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, is almost here. Launching on February 29 for PS5, a Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth demo is now available to download. This is only a taste of things to come, and as we discovered during a recent hands-on event, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is much bigger than its predecessor.
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