The trio of Final Fantasy mainline games that released on the PS1 (FF7–9) holds a very special place in many Gamers hearts as their first Final Fantasy games or even for some, their first taste of JRPGs.

Remasters of FF7 and FF9 have hit current-gen consoles, but it has taken forever for Final Fantasy 8 to do so. Many rumors over the past few years have emerged over issues with music licensing all the way to Square Enix no longer having the source code of the original game.

So when Final Fantasy 8 Remastered was revealed during Square Enix’s epic E3 2019 press conference, fans of Squall and crew were excited to see the often ‘black sheep’ of the PS1 trilogy returning with a new coat of paint along with QoL features with a 2019 release.

The question still remained. What took so long? Famitsu asked the original Director of FF8, Yoshinori Kitase what happened. His answer (won’t) will shock you.

At first, the plan was to release it on current-generation hardware, with more or less the same graphics. However, the title recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, and since TVs evolved from SD CRTs to LCD HDTVs, we decided that it was necessary to improve on character quality.

So then we continued its development until just before it went gold, then out of nowhere, we decided to work on refining the characters. For that reason, we found ourselves in a situation that needed a major schedule change, but thanks to the efforts from the original staff’s Harada (battle programmer, Hiroshi Harada), character modeler Kayano (Tomohiro Kayano), and character designer Nomura (Tetsuya Nomura) we were able to revive it with wonderful quality. The troubles were there, but in the end it was the right call.

There you have it. The answer we’ve all been waiting for! Nothing controversial or outrageous. If you missed the Final Fantasy 8 Remastered announcement during E3 2019, check it out here. Get ready for FF8 Remastered when it releases later this year. 

(Source)

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