Final Fantasy VII Remake Revisited Chapter 5: Dogged Pursuit

We’re taking a deep dive into the fifth chapter of Final Fantasy VII Remake with the wonderful development team who brought the game to life!
Autor: Sunil Godhania

This year is Final Fantasy VII’s 25th Anniversary - and the celebrations have begun!

As part of the ongoing festivities, the development team behind Final Fantasy VII Remake have graciously agreed to dive deeper into the game than ever before.

Over the coming months we’ll be revisiting their thoughts, memories, and anecdotes from the creation of the game. Check out previous chapters here:

If you've yet to play Final Fantasy VII Remake, go and play it now, and if you read on...

...please beware of spoilers.

With that warning out of the way, let’s mosey…


How is the Shinra Middle Manager on the train so brave and able to stand up to Barret, who looks twice his size and has a gun for a hand?!

That kind of willpower is the "Shinra Spirit".

Motomu Toriyama (Co-Director (Scenario Design))

Shinra Middle Manager confronting Barret

Barret hums the traditional Final Fantasy Victory Fanfare as his conversation with Cloud concludes, which was a nice easter egg for fans (who may have also heard it during Chapter 1). Why was this added into the script?

Barret gives a rendition of the fanfare with his prized humming skills when victorious in battle. This humming was added into to the dialogue in places to show different sides of Barret, such as when he was in a good mood and when he was just flaking out a bit.

Motomu Toriyama (Co-Director (Scenario Design))

The motion for peeling away the grashtrike hives feels so real and you get a great sense of the stickiness and viscosity. Are these kind of imaginative touches all created through the sensitivity of the individual motion artists?

The different motions are designed by the individual animators using their own ingenuity to try and match with the characters personalities, while the team leader occasionally checks over and manages the whole picture. Accordingly, each team member needs to exercise their own creative sensibility.

A lot of the way the peeling motion looked came from how the hives themselves were depicted, and it shows how the collaboration between each section of the development team comes together across the whole game to produce great results.

Yoshiyuki Soma (Animation Director)

Cloud removing a gashtrike hive

Tifa must have been a difficult character to balance alongside Cloud and Barret given that she is so quick, mobile, and able to quickly build up the damage multiplier on staggered enemies, how was this achieved in FFVII Remake?

We wanted to create a fun battle system where the player would get enjoyment in lots of different ways from changing between characters as they fought, so we were very particular about differentiating the situations when each character would come into their own.

It was comparatively easy to differentiate Cloud, Barret, and Aerith, but we had to think extremely hard about what defining characteristics we should give Tifa.

I think that we managed to add depth to Tifa's mechanics by tying her abilities to the burst system that is one of the core pillars of FF7R's battles.

Teruki Endo (Battle Director)

Tifa battling a monster

In this very combat-heavy chapter of FFVII Remake players have access to Cloud, Barret, and Tifa. While playing the game, which character do you tend to gravitate towards using?

As you might expect, we put the battles in this chapter together with the expectation that players would be using Cloud a lot, as the story does centre around him.

However, which character a player uses the most will differ depending on their play style and other preferences, so we designed it to work regardless of who you favour.

Teruki Endo (Battle Director)

Cloud fighting a robot in a Midgar tunnel

Where within the Shinra Electric Power Company did the original design of Stamp come from?

The character of Stamp was first designed as part of a public relations exercise to fire the public's morale when the war between Shinra and Wutai broke out. It is not public knowledge, but there is a rumour that Stamp is based on a doodle that Palmer drew at the time his space exploration division was being downsized.

Motomu Toriyama (Co-Director (Scenario Design))

An image of the Shinra mascot Stamp on a container

What can you tell us about some of the graffiti which appears in this zone? Where does it come from and are there any specific meanings behind each piece?

This area is a sprawling maze of tracks and a dangerous hotbed of monsters and the graffiti is drawn by hot-blooded young punks who sneak into the area to prove their bravery and acts as proof of their bravado.

The 2D design team and localisation team came up with ideas for what it would say, trying to get into the heads of the young daredevils and create the kinds of messages and pictures that they would want to leave here.

Takako Miyake (Environment Director)

Graffiti on a wall in Midgar

The music that plays during the Crab Warden battle is an arrangement of the battle theme from the original FFVII, why was this theme chosen as the basis for this battle, and not, for example, the boss battle theme from FFVII, or an entirely new piece?

In the original FFVII there was only one main boss battle theme, but that would not be enough when aligned with a modern game design, so for Remake we added in new boss music. However, if all of these additional boss fight tracks were completely new music then it would not tie-in to people’s memories of the original, so we created lots of different arrangements of "Those who Fight" and "Let the Battles Begin" to use here.

Keiji Kawamori (Music Supervisor)

The Crab Warden from FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE

When the train passes through the spiral tunnel, the player's viewpoint (the camera) shakes with the vibrations, giving an amazing sense of immersion in the world. How do these little touches come about? Are they envisaged and planned from the start, or do they come about through a process of trial and error?

We did set out the concept of making the player feel a sense of trepidation at moving along the tracks, but also thought that fans would not want to have Cloud hit by a train if they messed up…

So we decided to create a feeling of realism as the trains went thundering past and proactively incorporated various supporting touches with the lights, sound effects and the camera vibration. We also did detailed calculations of the player's position and the timing when a train would come past, to make sure that they only appeared at points where you could not be run over, regardless of how you control the characters.

Naoki Hamaguchi (Co-Director (Game Design / Programming)

Cloud, Barret and Tifa run along a train line, as a train speeds past

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading this chapter of Final Fantasy VII Remake Revisited and are looking forward to learning more from behind the scenes of the game over the coming months.

Make sure you share this article with your friends on social media and we hope you’re looking forward to Chapter 6 next week!

Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade is available on PS5, Steam and Epic Games Store while Final Fantasy VII Remake is available on PS4.

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