Final Fantasy 14's Evercold expansion will carry an entire raid series built around the Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy: 12 encounters across three tiers, released over the expansion's expected two-to-three-year lifespan. Naoki Hamaguchi, director of Rebirth and Revelation, has now described some of the design constraints the two teams are working under.
Hamaguchi said the crossover came together because the release dates for Evercold and Final Fantasy 7 Revelation landed close to one another. He said he raised it with Final Fantasy 14 director and producer Naoki Yoshida, and rather than treat the two launches as separate events they looked for something that would, in his words, energise the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole.
He would not say which characters appear. The complication he did describe is one of scale: Final Fantasy 14's raid encounters are built around large bosses, and Final Fantasy 7's cast is mostly human-sized. Hamaguchi declined to confirm or deny whether Sephiroth features, but used him to illustrate the problem — a human Sephiroth cannot simply be enlarged without explanation.
I won't mention specifics, but when [Creative Studio 3] were saying "We'd like to have this character as a raid boss," we had a discussion on how we can make them big. I'll use an example that it is definitely not. So say Cloud is the boss. Nobody wants to go in there and just see Cloud looking like Cloud, but massive.
The answer, Hamaguchi said, is lore: the crossover needs an in-game reason for a character to appear at raid scale, and for the two worlds to connect at all. Original Final Fantasy 7 writer Kazushige Nojima is working on that side of it. Without those rules established, Hamaguchi said, players would read the result as fake.
Character designer Tetsuya Nomura is also involved and holds a veto over how the Final Fantasy 7 cast can be depicted. Hamaguchi described a back-and-forth in which Creative Studio 3 proposes a way to enlarge a character, and Nomura rules some depictions out entirely.
The Final Fantasy 7 raid series is one of two crossovers in Evercold; the expansion's alliance raid is built around Evangelion. It has taken 13 years for Final Fantasy 7 to reach the MMO at this scale.
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