Final Fantasy is one of those games that rarely ever make you feel doubtful about your own actions. You’re the good guys, the ones fighting the evil empire, and certainly will never do anything evil to hurt innocents. This franchise doesn’t necessarily dwell on the grey area when it comes to our main characters. However in this remake of the original Final Fantasy VII, you are playing as a part of a terrorist cell, AVALANCHE. And well, they tend to do typical terrorist things in the beginning of the game, like blow up a reactor powering the city.
In the original game, we don’t tend to see much of how the Mako reactor’s explosion affected the residents of Midgar. But this remake will change the way we see things. It will actually show the effects on innocent people after our lovable main characters decide to blow up a power reactor they were currently using.
We really wanted to show the everyday lives of Midgar’s citizens — to show how they lived in this massive city powered by Mako energy, how and when they’d be using it, to tell that aspect of the story.
Yoshinori Kitase, Final Fantasy VII producer
Understandably, citizens won’t feel too good having something bombed near their vicinity. The ensuing explosion causes a mass panic within the city. Especially more so since this Mako reactor is critical to how the city is powered. And thus with it gone, the city is very much impacted.
The original version went straight into the bombing mission. We wanted that feeling that things were already underway, you were in the middle of the action. Yet if you immediately went from there into the panic caused by the bombing mission afterwards, you wouldn’t understand the impact it had on the inhabitants’ everyday lives before that event interrupted them. That’s why we started with this domestic kind of scene.
Yoshinori Kitase
It should be noted that Midgar is the entire game for the upcoming Final Fantasy VII, with the full game said to be released episodically. And since the game is at least at 100GB, the developers had more time and space to give the city some depth and make it feel alive.
We want them to feel conflicted about the effects of their actions. That’s why we depicted this area in such detail.
Players can explore Midgar for themselves when the game releases this April 10th for the PS4. A demo is available right now that you can download on the PS Store to see if this game is for you. See just how much Midgar has been expanded to feel like a real city bursting with people and activities.
Source: IGN
