They have been completely apart for more than five years
Square Enix is now one of the most representative third parties in Super Smash Bros.Ultimate with Cloud, Sephiroth and Dragon Quest’s Hero as playable characters, but that would once be considered impossible when the crossover series was first created .
It almost feels like a miracle that Final Fantasy 7 could also receive two warrior slots in Smash, as it was the game that led to the biggest break in the history of video games, which made some in Square feel that Nintendo was the door for them closed and never wanted. to ever see / work with them again.
Hiroshi Kawai, the character programmer of Final Fantasy 7, remembers just as much of the impression he got from Nintendo’s former president Hiroshi Yamauchi after it was decided to make the new entry exclusively for the PlayStation.
This revelation comes from Polygon’s oral history piece for FF7, although not all of Kawai’s colleagues viewed the meeting bitterly.
“I’m going to say it. I’m impressed with what Nintendo [was] able to do with the 64 hardware, “Kawai said via Polygon.” Mario, Zelda – their developers need to be top notch to do this. But that is essentially the scope of what you can do with the hardware. And you will not get nearly anything like a Final Fantasy running on it. ‘
Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi followed suit by saying that Yamauchi was very gracious in their meeting about their new partnership with Sony by giving them all expensive beer and food before knocking on their backs when they left.
“What I heard was Nintendo saying, ‘If you leave us, you should never come back’ – Hiroshi Kawai
Although Sakaguchi claims there were no bad feelings between them, Kawai replies that the in-depth playmaker ‘is just trying to be politically correct with the one’.
“What I heard was Nintendo saying, ‘If you leave us, you should never come back,'” Kawai concluded.
The meeting was the culmination of months of prototyping on the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation, where Sakaguchi made the call to move Final Fantasy 7 to Sony’s console.
The era of every Final Fantasy before it was released on Nintendo systems came to an end with the first games in the series leading Square, from barely surviving to one of the biggest developers in the industry.
Nintendo even gave Square a beating in their own Mario game with the Super Mario RPG, but the N64 created too much gap between them on several levels.
Much of this disruption is attributed to the choice to keep cartridge cases on CDs, which provides drastically more storage space, but Kawai also notes that the overall difference in horsepower and communication also affects the split.
Super Mario RPG was one of the last games Square released with Nintendo in 1996. However, this would only take place in 2002 when the two companies started working together again.
Flash a decade later, and Cloud is announced as one of the last DLC characters for Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS, which is quite ironic, given the split and the fact that FF7 was not yet available on a Nintendo console. at that point.
Smash creator Masahiro Sakurai said that Final Fantasy was one of the most advanced add-ons from fans, with the popularity of Cloud above the previous protagonists of the 8-bit and 16-bit era.
Now just over a month ago, we got a double dose of Mako with the surprising announcement and release of Sephiroth for Smash Ultimate.
Some fans have said that the companies are once again teaming up with FF7 over the 14 other mainline entries and countless playoffs, but it’s hard to deny one of the most iconic villains in video games.
Sure, Nintendo may not have gotten Final Fantasy 7 Remake either, but the developers have a very close working relationship again, especially when it comes to their other franchises like Dragon Quest.
Via Polygon, Nintendo Life.