EMOTION ENGINE
This is the first Final Fantasy game to be made in Unreal Engine 4, meaning it has more in common with Kingdom Hearts III than Final Fantasy XV (which used Square Enix’s in-house Luminous Studio engine). But as always, an engine is just a tool. “By putting in numerous customisations in areas such as the lighting, the shadow processing, the physics simulations, and also facial animation, we created the perfect basis to create the high-quality graphics for Final Fantasy VII Remake,” says Hamaguchi.
The new technology has enabled the devs to play with many elements. “We’ve tried something new with the music and essentially by using the same melody line throughout all the different sections of the game,” says Hamaguchi, “but having it dynamically shift and transition to different arrangements of that music based on the action that is actually taking place at the time.” This means that the music changes as you explore, becoming more urgent and loud when you get into a fight, then reaching an emotional climax after you win, all while retaining the same key melodies.
Matching sound to visuals has also been part of the animation process. “The game has a system using AI-style pattern matching to pick out the emotional content from the voice data for the language being spoken at any one time,” says Hamaguchi. “This allows us to create really high-quality facial animations and lip-synching based on the actual voice data being played.”
Even the lighting bolsters the emotions the devs want to convey.
“We used a network of over 100 PCs slaved together to do full physical simulations on the light reflections and rebounding for every object in the game,” says Hamaguchi. “It allows us to do a really realistic rendition of the atmosphere in Midgar and create that perfect lighting for the location.”
It’s been important for Square Enix to push its technology to the limit to create a Remake that not only celebrates the past, but takes Square Enix’s JRPGs into the future. “The better technology you have behind your game, the more expressive you can be, the more you can show, and that adds the better characters and more immersion into the game experience,” says Hamaguchi.
“THE MUSIC CHANGES AS YOU EXPLORE, BECOMING MORE URGENT WHEN YOU FIGHT.”