Final Fantasy 8 Director up for a remake - on one condition

The chatter around Final Fantasy remakes is starting to reach a fever pitch. Sony's recent State of Play revealed plenty about the upcoming second instalment of the now-trilogy of Final Fantasy 7 remakes (don't worry, we're still a little confused too).

Players are starting to wonder about the end of Cloud's saga and what could be next to receive the remake treatment at Square Enix. That question has been raised with the team behind the game's direct successor - and there is real potential there, if not for one feature that needs a change.

Final Fantasy 8 remake would need a combat revamp

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Speaking with IGN, Final Fantasy 8's Director has revealed that he'd be keen enough for a remake of the game, but if it were to go ahead, it’d need one pretty major change.

Yoshitore Kitase mentioned the potential of a remake but offered no confirmation that it's even happening - as per expectation. Still, he suggested that the battle system would need a bit of a revamp. "I think you may remember we had the Junction system in Final Fantasy 8," says Kitase.

He explained, "The thing about that system was the enemies levelled up in line with what the player’s level was. And obviously you had to then use the Junction system and how you customise that to overcome the challenge there."

Saying that he thinks Final Fantasy 8's Junction system was "a very difficult system for some people to get into," Kitase admits it was dependent on player skills and how sometimes, "They just didn't work out the best way of doing it."

Still, Kitase is open to the idea of a FF8 remake and concluded, "I'd want to return to that and really rework the battle system on [Final Fantasy 8] and make it something where that level of difficulty and approachability for some fans was a lot better balanced. So I think that's the thing I'd look at most if I was going to look at remaking it."

Final Fantasy 8 Remake might not happen at all

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Kitase is right in that the battle system could do with a little modernising, but he also adds that there's a good chance it won't happen. It's all to do with the sheer amount of work the remake of Final Fantasy 7 is taking.

"I've worked out that trying to recreate that kind of volume of content you had in the RPGs back then in the modern day really is not something you can take up lightly," he says. "It's such a massive investment of time and effort that we really have to think very hard about taking on any kind of project like that."

Sorry Final Fantasy 8 fans - the game will need a lot of work before it launches, and that's if it comes out at all. It looks like we're going to have to settle for what we have with a trilogy of FF7 remakes.