And since the Final Fantasy 7 Remake demo just released, two heads from the game’s development team – Producer Yoshinori Kitase and Co-Director Naoki Hamaguchi – have taken the opportunity to share the thought process and intentions behind Midgar’s recreation in a recent interview with PlayStation blog.
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The majority of the duo’s dissection of Midgar coincided with Remake’s new opening scene. The original Final Fantasy 7 intro only consists of Aerith’s introduction and Cloud’s team arriving at their first Mako reactor. But Remake adds something extra beforehand in the form of two minutes of new footage that gives players a better understanding of how Midgar operates.
Viewers, for instance, get a look at the everyday life people have in the city, such as children playing and adults continually constructing new architecture to build Midgar further and further out. Hamaguchi explains the shots of everyday life serve to give players a sense of the lives they’ll disrupt by bombing the Mako reactor, and as a result, force them to consider the morality of Cloud and Avalanche’s actions.
However, the everyday-life sequence isn’t the first thing to appear in the trailer. The opening scene shows viewers a bird sweeping over a wasteland outside of Midgar before flying into the city’s polluted air. Hamaguchi explains the imagery works to subtly show how Midgar’s industrialization is killing the planet. This idea comes up again later in the opening through the sight of dead flowers and a little girl witnessing a Mako reactor ominously spewing Mako energy into the sky.
Before the little girl witnesses this, however, she plays on a dilapidated playground with her friends. Anyone familiar with the 2015 Final Fantasy 7 Remake trailer will probably recognize it. For context, the rich and poor of Midgar live separated between the plates and the slums, respectively – at least, that’s usually the case. However, Hamaguchi confirms this park exists on one of Midgar’s plates, revealing that the economic inequality goes deeper than the on-the-surface divide.
Finally, the “plates” of Midgar refer to the platforms housing the towns or “sectors” that make up the overall city. There are eight in total resting on eight pillars, along with a ninth central support holding up Shinra Headquarters. The devs explained that they worked out the logistics Midgar would need to work in real life and applied them when redesigning it for the game to give it an even greater authentic feel.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake will launch on April 10, 2020, for the PlayStation 4.
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