You might have assumed that during the development of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, its developers were constantly going back to documents written up during the original for references and inspiration. Turns out that wasn't the case at all, as 20 years later, basically none of those documents were left.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi confirmed as much to Eurogamer when he was asked just how pivotal documentation of the original game was to Remake's development. "We're talking about the mid '90s... There's almost no documentation left over from that period at all, practically none," Hamaguchi revealed.
"Data management wasn't done to modern standards, so yeah, there's basically nothing," Hamaguchi went on to say. "There are some character design sketches I think we've still got and obviously anything which was published separately, so the Ultimania guides have a few of the original documents in there, but in terms of stuff like... there's practically nothing to work on."
That posed a problem for Hamaguchi when he was chosen to helm the development of FF7 Remake, as he admits fearing he would overwrite the original game and make its remake feel more like a fan fiction version as...
