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Final Fantasy 8 director Yoshinori Kitase has said that if Square Enix were to remake the game, he would change the battle system.
Speaking in an interview with IGN, the series producer explained that he would “rework” the battle system known as Junction after noticing how some players struggled to understand the mechanics when it was originally released in 1999.
“I think you may remember we had the Junction system in Final Fantasy 8,” Kitase said. “And 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. And I think it was a very difficult system for some people to get into. Depending on player skills, sometimes they just didn’t work out the best way of doing it.”
Kitase continued, saying that he would want to return to address this aspect specifically if a remake was made, and make it so that the “level of difficulty and approachability” for some players “was a lot better balanced” overall.
“So I think that’s the thing I’d look at most if I was going to look at remaking it,” he said.
Square Enix is currently focusing on its Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy, the second part of which, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, is set to launch on February 29 for PlayStation 5. There’s no official word on a remake of Final Fantasy 8, but even if it was to be confirmed, Kitase says that to recreate that level of content from an RPG today is “not something you can take up lightly.”
He added: “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.”
For more, here’s our list of the best JRPGs to play right now, alongside our list of the best single-player games.