Japan was somewhat closed off from the Western world back then, but Yoshinori Kitase, Final Fantasy VII’s director, managed to take it a step further.

In 1997, the Internet wasn’t widely available even in Japan, meaning he had no way to look up the success he gathered with the game he directed (and now, it’s getting a remake, and we predict Square Enix will not release its second part on PlayStation 4).

“From the sales data, I could see it was selling well to people all over the world – but back then, we didn’t have the opportunity to interact with our global fans, so I didn’t have a sense of just how well-received it was. I only really understood five years later, in 2002, when we released Final Fantasy X on PlayStation 2.

I went on a promotional tour of Europe and North America for the first time – it was the first chance I’d ever had to meet with international fans, and many of them brought their copies of Final Fantasy VII for me to sign. That’s when I felt the level of our success for the first time – it was very memorable, to say the least,” Kitase wrote on the PlayStation Blog.

A correction: Final Fantasy X was released in 2001 in Japan and North America on PS2, while Europe and Australia had to wait until May 2002 for the PAL version. Aside from that, Kitase added that Square (as there was no Enix fusion back then!) only managed to include “a large volume of movie cutscenes” in Final Fantasy VII due to CD-ROMs’ memory offered at the time. (Another correction: he meant FMVs.) It makes sense: the game came on three CDs; it had that many FMVs! If they had remained with Nintendo, the Nintendo 64 would have allowed them a maximum of 64 MB of space on a cartridge, while a single CD-ROM offered 10x more space.

Better late than never.

Source: PSL