Kupo Chronicle #7 - Mako, Makoro

How do you tease the launch of the biggest JRPG of all time?

Welcome to the Kupo Chronicle, the premium edition of the Wark Digest newsletter, where we explore the Final Fantasy universe in long-form and drill down into unique moments of the series’ history. I’m Chris, aka Hoogathy, and in this installment we’re dissecting both demos of Final Fantasy VII to see how Squaresoft showed off its big gamble, and how the game changed over the course of its quick development.

This week’s newsletter is 2844 words, a 13-minute read.

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We almost had these extra-chibi eyes in the final game.

The Ultimate “Please Be Excited” Play

After years of collaboration, culminating in the genre-defining classics Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, and Super Mario RPG, Squaresoft went through a pretty ugly public breakup with Nintendo. Sony had wooed them with promises of stronger, CD-based hardware, and early experiments with the Nintendo 64 weren’t yielding the sort of results they’d hoped for. With these expectations, Square desperately needed the next installment in their flagship series to make a huge impact.

In 1996, under the watching eye of the entire industry, they began advertising Final Fantasy VII, promising a groundbreaking new RPG that would push gaming’s technological envelope. And to prove that they meant business, they even released demos of this upcoming magnum opus, to whet consumers’ appetites and show what the fledgling PlayStation had enabled them to do.

The first demo was included on a promotional disc with Tobal No.1, a 3D fighting game featuring designs by Dragonball Z creator Akira Toriyama; the second was distributed closer to the game’s release on a PlayStation Underground demo disc.

Back in the augural issue of the Kupo Chronicle, we broke down Final Fantasy VIII’s demo and found a considerably different cross-section of the final product. Now, we’ll turn our gaze to both FFVII demos to see how the team’s vision shifted over time.