Last year when the Final Fantasy VII, IX, X/X-2 HD remasters were announced, Final Fantasy VIII was noticeably missing but later announced for a 2019 release. The original director Yoshinori Kitase explained in an interview with Famitsu why its remaster was delayed.

Famitsu: We previously heard about all the troubles you had such as missing data from the original versions and such for the other remaster titles. What kind of trouble did you run into for Final Fantasy VIII’s remaster?

Yoshinori Kitase, Director: “At first, the plan was to release it on current-generation hardware, with more or less the same graphics. However, the title recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, and since TVs evolved from SD CRTs to LCD HDTVs, we decided that it was necessary to improve on character quality.

So then we continued its development until just before it went gold, then out of nowhere, we decided to work on refining the characters. For that reason, we found ourselves in a situation that needed a major schedule change, but thanks to the efforts from the original staff’s Harada (battle programmer, Hiroshi Harada), character modeler Kayano (Tomohiro Kayano), and character designer Nomura (Tetsuya Nomura) we were able to revive it with wonderful quality. The troubles were there, but in the end it was the right call.”

Final Fantasy VIII Remastered releases for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC in 2019. You can check out its recent announcement trailer here and a few comparison images in our previous report.