Final Fantasy 7 remake would take longer than FF13 trilogy combined, says producer Final Fantasy 13 series producer Yoshinori Kitase says that a remake of Final Fantasy 7 would require a large time investment from the company, estimating that it would take longer than the ten years it took to make all three FF13 games.

Square Enix has heard fans requesting a remake of Final Fantasy 7, but has explained some of its hesitance to take on the project. Now that Lightning Returns has wrapped up the FF13 saga, producer Yoshinori Kitase has this time commented on just how time-consuming it would be to recreate FF7.

"I still think it's going to be a very challenging task," Kitase told Joystiq. "I can tell you personally I would love to do it. But before I decide to do anything of that kind, I would have to bring my dedication and motivation levels to the maximal high. It's not the kind of project I can start casually working on, it's a really serious project. It would be nice if I got the opportunity to do that in the future, but at the moment no plans."

To express just how serious the project is, Kitase compared the timeline to how long the entire trilogy of FF13 games took to produce. "We already took nearly ten years to make the trilogy of Final Fantasy 13 games, ending with Lightning Returns. I think that a high-definition FF7 would be definitely comparable to that scale, an even bigger project maybe," he said. "It would probably take a lot longer than ten years, even if we ever do it. So that's what I am saying, I would have to have a complete and utter dedication to the project."

Considering that a major hurdle of putting FF7 on modern consoles is updating it to match their power, and he estimates the project would take about the length of a console lifespan, we probably shouldn't count on it happening any time soon. We always have the tech demo video from the PS3's launch, though, rendering FF7's cinematic intro in real-time: