Final Fantasy 7 Fans Nearly Created An Open-World Sequel

Fans have abandoned all hope in waiting for Square Enix to do a proper follow-up to Final Fantasy VII and took it upon themselves to do a faux-sequel of epic proportions. A team of web developers came together to make an open-world sequel to Final Fantasy VII called Time Guardian. A 16 minute video was released to cover the game's features.

As noted on Siliconera, the video above is more of a tech demo. And to be completely honest, only about 12 minutes of it are of actual gameplay, the remaining four minutes consist of just space and some music.

Anyway, the video takes great care to cover all the new, improved, altered and drastically overhauled features that the Rodensoft team have implemented into Final Fantasy VII: Time Guardian. And yeah, the plot takes on a sort of Chrono Trigger vibe where players will journey across time and space to retrieve dark Materia.

The game sports an in-depth time progression feature where months and years can pass; and NPCs actually work on schedules due to the game's day and night cycles. In fact, some areas will have enemies that only attack at night or get tougher once the sun goes down. These guys really thought this through.

Also, due to the day and night shifts, each of the photo backgrounds have to go through the day, mid-day and night cycles. This would require a lot of asset shifting and because of this Final Fantasy VII: Time Guardian is on a massive nine CDs.

However, there's some really good parts to being on that many discs: you can swap out the main character and take on completely different quests. Each character has their own quest line and you can pick and choose your character at will. Even more than that you can make up separate teams and spread them around the game world. When you switch to a different team they'll be where you last left them. You can have up to three teams with three members per team.

Additionally, all of the music in the game is attached to the world and day/night cycle, so there would have been a smooth transition from one track to the next, as well as a varied source of music for your journeys.

To help flesh out the game's replay values the team also upped Final Fantasy VII's crafting and harvesting features, allowing players to mine and gather goods while traveling around in brand new randomized dungeons.

Rodensoft also added some new side-quests and character-specific missions to Final Fantasy VII, expanding the game's content by a great deal. So now you have an open-world role-playing adventure that's like “Skyrim with Chocobos”.

If you're hoping to play this spiritual successor to Final Fantasy VII... you'll have to bury those feelings of longing. The project is dead... for now.

"I stopped mostly as its a full time job and the scripting tools, while great, are quite restrictive compared to real coding," said one of the developers. "I've since gone on to working on a similar RPG with the Unreal Engine."