Cloud’s Buster Sword is one of the most iconic features in Final Fantasy 7. Even those who don’t know the series that well will surely recognise the whopping great blade the blond-haired hero has strapped to his back, ready to deploy when the time calls for it.
However, it turns out that the Final Fantasy 7 Remake developers actually once considered giving Cloud a more realisticly-proportioned sword. Thankfully for us all, though, the team decided against it.
In a conversation with French gaming personality Julien Chièze, Final Fantasy 7 Remake director Naoki Hamaguchi said the team considered “the aspect of the weight” that would come with lugging the Buster Sword around (thanks, GamesRadar).
“How Cloud swings it around with one hand that sort of felt like it would weaken the sense of realism, you know,” the developer explained. “So at the time, when we were making Remake, there was some discussion about whether we should give Cloud a more realistic version of the Buster Sword.”
Ultimately, though, the team realised that the Buster Sword is “just too iconic”, and if Remake released and the developer had decided to give Cloud a more ordinary and realistically sized sword, “players wouldn’t accept it”.
“In the end we stayed faithful to the OG,” Hamaguchi said, before adding: “A whole new generation of people fell in love with it, so I think it was the right call.”
And, right call it was. Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which launched on 10th April 2020 as a PlayStation exclusive, reached the five million sales mark after four months. It went on to be released across additional platforms, of course boosting sales further. The game is due to be released on Switch 2, though the physical release of Final Fantasy 7 Remake will be on a game key card and take up around a third of the console’s storage capacity.
“An expansive remake that treads carefully upon this most cherished of games, though some blunders will linger long in the memory,” Aoife Wilson wrote in Eurogamer’s original Final Fantasy 7 Remake review.
