Final Fantasy VII is a weird game. From a hilarious snowboarding segment to the time the team dresses up a tiger (Editor’s Note: Don’t you disrespect Red XIII/Nanaki!) in a sailor’s uniform and teaches him to walk on two legs so he’ll blend in, the game is just full of quirky little moments. Perhaps the most famous is the lengthy section where Cloud must dress as a woman to sneak into the mansion of a mafia don. This section contained several minigames, including a particularly memorable one that had Cloud doing squats in competition against a bodybuilder. It’s precisely this weirdness that makes the sequence so memorable to fans, and producer Yoshinori Kitase said the minigame had to be included in the remake.
Since we announced the remake, lots of fans of speculated, as to how far we would go in reproducing the elements that made the original great. We put a lot of care and attention into the cutscenes. But the fans of the original also have strong memories of things like the squats too. So even though they are just little mini games, the development team had a huge motivation to do them properly, and remake them in a modern style.
A trailer from last month confirmed squats would be in the game, and even seemed to expand the minigame by including Tifa in the contest. It’s a good thing too. Squats were mentioned as one of the parts of the game we’d specifically like to see remade.
If you haven’t played the original, Cloud needs to acquire a blonde wig from a bodybuilder named Big Bro. To do so, he engages in a squatting contest against another bodybuilder who really wants Big Bro’s wig for reasons that are never really defined. Should Cloud win he’ll get the wig and Big Bro will promptly punch the bodybuilder, causing him to go flying across the gym and smack into a wall, an oddly dramatic finish for what seems like a simple contest. The squatting showed up again in Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, with Shinra using squats to test Zack’s physical aptitude and giving him “quadriceps of steel.”
[source: Twitter]
