Following the news that Square Enix was going to break up the Final Fantasy VII Remake into a multi-part series a la Final Fantasy XIII, fans were confused, upset, and in some cases – angry.

Despite a clarification being found in an official statement from the publisher, fans were still not happy with the answer. Now, Square Enix boss and Final Fantasy VII Remake producer Yoshinori Kitase has released an official response, over on the Square Enix blog.

You can find his entire message, below:

For many years, people around the world have asked me “Will you ever remake FINAL FANTASY VII?” For many years I gave the same answers and on a personal level, having made the original FINAL FANTASY VII, did I really want to spend so many years making the same game again?

With FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE, we have the opportunity to go beyond the story, world and experience of FINAL FANTASY VII in ways we’ve always dreamed of – from the depths of Midgar to the skies above the Planet. The multi-part format enables us to expand the original story and turn it into an epic experience for fans and new gamers alike.

This past weekend at PlayStation Experience we were thrilled to present more of FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE. It was great to see so much excitement when we surprised everyone with the first gameplay footage and it was a treat for us to show that development is going well, and further along than perhaps many had realised. Just like when we revealed the announcement trailer at E3 earlier this year, we like surprising you.

One thing that we wanted to be clear about during this weekend to accompany the new trailer was the scale of this project. We wanted to tell you this now and not in the future so that you’d share our vision for what we want to deliver.

The biggest reason why we haven’t done a remake until now is because it’s a massive undertaking to reconstruct FINAL FANTASY VII from the ground up with the current technology. Producing a proper HD remake of FINAL FANTASY VII that maintains the same feeling of density of the original would result in a volume of content that couldn’t possibly fit into one instalment.

We’ve seen everyone’s comments and reactions to the news that FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE will be a multi-part series and many have speculated correctly as to the reason why we have made this decision. If we were to try to fit everything from the original into one remake instalment, we would have to cut various parts and create a condensed version of FINAL FANTASY VII. We knew none of you would have wanted that.

I hope that by explaining a little more about our design decisions that you can appreciate the size of this project and what we have planned for this remake. Going beyond the scale and depth of the world, narrative and gameplay from the original to deliver something that feels familiar yet new. As I said before, we like delivering surprises. :)

See you all soon and Happy Holidays!
Yoshinori Kitase

This is essentially the same kind of response we saw before – so it seems like Square Enix is sticking to their guns in saying a single release isn’t possible, and that they want to expand the game, while also breaking it up into multiple parts.