Final Fantasy VII is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year and directors Tetsuya Nomura and Yoshinori Kitase have released a special message to commemorate the occasion.
Kitase served as director of the original Final Fantasy VII and Project Producer on Final Fantasy VII Remake, while Nomura was involved with Character Design in the original and as Project Creative Director in Remake.
Even though the Western release for Final Fantasy VII did not come until later in the year, the celebration for the 25th anniversary begins today on the exact anniversary of the release in Japan on January 31, 1997.
- MORE: How to upgrade Final Fantasy VII Remake PS Plus version to PS5.
Nomura and Kitase's Final Fantasy VII Special Anniversary Message
In honor of the game's 25th anniversary in Japan, the official Final Fantasy VII Twitter account, which is now focused on Final Fantasy VII Remake, posted an image today to celebrate the occasion.
The image includes quotes from both Kitase and Nomura about the big anniversary, which you can see below.
Kitase brings up an interesting point by saying that Final Fantasy VII is now considered one of the "early series" games, while it still feels like a recent one to them.
Both Kitase and Nomura seem very enthused about the fact that Final Fantasy VII is still a phenomenon now 25 years later, perhaps even more so with all of the content associated with it now.
A lot of people were probably hoping for potential Final Fantasy VII Remake Part 2 news here, but unfortunately this message is focused solely on Final Fantasy VII itself and just mentions the exciting upcoming projects by name.
This anniversary message for Final Fantasy VII was a little basic, but it's always great to hear from both Nomura and Kitase in regards to the series and how much it really does mean to them.
Kingdom Hearts Celebrates The Anniversary Yet Again
Square Enix has a lot of properties under its umbrella, but there is no series more closely connected with Final Fantasy in the bunch than Kingdom Hearts, which has had Nomura as director since the very beginning.
From the very first game in the series, Final Fantasy played a big part with characters being included like Cloud and Sephiroth. While the usage of Final Fantasy characters within Kingdom Hearts has been scaled back, there was no way they could not also celebrate the anniversary.
This came courtesy of a special image on the official Japanese Kingdom Hearts Twitter, which you can see above. This is similar to them honoring the 20th anniversary with a picture of Sora in front of Merlin's tower as seen below in a tweet from this day in 2017.
It is definitely starting to become a bit of a tradition for Kingdom Hearts to help celebrate Final Fantasy VII's anniversary, so it'll be interesting to see what they have in store for the 30th anniversary and beyond!