When Square Enix announced Final Fantasy 7 Remake as a multipart series, it took some fans by surprise and disappointed some others. Essentially, the news meant that even though fans would finally get Final Fantasy 7 Remake, they would still have to wait for years at a time to get their hands on the whole experience.
While Square Enix has provided a reason for its decision in the past, FF7 Remake Producer Yoshinori Kitase took the opportunity to touch on it once more during an interview with the Square Enix blog. He addressed the question while answering why Midgar was the only area to appear in the game.
According to him, the original Final Fantasy 7 just had too much content to fit into one title comprehensively. If he and the team had gone that route, they would have had to decide which portions of the original game they were going to cut to make the project work, and they knew that fans would be upset if that happened. On top of this, cramming all of the content of the original game onto one title would prevent the team from giving it the graphical improvements and details that it deserved as a modern game, which went against Remake's original purpose.
So, when deciding how to tackle the game, the team figured the best direction to go in would be dividing Remake up into multiple parts. This method would allow them to not only eventually give fans the whole story with the highest level of graphics possible, but to also expand upon the portions and areas where they felt the game was lacking.
For example, in the original Final Fantasy 7, there are many instances where the game will skip over particular events, opting to imply what happens instead of showing. In these instances, the screen will go black, and when the game loads again, the player will find themselves in a different location. Kitase refers to these instances as "breaks" in the game, and he and his team will be removing them in favor of showing the events and expanding upon the story.
Overall, in the end, multiple parts would allow Remake to be more immersive than the original Final Fantasy 7 altogether. And since Midgar is the first area players explore in the original title, it naturally became the area to Remake's first episode.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake will launch for the PlayStation 4 on April 10, 2020.
Source: Square Enix