Although Final Fantasy 8 Remastered was revealed right alongside new gameplay footage from Final Fantasy 7 Remake, there is an important distinction between the two. One is built from the ground up for modern platforms and features completely new gameplay, and the other is a visual touch-up of a PS1 classic with some improvements made where possible.

As far as what improvements players can expect, series producer Yoshinori Kitase has revealed a few changes coming to Final Fantasy 8 Remastered. By and large, fans should welcome these changes, although one could be seen as controversial.

Perhaps the most important modernizing of Final Fantasy 8 Remastered is that it will offer triple battle speed. While there is something to be said for the pace of battle in a JRPG, some battles can easily be one using basic attacks and are better served getting right to the XP and item reward screen.

Those battles in Final Fantasy 8 Remastered will also apparently have some new tweaks like options for Max HP and skills available from the start. It’s a little unclear how exactly these “battle enhancements” will work but it sounds like they could be optional.

And the most controversial change is that Final Fantasy 8 Remastered will allow players to turn off random battles. JRPG fans likely have a love/hate relationship with random battles in that they remember the grind associated with walking in circles but were frustrated when they got in the way of progress. Being able to remove them when players want to focus on the story is a nice change, and then if they want to grind they can do so as well.

The Steam version of the game already includes more customization options that extend beyond these basic ones. Players can give themselves max level Gil, for example, if they don’t want to worry about farming money. Or they can just skip the leveling process and go right to having every ability in the game. These options won’t all be coming to the console Remaster but some apparently are.

It may not be the complete remake that Final Fantasy 7 is getting, but these changes for Final Fantasy 8 Remastered show that Square Enix is at least trying to modernize the game a little bit. Whether or not that leads to changes that don’t go over well with fans isn’t yet clear; we will see how the lack of random battles changes things.

Source: Ryokutya (via Dual Shockers)