'Final Fantasy 7 Remake' leaks reveal one surprising way it honors the original's legacy

Final Fantasy VII Remake won't even encompass the entirety of the original game, and yet the recently leaked file size indicates it'll already be the biggest Final Fantasy game of all time, bigger in fact that almost every other game on the PlayStation 4. The rumored file size rivals that of Red Dead Redemption 2 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, but it also means Final Fantasy VII Remake honors the legacy of the original in an important way.

Twitter user Nitomatta leaked a picture of what's supposedly the Korean box art for Final Fantasy VII Remake on Monday, and it the unconfirmed box art shows the game will take up around 100 GB of memory. The hard copy will also span across two discs (something we already knew). As the standard amount of memory a PS4 or PS4 Pro comes with is 1 TB, this means the Final Fantasy VII Remake download will take up about a tenth of your PS4's total memory.

Final Fantasy VII Remake is said to only cover the portion of the PS1 game set in Midgar that is roughly half of the game's first disc story-wise, so this massive size is pretty surprising.

We've mainly seen footage and a single demo from the early parts of the game, but the file size indicates that there's still a lot of surprises in store for players as the game expands the characters, stories, and cutscenes.

In a 2008 post on the Giant Bomb forums, one user notes that the original game was spread out across three discs, however, game files for the entire game (around 243 MB) were found on each disc: "They just put the entire game on each disc and filled up the remaining 400 MB with full-motion video," user Meowayne wrote. In other words, the vast majority of files on the original discs were taken up by cinematic cutscenes. Remake will probably use disc space more efficiently, but we can safely assume based on the legacy of Final Fantasy that FF7R will have far more cinematic cutscenes than your average game. It's possible that's where most of this 100 GB are spent.

Nitomatta, who leaked the box art, also theorized that "the massive size is undoubtedly taken up by video files even if they are compressed."

This kind of enormous file size is unheard of for offline single-player RPGs like this, but it's becoming more and more common for newer games as we near the end of the current console generation. Red Dead Redemption 2 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare both had initial file sizes above 100 GB on consoles. Games-as-a-service titles like Fortnite and PUBG are also starting to near this file size on account of ongoing game updates. Final Fantasy VII Remake will be something totally different that's just as big.

While the big file size might not make your hard drive very happy, it mainly indicates that Final Fantasy VII Remake will be a title densely packed with details expanding far beyond the original. Everything we've seen so far has had an immense amount of detail, and this massive file size hopefully means that Final Fantasy VII Remake is taking the memory space required to prevent any major graphical downgrades before launch. But there's also the presence of new characters that didn't appear in the original, along with fresh mechanics like trackable side quests.

This file size leak also makes it clear why the retail version of Final Fantasy VII Remake is taking up two discs. If it functions like Red Dead Redemption 2, don't be surprised if one disc is just required to install data onto one's system while the other is what's mainly used to play the game.

In the era of the original PlayStation, cinematic RPGs like the Final Fantasy series were the most common games that took up multiple discs' worth of space, and for that alone, Final Fantasy VII Remake upholds a certain king of legacy. If this 100 GB download size is accurate, then we can also expect many hours worth of cutscenes.

Final Fantasy VII Remake will be released exclusively for PlayStation 4 on April 10, 2020.