Cloud and Sephiroth may be in Super Smash Bros. now, but Square felt Nintendo never wanted them to come back after Final Fantasy 7's PS1 exclusivity
They did break up completely for over five years
Square Enix is now one of the most represented third-parties in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate with Cloud, Sephiroth and Dragon Quest's Hero as playable characters, but that would have once been thought to be impossible when the crossover series was first created.
It almost feels like a miracle that Final Fantasy 7 could receive two fighter slots in Smash too considering it was the game that led to perhaps the biggest breakup in video game history that left some at Square feeling like Nintendo closed the door to them and never wanted to see / work with them ever again.
Hiroshi Kawai, the character programmer for Final Fantasy 7, recalled as much from the impression he got from Nintendo's former president Hiroshi Yamauchi after it was decided to make the new entry exclusive to the PlayStation.
This revelation came via Polygon's oral history piece for FF7 though not all of Kawai's colleagues viewed the meeting ending that bitterly.
"I'll say this. I'm impressed with what Nintendo [was] able to do with the 64 hardware," said Kawai via Polygon. "Mario, Zelda — their devs must be top notch to be able to do that. But that's essentially the extent of what you can do with the hardware. And you would get nowhere near anything like a Final Fantasy running on it."
Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi followed that up by saying that Yamauchi was very gracious in their meeting about their new partnership with Sony by providing them all with expensive beer and food before patting them on the back as they left.
Though Sakaguchi states that there were no bad feelings between them, Kawai responds that the storied game maker is "just trying to be politically correct with that one."
"What I heard was Nintendo said, 'If you're leaving us, never come back," finished Kawai.
That meeting was the culmination of months of work of prototyping on the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation where Sakaguchi made the call to shift Final Fantasy 7 to Sony's console.
The era of every Final Fantasy before it releasing on Nintendo systems had come to and end with the first games in the series leading Square from barely staying alive to one of the biggest developers in the industry.
Nintendo even gave Square a crack at their own Mario game with the Super Mario RPG, but the N64 created too much of a rift between them on multiple levels.
Much of this break has been attributed to the choice to stick with cartridges over CDs, which offered drastically more storage space, though Kawai notes too that the overall horsepower difference and communication issues also influenced the split.
Super Mario RPG was one of the final games Square released with Nintendo at the time in 1996. It wouldn't be until 2002, however, when the two companies would begin to work together once again.
Flash forward over a decade later, and Cloud is being announced as one of the last DLC characters for Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS which is pretty ironic given the split and the fact that FF7 still wasn't available on a Nintendo console at the time.
Smash creator Masahiro Sakurai said Final Fantasy had been one of the most requested additions from fans with Cloud's popularity topping those of the previous protagonists of the 8-bit and 16-bit eras.
Just over a month ago now, we got a double dose of Mako with the surprise announcement and release of Sephiroth for Smash Ultimate.
Some fans were bummed that the companies went with FF7 again over the 14 other mainline entries and countless spin-offs, but it's hard to deny a place to one of the most iconic villains in video games.
Sure, Nintendo may not have gotten Final Fantasy 7 Remake either, but the developers have a very close working relationship again, especially when it comes to their other franchises like Dragon Quest.
Via Polygon, Nintendo Life.
