It’s pretty wild to think back to The Game Awards 2020 where the world was caught by surprise in the announcement that Final Fantasy 7’s Sephiroth was coming to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as a DLC character in a trailer that can still give us chills over 3 years later.
That surprise apparently carried over to the actual development team for Final Fantasy 7 Remake / Rebirth at Square Enix too.
In a recent interview with Kinda Funny Games, FF7 Rebirth Director Naoki Hamaguchi was asked whether his team had any feedback or early impressions for Sephiroth’s playable form in Smash, and that was apparently a no.
“With sort of Sephiroth in Smash Bros., it was actually extremely confidential that he was even going to be in it,” said Hamaguchi via Kinda Funny. “So, none of the dev team knew, including myself. So it was more like when the whole world knew it, and that’s when we knew it like, ‘Oh, I had no idea!'”
While it’s not too surprising that most of the developers would be kept in the dark to avoid potential leaks, leaving the Co-director of FF7 Remake out of the loop too is interesting since Sephiroth and the game would have been worked on at the same time for at least a short amount of time.
That being said too, we doubt that no one working on Remake / Rebirth knew about Sephiroth’s inclusion when important people like Tetsuya Nomura and Yoshinori Kitase at least had to be brought on to give notes and feedback to Masahiro Sakurai’s team.
“I think Sephiroth was pretty unexpected, so it was fun to see how surprised people were,” said Nomura in a Gamespot interview in 2021. “Considering he was the second Final Fantasy 7 character to be added to the game, I was somewhat unsure if it was okay for him to take up one of those precious slots in the roster. I was relieved to see that people responded positively to his announcement.”
Sakurai previously noted that the script for Sephiroth’s Smash reveal trailer was complete before FF7 Remake was even released in April 2020, which is partly why no references were made to the new game and relied much more on Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children since the Fighters Pass characters were apparently selected in 2019.
Although there was a time when Square Enix felt they’d never be welcome on Nintendo consoles again, they ended up with the most DLC additions in Smash Ultimate Dragon Quest’s Hero and Kingdom Hearts’ Sora closing out support for the game in a way that many fans had only dreamed about.
The Smash creator also spoke at length about Sephiroth’s importance as a villain for video games as a whole, so Sakurai’s team went out of their way to make the special Sephiroth Challenge boss fight for Ultimate despite how difficult it was for them.
In the end, everything seemed to be worth the surprise for both fans and developers.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is set to release on PlayStation 5 this week on February 29, 2024.