Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age director teases further PS1-era remakes after Final Fantasy 7

PS1 Final Fantasy games "far more likely" to be remade, Takashi Katano told IBTimes UK.

The man at the helm of Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age has teased Square Enix remaking more Final Fantasy titles that were originally released prior to the PlayStation 2 era, opening up the possibility that Final Fantasy 6, 8 and 9 could be remade.

The Zodiac Age is a remaster of Final Fantasy 12, which launched on Sony's PS2 in 2006. However in an interview with IBTimes UK, the game's director, Takashi Katano, noted that a full remake, rather than a remaster, would be preferable for titles released on older hardware.

"[Final Fantasy 12] is a PS2 title, and you look at the other titles in the series and technologically anything before the PS2 era is going to be quite difficult to do a modern remaster of to a suitable level of quality," Katano told us.

"That means [a future game] is far more likely to be a remake."

Remasters are essentially new licks of paint for games, whereas remakes are complete renovations. Developer and publisher Square Enix has flitted between both for Final Fantasy games over the past decade.

Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age is the latest entry to fit into the former camp, with the PS2 title enjoying a HD graphical upgrade, minor gameplay and balancing tweaks and an all-new Job system inherited from a Japan-exclusive edition of the game.

Final Fantasy 10 and its direct sequel, Final Fantasy 10-2, received similar treatments for the PS4 and PS Vita in 2015, while the first five entries in the franchise have been ported, remade and remastered in various guises for PC, Nintendo handhelds and mobile devices.

The same applied to the seminal Final Fantasy 7, until the surprise announcement at Sony's E3 2015 press conference that the PS1 classic would be remade from the ground-up. It quickly became the most high-profile revisitation Square Enix has embarked upon.

Square Enix has been tight-lipped about how the remake is progressing, but there are hopes that it will re-emerge at E3 in June.

With Final Fantasy's pre-PS2 year boasting a number of all-time great RPGs, such as Final Fantasy 6 (released first on the Super Nintendo and later on PS1), 8 and 9, Katano's comments leave the door open for a number of full-fledged remakes from Square Enix's golden years.

Remasters are seemingly a less preferable approach for the company considering the low resolution and blocky character models of the original releases.

Set to feature a new real-time battle system and an expanded story, 'Final Fantasy 7 Remake' still lacks a firm launch date. However, Square Enix has previously stated that it will be a multi-part series, implying it will arrive on PS4 in episodic chunks.

With that in mind, any further Final Fantasy remakes are likely some way off at this stage.

As for which game would be next in the pipeline, Katano told us that it would be largely determined by the response from fans: "We really have to hear their voices on that, if they want to see a remake or a remaster of a certain game then that's more likely to be the one we go for."

"I've personally been working at Square Enix for 20 years now and I've got a lot of memories from that time. I think the way that we look at it is not the game that [we] would like to remake it's really down to what the players, the fans, want to see."

IBTimes UK also spoke to the producer of Final Fantasy 12: The Zodiac Age, Hiroaki Kato, who hinted that future Square Enix games may make a return to Final Fantasy 12's world of Ivalice. You can read the full interview here.