Every so often, I come across something that I didn’t realise I needed in my life, only to then become obsessed with every detail of it. We all love Final Fantasy 7 here at Retro Dodo; I mean, how could we not? It’s an absolute institution and one of the most incredible games ever made. Still, despite our passion for this game, I can safely say I don’t love it as much as Jamie Colliver, the die-hard fan who has recreated the entirety of Final Fantasy 7 within LittleBigPlanet 2.
And I don’t just mean the odd cutscene or characters that kind of look the same in a half-ditched attempt to be authentic; I mean every shot, every piece of speech, every song, every scene from FF7 recreated by hand in Sackboy’s world.
This really is something that you need to see to believe, so it’s lucky that Jamie has documented the entire process over 141 videos on his YouTube Channel. Creating a game that’s been out for almost 3 decades within a platformer that came out back in 2011 isn’t something that you might originally think could work, and it turns out that all it takes is around four years of work and a life-long love of Final Fantasy.
Speaking with GameSpot, Jamie explains that he was experimenting using the creation tools within LBP2, with the mechanics allowing him to go as far as to create new gameplay features and a new over-arcing theme of the game feeling like a stage performance, something else we wouldn’t be angry about if it rolled into the nearest theatre!
What blows me away entirely is that the whole game takes 30 hours to play through and has each and every one of the 140,000 lines of dialogue from Final Fantasy 7. The level of detail here blows my mind, and Jamie has already said that he’s planning on adding bosses from the FF7 Remake and FF7 Rebirth after telling the entire world about his epic creation.
At the minute, you can only watch Jamie’s game on YouTube as the servers for LBP2 have ceased to exist. Still, he’s considering taking his work to the top and seeing if Square-Enix will include it as a mini-game in the Remake trilogy. If enough people know about Jamie’s fantastic creation, then maybe it’ll happen! I’ve reached out to him to chat more about this mammoth process, and I’m looking forward to finding out more about his work and future developing plans while documenting his journey for you all soon!
