In this week’s issue of Famitsu magazine, the original director of Final Fantasy VIII, Yoshinori Kitase, had few interesting tidbits to share regarding the recently announced remaster of Final Fantasy VIII, which is scheduled to be released this year on all modern consoles, including PC.

Translations provided by bk2128 on Twitter and Siliconera:

• Hiroshi Harada (The original battle programmer), Tomohiro Kayano (character model designer) and Tetsuya Nomura are all involved in the Remastered project.
• “The character refinement quality is the result of having the original staff work on it.”
• Battle assistance is going to be added to the Remaster.
• Chocobo World will not be included. Instead, the items you could get from it will be available through a special ability Rinoa has.
• “Final Fantasy VIII was the first work that we’ve used motion capture on. At the time we didn’t know how things worked, so we made the actor use a heavy gun. Looking back now, I get the cold sweats thinking about any worst case scenario accidents that could’ve happened.”
• “Final Fantasy VIII has had its share of influence in Hollywood entertainment, be it a game screen shown in a Hollywood movie or an offer we got last year from a major video game-related film that wanted to use the Gunblade.”
• Triple the speed.
• Combat is also enhanced. (Max HP & ATB, can always use special moves)
• No encounter.
• PC only features:
  • the ability to obtain all items, abilities, special moves and cards.
  • Max GF level, gil and Magic
  • Detailed customization in system settings.

Sources: Twitter, Siliconera

Final Fantasy VIII Remastered is scheduled to release in 2019 on PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Steam(PC).