FFVII Remake Honeybee Inn Dance Took the Most Prep Time

Final Fantasy VII Remake‘s development team did a lot of work to remake Wall Market, but a song-and-dance took the most work of all. A new blog post from Square Enix covering the development of the game shows that the Honeybee Inn in FFVII Remake took the most prep work of all the sequences in the chapter. The post also shed more light on the boss battle with fan-favorite enemy Hell House.

As with other entries in the FFVII Remake Revisited series, the blog features insights from members of the dev team. This installment included input from Co-Director Motomu Toriyama, Composer Mitsuto Suzuki, Battle Director Teruki Endo, Designer Naoki Hamaguchi, Cutscene Director Hidekazu Miyake, and Character Designer Roberto Ferrari.

Note: The blog and this post contains spoilers for the FFVII Remake Honeybee Inn section, as well as for Chapter 9: The Town That Never Sleeps.

As with other sections of FFVII Remake, the Honeybee Inn and Wall Market areas were approached based on a central idea. This idea was to give players a deeper look at the lives of Midgar’s slum-dwellers. In-game, this is expressed in side quests and quest chains for the residents. The quests also have an additional effect on outcomes by the time the player gets into the Honeybee Inn: They affect the outfits Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith wear in that section. Sector 7’s sidequests affect Tifa’s outfit, Sector 5’s quests influence Aerith’s choice of clothing, and Wall Market itself (Sector 6), determine Cloud’s look.

When remaking the Honeybee Inn for FFVII Remake, the team decided from the beginning to reframe the establishment. In Final Fantasy VII, the Honeybee Inn was clearly a brothel, but for Remake, the team opted to recast the location as more of a cabaret, with a focus on “maximum showbusiness”. This included a song-and-dance number, naturally. The process of referencing dance shows, editing together footage, lyrics, and choreography, was quite time-consuming. In fact, according to Toriyama, pre-production prep took up “the longest period in the whole development” of Wall Market. By the time development wrapped up, the finalized sequence contained many references to Cloud’s actions from the original game as well as in the remake, with distinctive poses and steps.

Final Fantasy VII Remake is available on PC, PS4, and PS5. Its sequel, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, is in development. Figures of Cloud in one of the dress options from the Honeybee Inn section are available for pre-order.