Square Enix delays its Avengers game and the Final Fantasy VII remake
It’s hardly uncommon for a video game to get delayed, but it’s somewhat rare for two delays to happen at once and for both to be completely unsurprising. Today, publisher Square Enix announced that it’s pushing back its two biggest releases for the spring, and—no offense to either game—it seems like the right move for them. The first is the Final Fantasy VII remake that Square has been teasing for the last decade or so, which was supposed to come out on March 3 but has now been pushed back to April 10.
That’s not a staggering delay, especially since fans of SOLDIER and AVALANCHE have already been waiting longer for this remake than it took to actually go from the first Final Fantasy on NES to the original FFVII on PlayStation, but it still stings a little. After all, Square is still being cagey about just how much of the original game will be represented in this remake, so waiting longer for it to come out means waiting longer to find out where in the plot it’ll cram in a frustrating cliffhanger. Rock Paper Shotgun notes that this puts FFVII right between the Resident Evil 3 remake and Cyberpunk 2077, so hopefully you’ve got $180 to blow in April.
The other delay was for Crystal Dynamics’ Avengers game, which is being published by Square Enix and was supposed to come out on May 15. It has now been bumped all the way to September 4, but based on the way the game looked when it made its debut at E3 last summer, a few extra months in the oven can’t possibly hurt. The game is supposed to be some kind of Destiny-style loot grind, with you and a couple of friends controlling one of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes as you go on online or solo missions and customize the characters with new hammers and shields and Iron Man suits. Crystal Dynamics made those new Tomb Raider games that were (mostly) really good, but Avengers looks like a whole new kind of thing for the studio.