Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: Hamaguchi Defends "Yellow Paint"

"Yellow Paint" is a technical term used to define parts of the graphics that are highlighted with a very bright, easy-to-spot color – usually yellow, hence the name, but depending on the circumstances it can be red, green, or magenta – so that the player doesn't risk passing by them unnoticed.

The technique is sometimes used subtly, for example, when only certain elements of the game's graphics are yellow, while other times it's blatantly obvious, appearing effectively as a brushstroke of yellow paint that seems to say to the player: "Hey, buddy: this way!".

Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth falls into this second category: the second chapter of the Remake, in fact, by presenting players with vast open-world regions, has implemented these brushstrokes to highlight climbable paths, a choice that not everyone has appreciated aesthetically.

THE YELLOW PAINT VIRUS HAS INFECTED FF7 pic.twitter.com/calN0dqHf4

— Dave NewBlood (@DaveOshry) February 8, 2024

Naoki Hamaguchi Defends "Yellow Paint" in FFVII Rebirth

The topic reached the ears of Naoki Hamaguchi, game director, who explained the design choice to Gamesradar: "I think there is definitely a need for that kind of thing in a game in a lot of cases. We think about various obvious development experiments, we try different things looking for what works best, what fits best, the best way to do that thing in the game. The need to guide players around from a gameplay perspective and show them what they can do and what they need to do in certain cases is absolutely necessary. So I think it's obvious that there's a debate about how it's done, at what level, and how it works. And that there are still people who say: 'no, it doesn't suit us! We don't like it!'. That's fair, but I think there was really a need here, and it's something really worth dwelling on."

Hamaguchi speaks with the experience of player-experience monitored over hundreds of hours of Alpha and Beta testing, where it evidently emerged that without the 'little help', too many players would get lost or simply not identify the most important paths. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth – for which we remind you of our Review – is certainly not the first and definitely won't be the last game to adopt similar solutions...

...and then, on second thought, the original Final Fantasy VII already had the ability to highlight passages: judge for yourselves: