Final Fantasy VII‘s Cloud Strife has two defining characteristics: he suffers from repressed emotional trauma and carries a giant sword. Square Enix almost toyed with ruining one of those when it was originally planning to develop the current remake trilogy.

The Ex-Soldier’s iconic Buster Sword looks like a six-foot butcher’s knife. While fans love it, the RPG publisher was worried it might not look realistic enough for the real-world aesthetic its Unreal Engine homages to the classic PS1 game were chasing. Maybe what looked good with blocky polygons back in 1997 wouldn’t fly in a less cartoony overhaul.

“While making Remake, there was this aspect of the weight and how Cloud swings [the sword] around with one hand that sort of felt like it would weaken the sense of realism, you know?” director Naoki Hamaguchi recently recalled in an interview with YouTuber Julien Chièze, according to a translation by Shinra Archeology.

“So at the time, when we were making Remake, there was some discussion about whether we should give Cloud a more realistic version of the Buster Sword,” he continued. “But it was just too iconic, and if we’d made it just a regular old sword, players wouldn’t accept it…in the end we stayed faithful to the OG and a whole new generation of people fell in love with it, so I think it was the right call.”

It’s hard to know just how serious Hamaguchi is being or just how real the concerns and doubts raised in those original meetings were. Take away his Buster Sword and Cloud is just a spikey-haired emo kid slowly having a psychological break with reality. Much harder for all the fans to cosplay as during conventions.