I’m surprised it’s taken 13 years to happen, but Final Fantasy 14 is finally bringing Final Fantasy 7 to the MMO in a big way. Upcoming expansion Evercold is getting an entire raid series dedicated to the remake trilogy—that’s 12 whole fights spread across three tiers which will trickle in over the course of Evercold’s two-to-three year lifespan.

It’s been a long wait, but as Rebirth and Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi tells me, the stars finally aligned to make the crossover happen. “I was speaking to [FF14 director and producer Naoki Yoshida] about the fact that Evercold and Revelation release dates were actually going to end up being fairly close together,” he said. “And so, instead of having them as two separate things … let’s do something that can really energise the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole.”

As for what we can expect when the raid series lands? Well, that’s all very mysterious right now. Hamaguchi kept tight-lipped on what sort of fights we’ll see, though he did hint towards efforts being made to make a Final Fantasy 7 boss more suitable for Final Fantasy 14’s raids.

“We’re working with both teams to talk about lore and to make sure it’s well established,” Hamaguchi said. “At the same time, Final Fantasy 14 raids have their own way of working. For example, you’ve got to have quite big bosses for that to be able to work.

“So, I’m not confirming or denying whether Sephiroth will be making an appearance—but say, for example, you can’t just have human Sephiroth be absolutely massive. So how would he appear? What would go on there? These are the kinds of things that we have to think about when we’re thinking about how we can get the world of Final Fantasy 7 into 14 in a way that works.”

I mean, hey, I certainly wouldn’t say no to a giant Sephiroth. But I also can’t help but think about when he made an appearance in Kingdom Hearts 2 and how, despite very much being normal human-sized, he was by far the most foreboding fight in that entire game. Of course, when you’ve got eight players of varying stature surrounding a regular dude, that might just feel like unfairly beating on a guy.

It seems that the ultimate goal, though, is making sure designs and lore are compatible for both worlds. “You really have to make sure that things make sense to the fans,” he said. “If Cloud just appeared in FF14 like ‘Hey, I’m Cloud,’ without any consistent rules, people are going to be like ‘Well, that doesn’t make sense.’ So we really have to think about how and why these worlds are going to be connected. And that’s why we have [OG FF7 writer Kazushige Nojima] on board as well to make sure that things are all looking good from our side. If we don’t have that all in palace, then players are just going to look at that and go ‘This feels fake.'”

But everything has to go through the father of Final Fantasy 7’s cast of characters himself: Tetsuya Nomura. The longtime belt-loving Square Enix artist is also assisting with the raid series—seriously, I’m kind of shocked to see just how many big names are working on this.

“I won’t mention specifics, but when [Creative Studio 3] were saying ‘We’d like to have this character as a raid boss,’ we had a discussion on how we can make them big. I’ll use an example that it is definitely not. So say Cloud is the boss. Nobody wants to go in there and just see Cloud looking like Cloud, but massive.

“The lore is really important in establishing why. Like [you need] a good in-game reason why the character would be big and be able to have people fight them at that kind of scale. So yes, we spent a lot of time discussing that. And then you can come up with an idea and be like ‘Well, we could do this.’ And then Tetsuya Nomura will say ‘No, you cannot do that to that character. You cannot show them like that.’ So these are the parameters that we’re working with, and we’re always coming up with new ideas to try and see what we can do.”

I am so curious to know exactly who or what Hamaguchi is referring to here, and I’m already doing my best to dive deep into my brain and remember which formidable foes are particularly small. My first thought was maybe a tonberry—a 10-minute savage fight with a slow lil guy could be very funny—but I think scaling him up without any other changes makes a lot of sense.

Whatever it is, I’m already giddy at the thought of the raid series in Evercold. Part of me is a tiny bit sad that both the alliance raid and eight-player raids are crossovers next expansion—with the alliance raid being all about Evangelion—but since Hamaguchi seems positive about intertwining the lore in a way that feels right, I’m ready to trust his vision.