While Square Enix is hard at work in developing the highly-anticipated third part of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy, the studio has also noted that player feedback is an important aspect of how it develops its games. In an interview with ntower, Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Rebirth co-director Naoki Hamaguchi spoke about fan feedback being important, and how Final Fantasy 7 being split into three titles has been beneficial for the studio in terms of said feedback.
“Yes, I think that is an important aspect,” said Hamaguchi when asked about how important fan feedback has been during development. “We do listen to a lot of feedback, obviously, it is very important to us. Certainly, one thing our producer, Yoshinori Kitase, has said it’s an advantage of this series that we can look at the results part way through because it’s a trilogy of three games, and one of them will go out into the world and they’ll get responses to that, and then we can look at that and reflect that in the later game. That is definitely a part of it. That is very important. It’s a great opportunity to be able to do that as well.”
Hamaguchi also noted, however, that there are limits to how much this kind of feedback should affect the core vision behind a game. When it comes to the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy, Hamaguchi spoke about the importance of a core theme, a core base, and a creative vision that has to define the foundations of the title. Rather, the example he gave of where fan feedback can be useful were the mini-games and their difficulty tuning.
“But I think one thing is very important when you look at that feedback and opinions from players is what I want to avoid is having that adapt and change the core experience of the game,” he said. “I think that core theme, that core base, that creative vision you have has to come from the creative team. In our case, that’s obviously Mr. Nomura, Mr. Nozuma, Mr. Kitase, myself as well. We have to really get that solid idea of what game we want, what experience we want to create down.”
“That is not affected by the fan feedback at all. That really is our decision and our creative vision. But then you have to look at other aspects of the game where it is important to look at fan feedback, and certainly in terms of the gameplay experience itself, things like … We got a lot of feedback on for the mini games, for example. ‘I really like this mini game,’ or ‘I thought this one was maybe should be done differently.’ The difficulty level is another thing that we really have to pay attention to and try and place it where we want. Those kinds of areas of feedback and the nitty-gritty of the game, the small details, are very important.”
This kind of feedback, according to Hamaguchi, is helping the third game in the trilogy be a better experience, since the development team has been able to learn from the last two titles, especially when it comes to figuring out what works and what doesn’t work.
“The third game, again, should be a better experience because we’ve learned and we know what people want and they like,” said Hamaguchi. “So, it’s very interesting doing a series like this. And obviously, it’s a little bit unique because we’re releasing three standalone package games. But in a lot of ways, because it’s an ongoing series of direct sequels, it’s a lot like doing a service model game in some ways, although not exactly the same. So, it’s quite a unique balance there in terms of how we have to deal with feedback. And I’m very honored to be able to do it in this way because it’s a unique experience that not many developers get.”
The third game in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy doesn’t yet have any release date. However, Square Enix is getting ready to bring the trilogy to more platforms – namely Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch 2. This is starting with the release of Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade on January 22, 2026.
