With the development of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy having taken a decade at this point, the eventual release of the third entry will mark a major event for its development team, essentially ending its time with the seminal RPG. In an interview with GameSpot, director Naoki Hamaguchi has spoken about wrapping up work on the trilogy, and what that will mean for the team going forward.
“That’s a good question, and also, a very difficult question [to answer],” said Hamaguchi when asked about whether he and his team have been savoring their final few months with the trilogy. “We want to see it through, and we want to meet, if not surpass, fan expectations with the final installment. But it would be a lie to say that I haven’t thought, ‘Oh no! There’s still more I have to get through!’ Especially when transitioning from the first to second game. But now that we are seeing the conclusion of the trilogy, there is no wavering. We are focused and want to see it through.”
Leaving behind something you might have worked on for over a decade can understandably be a challenging thing, especially when taking the context of Final Fantasy 7‘s popularity into account. Hamaguchi had spoken in the past, however, that he hopes to work alongside the same team again on future projects. Back in October, he spoke about how the team had bonded throughout their time on the project, and how this helped them improve quite a bit.
“I think once we have got out the third game in the series, and hopefully it’s a big success,” he said. “We’ll definitely move on to something else, and it’d be great to see what that team that we’ve managed to build up together produces. I don’t know if it’s the right way of talking about it, but the bonds, the relationship between the team has definitely improved a lot and strengthened that team.”
Whether this next project will be yet another game in the Final Fantasy series or whether it will be something new altogether is also currently unknown. Despite this, however, Hamaguchi noted that fans of the Remake trilogy can also look forward to the team’s next release.
“I can’t say at this point what that’s going to be, whether it’s going to be a completely new game, completely new IP, whether it’s gonna be something new within the Final Fantasy series, but I’m really looking forward to it,” he said. “I think fans who’ve seen what our work has been on the Remake series, the three games, will really look forward to this exciting, new gameplay experience. What we work on after that, I’m very much looking forward to working on that myself as well.”
The most recent entry in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy was 2024’s Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and development on the third game has been described as going well. In another recent interview, Hamaguchi also confirmed that the third game will feature a “powered-up version” of fan-favorite mini-game Queen’s Blood.
In the meantime, also check out our review of the recent Nintendo Switch 2 release of Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade.
