Final Fantasy 7 Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi has revealed that the development team hasn’t taken player reaction into account to make any changes to the main story. In an interview with Edge Magazine (via GamesRadar), Hamaguchi spoke about the challenging task of remaking a beloved RPG, and said that the team found it “essential” to avoid turning the Remake trilogy into “my own personal fan project.”
“We haven’t altered the core of the story based on reactions at any given time. It feels as though we’ve built up each title one by one without wavering from the central theme we established at the very start of the Remake series. It wasn’t easy. I felt it was absolutely essential to avoid turning a masterpiece like FF7 into something that felt like my own personal fan project.”
That’s not to say that the Remake trilogy is a 1-to-1 remake of the original; Hamaguchi spoke about wanting to incorporate a new meta-story to Final Fantasy 7 without altering the core vision of what a remake of the 1997 RPG should be.
“The real challenge wasn’t simply incorporating elements that differed from the original or introducing new interpretations. It was constantly asking ourselves whether what we were creating could truly be called FF7R.”
Interestingly, just last week, Hamaguchi pointed out how turning a remake of Final Fantasy 7 into a trilogy was such a risky business decision. He noted that there was a chance that the first entry in the trilogy was received quite poorly, throwing the rest of the trilogy’s future into question.
“For example, if the first title had sold really poorly and been poorly reviewed, I mean, what do you do with the rest of the titles? There’s also this need to keep the team as similar as possible across all of the titles, and that’s another huge headache, especially for people who control the strings. Those are big risks that you have to take, and I don’t think many will.”
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is coming to PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2 on April 8th, and is going to wrap up the story that was started with 2020’s Final Fantasy 7 Remake. The plot will pick up right where Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth left off, and one of the many new features in the upcoming title is the ability to fly just about anywhere in the world.
Hamaguchi confirmed that Final Fantasy 7 Revelation will let players “explore the entire planet” last month, and spoke about how the team worked hard to incorporate regions from Remake and Rebirth into a larger world while still introducing changes in these regions to show the passage of time.
“So, from Remake to Rebirth and from Rebirth to Revelation, we wanted to take a step above. So, from the evolution from going from Rebirth and then heading into Revelation was that, again, ‘How can we expand the open world?’ And the way we achieved that is to achieve this planetary exploration, the open-world map scale where players can just really just explore the entire planet using the Highwind. So, taking on that challenge was one of the rather difficult parts of the development, for sure.”
