While Square Enix has seen plenty of critical acclaim and commercial success with its ongoing Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy, director Naoki Hamaguchi has acknowledged that splitting the classic 1997 RPG into three games was a risky move. In an interview with Final Weapon, he said that the decision to split the ambitious remake into three games was a creative decision, but when it comes to the business side of things, it would have gone downhill quite quickly if the first entry didn’t do well.
Hamaguchi also spoke about some of the logistical challenges that came up alongside the decision to split the remake into a trilogy, since a similar development team would need to be maintained for all three releases to ensure that there was gameplay and story continuity.
“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.”
On the subject of holding on to the same team, Hamaguchi also spoke about how there has been a “level of success here” that can potentially be replicated with other teams across Square Enix to help iterate on new games at a quicker pace rather than having fresh teams having to start each game from scratch.
“I do think there is a success level here that I think can be replicated now. In the old way of doing things, things were obviously very hard, and once a game was done, the team would separate and do their own thing, but obviously we have a dedicated team working on this right now. And while it is really hard to develop games now, I think the level of expectation is just so high, and the difficulty is just so great, but the way we are doing things, I think, could be sort of a lodestar for the company.”
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is being developed for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2, and is slated for release on April 8th, 2027. Being the final game in the planned trilogy, Revelation is also slated to be a massive release, and Hamaguchi has said that players will need to play through it multiple times to experience everything in the game.
Among other things, Final Fantasy 7 Revelation will take into account when a player picks up a side quest and with which character, resulting in a variety of different dialogue depending on the larger story being told. The director said, “We have prepared many cases where it changes not just whose perspective the quest is told from, but the story experience, the gameplay experience, and even the conclusion.”
As for just how much content will be in the game at launch, Hamaguchi said that it “probably exceeds Rebirth.”
