'Final Fantasy VII Remake' Director Not Interested In Remaking Other 'Final Fantasy' Games, Wants To Create Something New

Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy director Naoki Hamaguchi revealed he’s not interested in remaking any other Final Fantasy games after spending 10 years working on the Remake trilogy.

In an interview with Ollie Reynolds at Nintendo Life, Hamaguchi was asked, “Are there any other Final Fantasy games in the series that you’d like to see get remade?”

He answered, “In terms of if the company thinks it’s a good idea and there’s a business opportunity there to do one of the older Final Fantasy games and remake it in a similar way, there’s a lot of them we haven’t done, so I definitely think we could.”

However, he does not want to be the one in charge of it, “I wouldn’t want it to be me that does it. The Final Fantasy VII series has taken up well over 10 years of my career as a creator, and it’s been great, I’ve really enjoyed working on it. But if I was asked by the company to helm another Final Fantasy for another 10 years, that would probably be my career over by the time it’s done, so I would rather work on something completely new. I think the fans would probably appreciate something new too, maybe.”

He concluded, “If there’s another younger creator within the company, someone who’s really passionate about Final Fantasy and wants to do a remake project, then I’d definitely back them up as much as I could; I just don’t want it to be me!”

In fact, elsewhere in the interview, Hamaguchi shared that he hopes the team he’s put together will be able to work on something new after they are done with Final Fantasy VII, “One big thing I’m looking forward to in the future is having the team I’ve put together work on something new. One thing that’s common in the industry is that when a project is finished, the team is split and moved around, but that hasn’t happened here. We’ve basically got the same guys all the way from the beginning of the project right through to the end. So I’m really looking forward to the game that we look to create after – it could be a Final Fantasy, it could be something completely different... I’ve not decided yet.”

“But whatever it is, gamers who have paid attention and seen what we’ve done with the Remake trilogy, they’ll have great expectations and will look forward to seeing what the team come up with,” he finished.

In a separate interview with VGC, he provided an update on the status of the game, “we’re working really hard on the third game in the Remake series at the moment. It’s coming along really well. I’ve got in my head the vision now, the gameplay structure, the gameplay experience, the core experience, and it’s looking in a really good state.”

“It’s something really satisfying that gamers can get their teeth into, and it’ll be just a brilliant experience that it really should be and has to be,” he continued. “So we’re going to work on that, brush that up even further, and then deliver it in the not-too-distant future. You really can look forward to that climax of the series, and it’ll be exactly what you want it to be. So don’t worry about that. It’s coming, and it’s just as good as you think it is. I’m very confident in the game that I’m making there.”

Earlier in that interview, he revealed he is working to improve the game’s pacing compared to Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, “For the third game, in terms of what I said about that and the way I’m looking at that is about improving the pacing and making sure that, to achieve an even greater level of immersion in the game, we make sure that the story developments move forward in a fairly speedy manner and with the right pace essentially, rather than feeling slow and drawn out.”

“I think that may have been misconstrued by people; they may have said, ‘OK, that means they’re going to cut down on the volume and they’re going to remove story content, it’s going to be a shorter game, they’re going to cut it down’, and that’s not what I’m saying at all. It’s about making sure the pacing feels right, it’s not about cutting out content, it’s making sure that it feels right, the speed that the story progresses at feels right, and it is fairly quick and feels like you can get through it at a reasonable pace. But it has to feel right, so that’s what I mainly intended to say there,” he clarified.

Square Enix has not revealed a release date for the game, but speculation indicates the game will arrive sometime in 2027 based on the 3-year development cycle for Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, which released in February 2024 on PlayStation 5 about 4 years after the release of Final Fantasy VII Remake, which debuted on PlayStation 4 in April 2020. However, Rebirth did not go into development until after the release of Final Fantasy VII Remake’s Intermission DLC, which was released in June of 2021.

NEXT: ‘The Outer Worlds 2’ Is Like a “Circle Jerk,” According to Synthetic Man