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Why Square Enix is remaking Final Fantasy 7 as three full games
Director Naoki Hamaguchi argues the scope of the 1997 PlayStation role playing game made a trilogy the only honest answer, even as fans question the pacing.
Director Naoki Hamaguchi argues the scope of the 1997 PlayStation role playing game made a trilogy the only honest answer, even as fans question the pacing.
Square Enix is finishing a project that began in 2020 and will not close until spring 2027: a three-game remake of Final Fantasy 7, the 1997 PlayStation role-playing game that became a touchstone of the genre. The third and final entry, Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, was revealed at the publisher's Summer Game Fest showcase earlier this month. The actual news is not the announcement itself. It is what the announcement reveals about how Square Enix's team thinks a faithful remake has to be built.
Director Naoki Hamaguchi, who led Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and now the trilogy's final chapter, made that case directly in a sit-down interview at the studio's Los Angeles office in the days after the showcase. His argument, as reported by CNET, is that a faithful retelling of the 1997 original cannot fit in a single game without sacrificing something that mattered.
The original Final Fantasy 7 was a continent-spanning role-playing game whose scope defined a generation of the genre. Remake, the 2020 first entry, covered only the opening hours of that story and expanded them into a full release. Rebirth, the 2024 middle chapter, covered more. Revelation, scheduled for spring 2027, will close the arc. For Hamaguchi, that is not padding. It is the only way to honor the source material at the density the original was known for.
Not every player agrees. On fan forums and in Rebirth's review threads, critics have argued that the trilogy structure inflates content that the original handled in a single chapter, that side activities pad the runtime without deepening the story, and that each entry's pacing suffers for spreading one act of the source across a full-priced release. The critique is structural. It targets the methodology Hamaguchi is defending.
Hamaguchi's response, in the CNET interview, is that the alternative would have been worse. Cutting material from the original to fit one game would mean losing what made it matter in the first place. The trilogy is, in his framing, an attempt to preserve that matter at the cost of three entry points and three waits between them.
The texture of the interview reinforces the methodology read. Hamaguchi discussed downloadable content philosophy as a question of what a remake owes the original versus what it owes modern players who did not grow up with the 1997 release. He described the airship Highwind, a late-game vehicle in the original, as a design problem the team had to solve before they could write the chapter that uses it. He acknowledged that battle-royale design language, the kind of large-arena, last-team-standing combat that defines a separate genre, influenced how the team thought about the climax's scale.
None of those threads are separate stories. They are evidence of how a team decides what fits in a single game and what gets its own release. The trilogy is the cumulative answer to those decisions.
The question that lingers is not whether spring 2027 will ship. It is whether, ten years after the project began, three games will feel like the right way to tell a story the original told once. Hamaguchi's bet is that fidelity to scope is worth the cost. Players who wait until 2027 to judge will be the ones who settle it.