Final Fantasy 7 Remake was the hardest entry in the trilogy to develop, director Naoki Hamaguchi says, despite the larger scope of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Final Fantasy 7 Revelation.
A 30-person start
Remake began with just 30 people.
Hamaguchi described concern about whether the developers’ work would be enough to satisfy fans.
The gamble connecting all three games
The creative workload sat alongside a business risk. Hamaguchi has previously discussed the uncertainty involved in committing to a trilogy, where the future of the later games depended on how the opening entry performed.
Keeping the development team as consistent as possible across all three entries presented another management challenge.
The team working on Rebirth and Revelation had grown and evolved.
Rebirth takes Cloud Strife and his companions beyond Midgar as the second chapter of Square Enix’s reimagining of the 1997 RPG. Its combination of real-time combat and strategic party management is covered in the Rebirth character builds guide.
Keeping FF7’s identity through the finale
Hamaguchi’s comments about the story describe a similar commitment to decisions made early in the project. “We haven’t altered the core of the story based on reactions at any given time,” he said, explaining that each game has stayed with the central theme established at the start of the Remake series.
New story elements still prompted the developers to question whether their work could genuinely be called FF7R. Hamaguchi described a personal boundary: “I felt it was absolutely essential to avoid turning a masterpiece like FF7 into something that felt like my own personal fan project.”
