In the wake of industry-wide layoffs, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director Naoki stresses how how vital it has been to have worked with the same team for the past decade – and how, hopefully, they can bring that expertise to the next project post-Part 3.

“My team has developed so much together, grown so much, gotten so much experience and knowledge while working on the Remake trilogy,” Hamaguchi-san told GamesRadar+ at the Golden Joysticks Awards 2024, hours before Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth scooped four of of its six prize nominations. “We’re still working on the third game – that’s not finished yet. We still have to get that out the door,” he laughs, though we do know that Part 3’s plot has already been written. “When we get to the end of the trilogy, in terms of what the next project that the team works on, I really don’t know yet at all. It could be the next numbered Final Fantasy. It could be a completely different brand. We might start up a completely new brand, but whatever it is, I mean, I’m incredibly excited to work on that and see what we can do with that knowledge we’ve built up.”

Hamaguchi-san showed great appreciation for how his team has managed to stick together in the years since Final Fantasy 7 Remake, retaining incredibly specific talent amid the spate of industry-wide layoffs, closures, and some of the most expensive studio acquisitions ever marking cause for concern elsewhere. “I think the reason [Sony and Microsoft] did that is because of the way game development is now,” he suggests, no doubt referring to the increasingly high technical demands, player expectations, and industry standards involved in modern gaming. “It’s just so difficult to make these real, high-end games without having that experience base. For a team with no experience at all, who’s never done a large-scale game, just to throw them in and get them to make something is such a difficult ask. So I think that’s why they went around buying these studios that already had a certain level of experience built up.

“But certainly, considering that background, my team has been together – The Final Fantasy 7 team – for about a total of 10 years, maybe. To go through this whole trilogy project, slowly building up our experience and our know-how, the team has seriously learned so much and grown so much during that period,” he says of how valuable it is to retain that talent. “So I think when we finally do bring the trilogy to a close and get the final game out, we’ll be in a really great position to move forward and do something even greater – and that experience is just so key to that, and that we managed to build [that] up by staying together.”

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