When you set out to create a game as big and ambitious as Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth, it takes a lot of careful planning. Or, in the case of Square Enix developers, maybe less than you think. Turns out that while they knew what the overall story of all the Final Fantasy VII Remake games would be, they didn’t specifically know what would happen in each game until they got deeper into development.
Naoki Hamaguchi explained the slightly loose approach to the series’ story structure while at MCM London 2025.
“Okay, so in terms of the overall construction, the structure for all three parts of the trilogy. At the beginning of development for each game, the overall structure is pretty fixed down. It’s decided by our scenario writer, Mr. Nojima Kazushige,” he told the crowd gathered for the Final Fantasy VII Remake panel. “So yeah, like I say, we had the overall plot, the overarching structure was already down there, but when we started on the first game, what we’d really decided was this is gonna be the story up until the escape from Midgar. And honestly, there was nothing decided about where we’re gonna cut the second game and the third game after that.”
So Hamaguchi and his team went into the massive undertaking of remaking one of the most iconic JRPGs of all time, knowing that it would be multiple games, but they didn’t have a complete breakdown of what the epic climax of each game would be until they got into the actual development of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.