“We’ve always kept the original in mind, and I don’t think it’s going to be a storyline that will betray the fans of the original [game],” says Yoshinori Kitase.
Just as Final Fantasy 7 Remake did before it, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s story plays with and subverts expectations in fascinating ways, and though in many ways the remake trilogy is hitting all of the main story beats you would expect it to, in others, it’s making some significant changes. However, its developers want to also assure veteran fans of the original game that by the time the trilogy comes to an end, they won’t feel like their expectations were betrayed.
Speaking in an interview with Anime News Network, producer Yoshinori Kitase provided assurances that the upcoming Final Fantasy 7 Remake Part 3 (or whatever it ends up being called) won’t make too many radical changes to the story, but that, at the same time, the development team is also hoping to deliver “a new sort of feeling of satisfaction to the players” that it couldn’t with the original Final Fantasy 7 back in the day.
“We do hear a lot of players’ different conjectures, saying, ‘Oh, how much will this story change from the original?’ And I do want to comment that I don’t think that’s how it will be,” Kitase said. “We’ve always kept the original in mind, and I don’t think it’s going to be a storyline that will betray the fans of the original [game]. But also, at the same time, [it’s] been 27 years since the release of the original Final Fantasy 7. There are these things that we feel we can only do now in the remake project that can bring a new happiness, a new sort of feeling of satisfaction to the players playing this game now 27 years later. What this will entail exactly is something we hope players will experience soon.”
Earlier this year, the trilogy’s creative director Tetsuya Nomura confirmed that the development team was already “hard at work” on the next instalment. Later, the aforementioned Yoshinori Kitase stated that Square Enix was hoping to wrap up development within three years, which would suggest the company is targeting a 2027 release for the remake trilogy’s final instalment.
