Want a Final Fantasy 8 remake? Too bad, you’re not getting one. That’s the paraphrased version of how Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi responded when IGN recently asked about the possibility of Square Enix remaking the divisive PS1 RPG.
“If after we’ve finished the three games in the [Final Fantasy 7] remake trilogy, Mr. Kitase then comes to me and says, ‘Right, we're going to be remaking another numbered Final Fantasy game and you are on the project,’ I'll just turn around and go, ‘No!’” Hamaguchi said.
Final Fantasy 8 director Yoshinori Kitase, who also produced FF7 Remake and is producer again on Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, said he’d love to streamline Final Fantasy 8 and remove some of the friction in the game’s infamous Junction and Draw systems. These two are some of the series’ most confusing and counterintuitive mechanics and often turn people away from FF8. However, Kitase explained how challenging it is to get projects of that scale approved, even when the pitch is good.
“I've worked out that trying to recreate that kind of volume of content you had in the RPGs back then in the modern day really is not something you can take up lightly,” Kitase said. “It's such a massive investment of time and effort that we really have to think very hard about taking on any kind of project like that.”
IGN said the conversation’s tone made it evident that Hamaguchi was joking in tone, but serious in intent. It’s not hard to see why. At the end of 2023, Square Enix announced its plan to scale back on the number of projects it greenlights and improve its production pipeline so major releases take less time to complete. While the Covid-19 pandemic likely played a role in FF7 Rebirth’s development lasting four years, it’s been nearly a decade since Square Enix first announced Final Fantasy 7 Remake – and there’s still one more part left to develop.
The pair’s comments echo what Square Enix said about remaking Final Fantasy 6, which was already a sprawling, ambitious game in the SNES era.
So, the TL;DR is that if you’re keen on playing older Final Fantasy games, you’ll have to stick to the HD remasters and Pixel Remasters, for now anyway. That said, we might still see small-scale remakes like the long-rumored Final Fantasy 9 remake, which Kitase and Hamaguchi didn't rule out.
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