It has now been nearly six years since Final Fantasy VII Remake was released on the PlayStation 4.
After a divisive start due to the fact that the first game in the planned trilogy was just the first handful of hours from Final Fantasy VII with a bunch of added content, Final Fantasy Rebirth righted the ship and delivered one of the best RPG experiences of 2024.
We’re now two full years since the release of Rebirth, but Square Enix has been silent about concrete details on the third (and presumably final) entry in the Remake trilogy. We know that it’s being worked on. We know that Square Enix is bringing the past games to other platforms. Beyond that, however, we’re still left in the dark. We don’t even know the full name of the final game just yet!
Well, there is another detail that we do know: the game is not being made with Unreal Engine 5. Naoki Hamaguchi, the director of Final Fantasy VII Remake, explains why in an interview with Automaton.
What makes Unreal Engine 5 groundbreaking compared to Unreal Engine 4 are two features: Lumen, its lighting system, and Nanite, which allows you to portray dense graphical detail. These represent the current trend in graphics pipelines, and of course, such pipelines are important to us as well. However, if we had tied our development schedule and milestones too closely to Unreal Engine 5’s roadmap, we would have risked our own progress being stalled if the engine encountered any kind of delay. For that reason, we decided early on in development of FFVII Rebirth to stick with Unreal Engine 4. We’re using a graphics pipeline built in-house, which also makes optimization and porting to various hardware more straightforward.
Hamaguchi continues to say that it’s more efficient for his team to use Unreal Engine 4 rather than “rebuilding [their] pipeline from scratch in Unreal Engine 5.” Not only does this keep the development process streamlined, but it also lets them refine and polish thing sbased on the experience and feedback they have from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.
The Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy is making its way to Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox Series X|S
As the development team looks to the future, they’re also focused on the past.
Final Fantasy VII Remake Integrade recently made its debut on the Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series X|S. You can expect Rebirth to release on those platforms on June 3rd, which will result in everyone being caught up for when the finale hits store shelves in the (hopefully) near future.
Hamaguchi said that the response to the release on Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox has been “extremely positive.”
This shouldn’t be that big of a surprise for the Xbox platform, but there were several questions leading to the release of Final Fantasy VII Remake Integrade on the Nintendo Switch 2 that had many wondering how the game would perform. As it turns out, those concerns weren’t necessary. Hamaguchi himself has stated in the past that the “Switch 2 is a very appealing platform and a great piece of hardware.”
It’s not a perfect port, but it was important to Hamaguchi to make sure the quality was there.
“I have seen a lot of other publishers struggling to get their games to work very smoothly on the Nintendo Switch 2. But considering that this is a trilogy, and Remake being the first title within it, I really wanted to make sure that we are conveying that quality to Nintendo players for them to understand just how great Final Fantasy VII Remake is.”
As for the official title and release date for the third entry in the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy, that’s a topic for another day. It feels like, however, that the wait is nearly over. You can expect it to release the same day on PlayStation 5, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch 2.
