The Secret Behind The Final Fantasy VII Remake Trilogy's Success

Hello. If there's one theme that I think has been pretty consistent across my work over the last 17 years, god I'm old, across all of the books and articles and podcasts and everything I've done, I think it's it's can be summed up in a sentence. It's that making video games is really freaking hard. Video games are a really interesting art form in that they straddle the line between art and technology. They take all of the things that are cool and difficult about art and all of the things that are cool and difficult about tech and they stick them together, make them into one big video game old stew that you can play with a controller. Um and as a result of that there are a lot of challenges that come over the course of making games. Challenges uh challenges involving art like creativity and iteration and just kind of like uh really struggling to try to say something and make something [snorts] interesting. And the challenges that come with technology, optimization

and evolution of tech and uh tools and software and all of that good stuff. So, making games is really hard and and I don't say that to try to get you to lower your standards for games or to excuse some of the most ridiculous things that game companies have done over the years. I say that because I actually I think it's really important for people to understand this stuff. I think it helps you appreciate games more. I think it helps you appreciate the making of games more. I think it helps you understand a lot more about how the games industry works and how games work in general. And I think it can just be beneficial to understand this stuff um as a whole. I it's good to know where your art come from where your art comes from and how it's made. All that said, today I want to talk about uh something that is one of my favorite topics to talk about, Final Fantasy, one of my favorite franchises in the world.

And specifically Final Fantasy VII. If you didn't see over the weekend, Square Enix announced Final Fantasy VII Revelation, which is the third part in this very ambitious remake trilogy that started in 2020 with the game called Final Fantasy VII Remake, and then continued in 2024 with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and now next spring will continue with Final Fantasy VII Revelation. And something really interesting is happening here. I mean, this is this project is is wild for a lot of different reasons. One is that it's it's pretty damn good and has sold quite well, so it's been a big success for Square Enix. But something I think is really interesting is that it's taken a relatively short period of time for these games to actually be made. The the gap between Rebirth and Revelation when it comes out next year will be 3 years, which is downright speedy for a video game project. Um So why is that? Well, I actually spoke to Naoki Hamaguchi, the director of the games, at Summer Game Fest last week.

We spoke at a at the JW Marriott, a hotel in downtown Los Angeles. I got to chat with him for an hour or so. Asked him a whole bunch of questions for Bloomberg. There is an article that is up on Bloomberg that I will post a link to in the show notes. I'm giving paywall-free gift link, so if you click that, you'll bypass the paywall, can read it for free. It's pretty cool Q&A. You should check it out. So go check that out in the show notes, I will kind of take a little bit of an excerpt for this video from that interview, which is he and I, Hamaguchi and I, talked a little bit about why it only took 3 years to make this game. And I think there are a few factors. One is that this is a continuation of previous games, so the combat system is already built. Obviously the characters and the story and the settings, a lot of that stuff was already established with Final Fantasy VII in 1997, so there isn't quite as much original creation here. But still, these are big ambitious projects. I mean, if you played Rebirth, you saw they have essentially transformed a chunk of Final Fantasy 7

into this brand new game. I mean, playing it, it feels like you're playing something new. It's an open world now. It's got these incredible just 3D settings, and um the scope of it is beyond what anyone could have imagined when they played Final Fantasy 7 on PlayStation 1 in 1997. So, these are not just kind of remasters that you're changing some of the graphics and calling it a day. Um so, why did it take 3 years? Well, Hamaguchi told me something really interesting, and he and I have talked about this before. I've written a little bit about this before, but he told me that between 80 and 90% of the staff from Remake in 2020 stayed on for Rebirth in 2024. And even more, 95% of the staff stayed on from Rebirth to Revelation. Now, that, I think, might be the most important factor, and something that a lot of game companies really under appreciate, including Square Enix. In fact, Hamaguchi told me this is unusual. Usually at Square, when

a game is finished, they disband the team, and everyone just kind of goes to other projects, and projects kind of pick and choose whoever they need for wherever they are in the life cycle. But this idea of keeping everybody together is unusual. Um and I think, you know, if you look across the industry, a lot of just big success stories and really acclaimed games are the result of teams that have developed chemistry together sticking together. So, why is that? Well, I think there are a few reasons that we can get into. For starters, making games, as I established, is very difficult. It has a lot of They have a lot of variables. There are a lot of little decisions to be made, and there's a lot of communication to be had along the way. By keeping a team together and developing chemistry among that team, you develop certain styles and shorthand, and you learn each other's personalities, and you learn how to work together, you learn how to talk, and how to kind of speak each other's languages

in a way that is really pivotal for making a game. Um for example, if you are um an artist and you have a certain way that you like to do things, you have a kind of routine that you like to follow or a pipeline of production that you like to follow in particular, and you are working with a programmer, um it might take that while uh that programmer a while to kind of understand how you like to work and be able to communicate you proper communicate you with with you properly about what needs to get done, how to optimize, how to kind of um deliver what you are expecting. And that kind of back and forth that I think um can be prevalent in game development. Cuz remember, by the way, maybe this will be a subject for another video, but in game development, um you have a lot of different disciplines that sometimes don't have the same goals. Um the o- kind of there's one overarching goal, of course, which is make a really great game and and ideally make it on time, but like if you are an artist, you want the game to look as good as possible,

whereas if you are a programmer, you want the game to run as good as possible. That's an over simpli- simplification, but it's very true in many cases. And so those goals can be at odds with one another. If you're a programmer and you're like, "What the hell? Like all of those pretty polygons, those pretty renders that you're making, Mr. Artist, are actually causing the frame rate to drop." Or, "Hey, designer, all of your pipe dreams for like the the things you want to see in this game um can't actually be done by me at a at a proper frame rate and and with good optimization." Then you're kind of there there's that tension and there those people are kind of at odds and um I think that there a little bit of tension can be really healthy and cause creativity um and certainly uh placing limitations on different disciplines can lead to really good things, but that's just part of the process and it can lead to animosity if people don't know how to talk to each other and don't know how to get along and don't know how to work together uh really well. And so I think having many years of just kind of working together and understanding each other

can really help smooth that along and make it so even the toughest parts of game development are a little bit easier because you're kind of you're you're sitting there, you're in the trenches with people you've worked together before. You guys all get along. Maybe you're friends outside of work. Maybe you're not, but either way you have a really good professional working relationship and you know how to do things together, communicate together. You know your roles, you know what you're good at. Um, when I've worked on teams before, uh obviously the news business is very different than game development and a little bit more short-term, but still, I mean, I found that uh when things were really just kind of humming, firing on all cylinders, it was because everybody knew their role and everybody knew each other's roles and everybody knew what each other liked to do and could just kind of set off on that path and and kind of understand that. And that is even more pronounced when you're working at scale with hundreds of people. So when Hamaguchi says that the kind of the secret sauce

here is that 95% of staff stayed on from Rebirth to Revelation, that's a big lesson. That's a big takeaway. That's something that I think a lot of people can learn as they try to make games. Um, uh you might have seen out there over the last, I don't know, 10, 15 years or so, you might have seen stories about people leaving big companies to start new ones. And there are a couple of things that happened as a result of that. One is that by starting a company, you kind of you need some time to set up that company and build a team before you can even start making a new game, which can add a couple years to the entire development process, which is why a lot of companies that we saw started 10 years ago have still not released a game. Um one that comes to mind is uh Bonfire, uh which was made by ex-Blizzard people, Rob Pardo and a few other people from Blizzard. Um they spent a couple years before they even started coming up with what their game would be. They started They spent a couple years just building a team together. That's how important

that process is. Um I think their game, Arcadian, is coming out this year, I believe, or at least entering beta this year. Um and so uh there are other examples out there, too. And then there are also examples of that sort of thing not really working because suddenly you don't have that team chemistry that maybe you built over time. Um another good example, uh I mentioned Mina the Hollower in a previous video. That's a good example of what happens when you have really good chemistry and then you kind of break it up for some reason. What happened on Mina the Hollower is after the team Yacht Club Games finished up Shovel Knight and its expansions, they decided to split their team. And so some of their team went to work on a 3D game, 3D Shovel Knight game, and others went to work on Mina the Hollower, and it really didn't work because they didn't have that chemistry and know-how and communication where they were all working together and they wound up with all sorts of issues along the way. Go check out that video if you want to know more, but essentially they had to put the team back together in order to finish Mina the Hollower.

Um Naoki Hamaguchi told me in the Bloomberg story, which again you can read in the show notes here. Um he told me that this is unusual for Square Enix. Um usually teams are not staying together. They are disbanding and then kind of scatter to the winds. Um it just happened that on this project they were. And also on Naoki Yoshida's project, Final Fantasy XIV, um they also keep their staff together. And I pointed out to Hamaguchi, I said, "Well, I don't think it's a coincidence that those are two of the most successful projects in Squares recent history is Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy and Final Fantasy XIV. And I think that is one of the big reasons is that team chemistry and retention and sticking together and know-how. Here's the thing about making games. It is so difficult to go through every step of the process. Pre-production, figuring out ideas, figuring out what you want to do, figuring out what your technology pipelines are going to look like, learning how to use the tools,

learning how those tools are changing over time, figuring out how design and art and engineering and audio are all going to work together to create the best possible product. Um, adding into that people, organization, and management just adds a whole 'nother layer of complexity and potential for for things to go way off the rails. And so by kind of trying to reduce that variable or eliminate the variable by keeping your people together, you can really make things a lot easier on yourself. If you still have the same kind of experienced leadership, leadership that knows how the pipelines work, knows how the tech works, knows how to talk to each other, that can really solve a lot of issues. Who knows if that'll be possible for future projects. I asked Hamaguchi, he said, "Well, I don't know, maybe." He said he hadn't really thought about it if they'll be able to keep that team together for future projects. We'll see

how that goes. One other thing I should point out is that Hamaguchi also noted that one of the other reasons that this project, that Revelation, the third part in the series, only took 3 years is that he stuck to his vision and did not pivot, did not change things. We've seen so many games over the last few over the last over the history of game development, really. And I've written about quite a few of them that have just changed in direction, pivoted in direction so many times that it really caused a lot of problems for a lot of people. Um Dragon Age Veil Garden might be the most recent example of a game that really struggled as a result of that. That was a game that started off as a single-player game, pivoted to become a multiplayer service game, then pivoted again to become a single-player game. So, it was in development for I don't know, 10 years all in all, but really it was only in development for three or four years in that last kind of

production struggle as it after it pivoted from multiplayer to single player. And you can see the results. Um you can see the results in that game of a game that struggled to with with pivoted vision and direction changing midway through. Um Hamaguchi pointed out that for Revelation, they picked a vision about a year before Revelation kicked off as they were finishing up Rebirth. Hamaguchi figured out what the plan was going to be. He said, "Uh I want this to be a game about exploring this world with the Hyur and I want it to be a game that has a job system." And he kind of put down these pillars and he didn't change them along the way. Um it was still still a challenging development cycle and he pointed that out. He said it wasn't despite being smooth, it was not an easy development by any means, but it was made way easier by keeping his team together. Um across the industry, we are seeing all sorts of layoffs and issues with

people just failing to keep their staff, seeing staff more as cogs in the machine than as I don't know, integral parts of the game development process, especially at a leadership level. And I think that has been even though you can't you can't draw a line directly from say this art director leaving or this technical director leaving at this game company to this game being a total flop and disaster. Uh I think there's some certainly some correlation there. So, if there's one lesson that a lot of game developers can learn from this Final Fantasy VII Remake project, other than the fact that it's easier to make games when you already have a built-in foundation of what that game will look like and feel like, one lesson here is to keep your staff, retain your staff. Chemistry matters quite a bit, and that is why Revelation has taken only 3 years. You can check out more from my interview with Hamaguchi, including

stuff about the job system, stuff about what he wants to do next, and also the way he kept Revelation from being a secret by not telling his staff what the title was actually going to be. You can check all that in the Bloomberg article, which is in the show notes. And as always, you can find more of my coverage from Summer Game Fest on Bloomberg, and you can hear me talking about the games that I played on this week's episode of TripleClick. Um now I'm off to more Final Fantasy. I'm going to the Distant Worlds concert tonight in New York City, looking forward to that, and I will be back with more videos next week and in the days and weeks and months to come. See you all next time.