It looks like Square Enix’s Final Fantasy 7 Remake is going through some major changes. During the Mobius Final Fantasy livestream that occurred this weekend, Mobius project lead Naoki Hamaguchi announced that development for the FF7 remake was being brought entirely in-house, cutting off any external collaboration that was in place before the change was made. Hamaguchi is also taking over development for the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, though he still plans on leading the Mobius team.

The information is already available online, but I’ve taken charge on the development side for Final Fantasy 7 Remake,” says Hamaguchi during the livestream. “Until now, development was moving forward with external cooperation, but the company has decided to shift to an internal setup, including mass production and quality, because we want to control everything, including quality on a stable schedule.”  

The news helps provide some context for a few announcements the Japanese publisher recently made. This weekend, it was announced by Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda that both Kingdom Hearts 3 and Final Fantasy 7 Remake would be delayed, with both titles potentially not reaching stores shelves until 2020. Though the ‘why’ is currently unknown for the Kingdom Hearts 3 delay, the FF7 remake delay makes more sense now, especially with Square Enix going through such a major development change with the game already underway.

To that end, Square Enix also recently announced that the company was looking to hire some additional staff for the game, specifically looking for designers, artists, and programmers. Breaking away from external development support means that Square Enix needs to bulk up the team working on FF7, so the company created a staff recruitment campaign with encouraging members from the team. Final Fantasy 7‘s original game director, Yoshinori Kitase, had this to say about the recruitment campaign:

For this project, we aim to surpass the original work in terms of quality by increasing the number of staff to strengthen the core company development as we head into the development progress phase.”

Though Square Enix’s new development plan for the Final Fantasy 7 Remake will most certainly shake things up within the company, the upcoming update of the classic RPG is still being considered episodic, until Square Enix tells us otherwise. That said, with E3 2017 coming next month, hopefully they will have some new footage of the game that will help hold us over until 2020.

So, what are your thoughts on Square Enix’s development change for FF7? Do you think it is a good idea? Let us know in the comments section below, and as always, stay tuned to DFTG for all the latest gaming and entertainment news! Don’t forget to follow Don’t Feed the Gamers on Twitter for our 24/7 feed!