Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director says Xbox is ‘great’, wants to see the trilogy on more platforms

The director of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has said he wants to see the Remake trilogy appearing on more platforms, while at the same time praising the Xbox platform.

Naoki Hamaguchi – who was the co-director of Final Fantasy 7 Remake and the director of Rebirth – was recently asked by GamesRadar how he felt about the game being released on other platforms.

Hamaguchi replied that while there were no announcements to make yet, he wanted to see the Remake games appearing on more systems.

“In terms of Final Fantasy 7, there’s nothing really we can say at the moment, but certainly I do want to bring Final Fantasy 7 and the Remake series to as many players out there as possible,” Hamaguchi explained.

“So we want to create that situation, that environment, where more players can play the games in future, and we want to look in that direction.”

Hamaguchi also said that while it used to be possible to release a game on a single platform and have players buy that system to play it, that’s less the case these days.

Explaining that while in the past publishers could “put out a game in one place and get most of the players coming to that game to play it [on that platform]”, he said: “It’s so much more diversified now, so I think that’s that’s probably why our CEO, Mr Kiryu, made that decision to move more in the direction of multiplatform. That’s just the way that the industry is going.”

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth  is one of several recent PS5 exclusives that have failed to meet Square Enix’s sales expectations, leading the publisher to announce plans to “shift to a multiplatform strategy”.

Although he didn’t specifically mention Xbox when saying he wanted to see the Final Fantasy 7 Remake series on other platforms, Hamaguchi was then asked for his opinion on Square Enix’s multiformat strategy, to which he praised the Xbox platform.

“This is just a personal opinion now, but I’ve got an Xbox myself,” he replied. “I think it’s a great hardware platform. I do like Xbox.”

Last month Final Fantasy producer Naoki Yoshida said that he’d like to release Final Fantasy 16 on Xbox platforms.

“Of course we did announce the PC version of the game, so looking towards the Xbox version, we do want to release it on Xbox,” he said in an interview. “But when it comes to the specifics such as when the game would be available and such, we are not in a position to be able to share anything.”

Earlier this month, Yoshida then stated that Square Enix plans to release games simultaneously on Xbox “more and more” going forward.