Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director snuck his adorable pet cat into FF7 Remake

Final Fantasy 7 Remake is stuffed with cats in every corner of Midgar’s dark and desolate slums, but one adorable street cat actually belongs to the game’s director. 

Despite Final Fantasy 7 Remake coming out three years prior, director Naoki Hamaguchi has just now revealed that the development team put his real-world pet into the action-RPG. “I have a cat named Musashi,” he explains on Twitter. “He is the model for the cat that was walking on the wall of Jessie’s family house.” 

You can see Musashi’s adorable, squishy face in the post below, side by side with his animated counterpart strutting along a Seventh Avenue wall. The American shorthair looks remarkably more detailed than the city’s other felines, even his fellow friends walking behind him, though he does seem unrealistically clean for a street cat living in gaming’s most notorious underground slums.

Now the question becomes: will Musashi appear in the upcoming Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth? It would be slightly cruel to unmask the loveable feline, only for him to miss the sequel. Musashi also never appears anywhere else in Midgar, so my headcanon tells me that he escaped the city and is waiting to make another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance elsewhere in Gaia. 

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth launches on February 29, 2024. All our feline-related questions will be answered then, but at least we now know how to pronounce Cait Sith beforehand. 

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s team keeps teasing fans over the original game’s massive twist, which only raises more questions and heart rates. Nothing is set in stone, however, as the third game in the trilogy only has a first-draft script.