Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director says defying industry norms and keeping the dev team together for the whole RPG trilogy was key to its success: "That's quite a rare thing"

The final Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy is a rare thing in a lot of ways – not the least of which is the fact that its dev team has largely stayed together for the decade the project's been in development. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi thinks that's been part of what's made Remake and Rebirth special, and he's planning to keep the band together for another project even after Part 3 finally launches.

"I think one particularly, really good thing about working on these games, and that's quite a rare thing in the games industry, is the fact that we managed to keep pretty much the same team throughout all of the games," Hamaguchi tells GamesRadar+. "In the games industry, it's quite common that once a big project is done, a team will be split up, they'll be moved around, and then a lot of the time your next project, you'll have to start again by rebuilding a new team."

Hamaguchi says "we haven't had to do this for the Remake project, definitely – certainly the key members, the core members of the team, will stay the same very much throughout all three games. And I think that really has helped us grow and evolve and become more refined and more capable as a team. Our experience really has grown as we work on each new game."

The Final Fantasy 7 remake project properly got underway in 2015, so the devs will have soon spent a full decade working together on the series. That stretch will get even longer by the time Part 3 is finally done, and Hamaguchi doesn't plan on letting that experience working together go to waste.

"I think once we have got out the third game in the series, and hopefully it's a big success, we'll definitely move on to something else, and it'd be great to see what that team that we've managed to build up together produces," Hamaguchi says. "I don't know if it's the right way of talking about it, but the bonds, the relationship between the team has definitely improved a lot and strengthened that team. "

Hamaguchi says he isn't sure whether the team's next project will be a completely new IP or a fresh Final Fantasy game, but whatever's next for these devs, it sounds like they're sticking together.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake director promises Part 3 news "in the not too far future" and tells fans he's "running straight to my hotel room and back to checking some of the levels."