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Final Fantasy 7 Revelation Director Cites The Witcher 3 as Key Inspiration
ReFinal Fantasy 7 Revelation Director Cites The Witcher 3 as Key Inspiration
Naoki Hamaguchi says CD Projekt Red's open-world epic shaped his approach to cinematic storytelling and player agency in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy, as the final chapter targets an April 2027 launch.
Naoki Hamaguchi, game director for Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, has named The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt as a defining creative influence on his work leading the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy. In an interview with GameSpot, Hamaguchi said he frequently returned to CD Projekt Red's open-world role-playing game while developing the Remake series, studying how it delivers cinematic moments through interactive systems rather than relying solely on pre-rendered cutscenes.
Hamaguchi distinguished between the games that shaped him as a player and those that shaped him as a creator. Final Fantasy 6 left a deep impression during his childhood, but The Witcher 3 became the benchmark he consulted repeatedly once he began directing the Remake project. «When I started working on the Remake series, I would frequently go back to The Witcher 3 and just marvel at the things that that game excels at,» he said. «It's a frequent one that I revisit.»
The director also pointed to Guerrilla Games' Horizon series as another reference point. According to Hamaguchi, both The Witcher 3 and Horizon excel at creating what he described as cinematic pay-offs embedded within gameplay mechanics, moments of satisfaction that only the interactive medium can produce. He said the Remake team deliberately avoided simply inserting cutscenes into the game world, instead studying how those titles build narrative weight through player action, customizability, and scalable world exploration.
«We do have to acknowledge that there are certain moments that bring satisfaction that can be only achieved by doing it within the video game medium,» Hamaguchi explained. «I think that is exactly something that The Witcher 3 and games like Horizon were really excelling at, just delivering these satisfactory moments. They feel cinematic. That was something that we were trying to follow suit with.»
The comments arrive as The Witcher 3 remains a fixture in discussions of the greatest open-world games more than a decade after its original release. A remastered edition is scheduled for September 29, and an expansion titled Songs of the Past is set to launch next year, helping bridge the wait for The Witcher 4. The enduring relevance of CD Projekt Red's title underscores how deeply its design philosophy has circulated through the wider role-playing game industry, influencing studios working on franchises with very different tones and traditions.
For Square Enix, the stakes around Final Fantasy 7 Revelation are substantial. The game is set to launch for PC and consoles in April 2027, concluding the trilogy that began with Final Fantasy 7 Remake in 2020. The publisher has described the project as aiming for a «planetary scale» world, expanding the scope well beyond the confined environments of the earlier chapters. Beyond the main campaign to stop Sephiroth, the game will include side activities such as classic snowboarding sequences, a nod to a memorable minigame from the 1997 original.
Hamaguchi's remarks place the final chapter of the Remake trilogy within a broader conversation about how Japanese role-playing franchises have absorbed lessons from Western open-world design. The Witcher 3's influence on Hamaguchi is not a matter of surface imitation but of structural ambition: the pursuit of narrative moments that feel authored and cinematic while remaining inseparable from player choice and exploration. That balance has become a central challenge for large-scale role-playing games, and Hamaguchi's team appears to be treating it as a core design mandate rather than an afterthought.
The interview was conducted by Emma Fyffe. Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is scheduled to arrive in April 2027, while The Witcher 3's remastered edition lands on September 29 and its Songs of the Past expansion follows next year.
