FF7 Remake Team Kept 95% of Staff for 12 Years, Director Reveals

Final Fantasy 7: Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi says 90-95% of the remake trilogy's dev team stayed on board for 12 years, a retention rate that stunned Western media.

A 12-year project with almost nobody quitting? That's the story coming out of Final Fantasy 7: Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi, and it's turning heads in the West.

According to IGN Spain, Hamaguchi spoke at the Malaga 2026 comic convention about what went on behind the scenes of the long-running Final Fantasy 7 remake project. Final Fantasy 7: Revelation is described as an action-adventure game from Square Enix, set to launch on April 8, 2027 for PC, PS5, Switch 2, and Xbox.

Hamaguchi recalled that the team started small, with only about 30 people on board when the project kicked off. It later grew to around a hundred, and those early days were full of challenges. Given how ambitious the whole thing was, you can imagine the pressure.

But here's the part that really got people talking: across the entire development cycle of the Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy, 90 to 95 percent of the developers stayed with the project for all twelve years. That kind of core-team retention is rare enough that it surprised plenty of Western media outlets.

Think about the climate we're in. Layoffs, studio closures, and cancelled projects seem to hit the news every other week. Holding together a stable core team that trusts each other through more than a decade of work is genuinely unusual, and Hamaguchi didn't shy away from saying so. He admitted that without this group of people fighting side by side for so long, finishing the Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy would have been very difficult.

It's a nice reminder that behind every massive remake saga is a bunch of humans who stuck it out together. No drama, no mass exodus, just a crew that kept showing up.

What do you make of that retention rate? Would you stick with one project for twelve years? Drop your thoughts below.