Square Enix recently announced that Final Fantasy VII Rebirth will arrive to PC on January 23, 2025, and it’ll be available to download on both Steam and Epic Games Store. While this is a really exciting and necessary port, the game’s director is seemingly worried about a particular subset of PC users.
In an interview with Epic Games Store (which @Genki_JPN partially translated to English), Final Fantasy VII Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi discussed the topic of mods now that his game is going to arrive on PCs in a few months. He clarified that his team has no plans for official in-game mod support, but that they’re aware that players will create mods of their own. “We respect the creativity of the modding community and welcome their creations, though we ask modders not to create or install anything offensive or inappropriate”, he said.
Curiously enough, this isn’t even the first time that the PC port of a Final Fantasy game has worried Square Enix’s higher-ups because of the prospect of fan-made mods. When Final Fantasy XVI came out on PC a few months ago, that game’s producer, Naoki Yoshida, said something very similar: “The only thing I will say is that we definitely don’t want to say anything offensive or inappropriate, so please don’t make or install anything like that.”
Naturally, fans did make some inappropriate mods for it, but they seemed to mostly focus on creating new outfits and costumes for the playable character, Clive Rosfield. When Final Fantasy VII Rebirth comes out in January 2025, thousands of fan-made mods will immediately plague the internet, so I don’t really think players will be able to keep their promise to Hamaguchi, especially dedicated fans of characters like Tifa Lockhart, Aerith Gainsborough and Sephiroth.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth almost got some extra content on PC
Naoki Hamaguchi also tackled another interesting subject during this interview: he explained that his team is not planning any additional features for the PC port of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth but that it almost happened. Hamaguchi revealed that they “did have the desire to add an episodic story as a new DLC to the PC version,” but due to their limited resources, he decided that finishing the third and final chapter in the Final Fantasy VII Remake Project was the “highest priority.”
A new DLC campaign for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth would have been great, similar to how Square Enix released an entire episode centered on Yuffie Kisaragi in Final Fantasy VII Remake, back when it ported that game over to the PlayStation 5. But it’s perfectly reasonable that he prefers to begin working on the third game in the new Final Fantasy VII trilogy. Considering that Remake came out in 2020 and Rebirth came out in 2024, we are most likely not going to see the third and final entry until at least 2028. However, if Hamaguchi and his team are already working on it, they may be able to finish its development a bit sooner.
