Final Fantasy 7 Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi has reconfirmed that the trilogy has stuck with Unreal Engine 4 this whole time to ensure a speedy and consistent development.

Ever since the first part of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy released, it's been praised as one of the best-looking and performing games in Square Enix's wheelhouse. That focus on visual fidelity made it quite a surprise when 2024's Rebirth stuck with the same engine that was used for Remake, Unreal Engine 4.

At the time, director Naoki Hamaguchi pointed out that Unreal Engine 5 wasn't quite ready enough to make the upgrade worth it. Now that it's 2026 and Revelation is around the corner, you'd think the team might have considered moving to UE5, but Hamaguchi has once again confirmed that the final game in the trilogy is sticking with UE4.

FF7 Revelation Will Once Again Use Unreal Engine 4, And Hamaguchi Is Very Confident In The Decision

"We Won’t Debate That"

It's worth noting that Hamaguchi actually confirmed that Revelation would be sticking with Unreal Engine 4 some time ago, before the final entry in the trilogy had even been named. Now that it's actually been revealed and is on the distant horizon of Spring 2027, Hamaguchi gave 4Gamer a bit more information about the decision (thanks, Nintendo Everything).

Hamaguchi noted that, from both a business perspective and a player perspective, "getting the game out as quickly as possible" is the best thing that a developer can do. With that in mind, the team decided early on to stick with its customised version of Unreal Engine 4 for Revelation, as it let them deliver on "the workflow that we were used to best" rather than resetting.

It's hard to disagree considering Kingdom Hearts 4 switched to Unreal Engine 5 early on in its development and was likely quite impacted by it.

The Revelation director even pointed out that he told the team that they "won't debate" the continued use of UE4, even though he suspected some team members might want to use the new engine's features. That wasn't really the case, though, and Hamaguchi thinks that they clearly made the "correct decision", especially since the team made their own comparable version of Nanite for Rebirth.

What's especially interesting about all of this is that Unreal Engine 5 is actually going to end up outdated itself in the next year or so, as Unreal Engine 6 was recently announced and confirmed to be coming in 2027. Of course, it also turns out that it's going to be very supportive of generative AI models, so perhaps Hamaguchi has the right idea.

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Final Fantasy VII Revelation

RPG Action Adventure Systems Released 2027 Developer(s) Square Enix Publisher(s) Square Enix Prequel(s) Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Franchise Final Fantasy Number of Players Single-player Genre(s) RPG, Action, Adventure Powered by Expand Collapse Next

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Posts By  Jade King