Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth landed in 2024 to strong reviews and expanded the original's midgame into a sprawling, ambitious open world, continuing the remake project after 2020's first installment, with the concluding third part still in development. Final Fantasy XVI arrived in 2023 as a harder pivot toward real-time action combat that split longtime fans, while Final Fantasy XIV's Dawntrail expansion kept the MMO side of the franchise commercially healthy. Square Enix, meanwhile, spent the surrounding years publicly walking back its ill-fated blockchain and NFT ambitions and restructuring after admitting its big-budget output wasn't earning back its costs fast enough.

Our take: the remake trilogy is proof Square Enix still knows how to make a generation-defining RPG when it commits fully to one vision, but the console-exclusivity windows Sony paid for on both Rebirth and XVI before wider ports arrived read as a company chasing short-term money over long-term goodwill with its own fanbase. Pulling those games onto PC and other platforms afterward amounts to admitting the exclusivity deals cost more in player trust than they were worth.

With the series' 40th anniversary approaching in 2027, watch whether Square Enix lets the final remake chapter ship as the artistic statement Rebirth was, or rushes it to hit an anniversary marketing window — the pacing of this trilogy has been its biggest strength, and that's the thing under the most pressure now.