FF7 Remake director reined in his team's excitement over the FF14 crossover

Final Fantasy 14's upcoming Evercold expansion will feature two crossover raid series simultaneously — an 8-man raid tied to Final Fantasy 7 and a 24-man alliance raid crossing over with Neon Genesis Evangelion. It's the first time FF14 has run both raid types as crossovers at the same time, and FF7 Remake director Naoki Hamaguchi is directly involved in making the FF7 side happen.

In an interview with GamesRadar+, Hamaguchi said his team got genuinely excited and started generating a flood of ideas — but he and FF14 producer Naoki Yoshida both had to step in and tell their respective teams to calm down and be reasonable. Hamaguchi's specific concern was protecting FF14's patch release schedule: letting ambition run wild would be "putting the cart before the horse." He told his team to assess their actual bandwidth and make sure whatever they committed to was something they could execute properly.

The caution is understandable given the recent history. FF14's Dawntrail expansion drew sustained criticism, with players feeling Creative Studio 3 was stretched too thin — partly a consequence of the team simultaneously developing Final Fantasy 16. That resource pressure showed up in places like Occult Crescent's Forked Tower raid launching with only a single difficulty setting. Yoshida has since acknowledged the feedback and announced meaningful changes coming with Evercold, which has gone some way toward restoring confidence in the game's direction. FF14 isn't new to Final Fantasy crossovers — there were FF15 seasonal events and the Omega raid series in Stormblood was packed with references to classic FF titles — but the scale of Evercold's ambitions is a step beyond that.

With both directors actively managing scope and keeping their teams grounded, the FF7 crossover raid has a reasonable shot at landing well rather than being a rushed side project. The prospect of fighting Sephiroth inside FF14 is the kind of fan-service that could genuinely deliver if given the space to be done right.