Final Fantasy Director Expresses Doubts About a Xenogears Remake, Leaving Fans Concerned About Its Return

Where is Xenogears? This question lingers in the minds of dedicated fans of classic Square Enix JRPGs. Since its last digital release on the PlayStation 3, it hasn’t been available on modern systems, and with the impending closure of the storefronts for PS3, PSP, and PS Vita in 2027, the game will soon be lost to time. Is a remake ever on the horizon? That question didn’t seem to be on the mind of Final Fantasy VII Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi when it was recently posed to him.

Xenogears originally stemmed from a concept for Final Fantasy VII, which even includes a nod to it. A similar reference has been confirmed in Revelation. When asked about this, Hamaguchi expressed genuine surprise. “To be perfectly frank, I had no idea that was in there,” he shared. “That was probably Toriyama-san or Nojima-san who added that in just for fun. They were also involved in the original.”

The interviewer then inquired about the possibility of a Xenogears remake, a game Hamaguchi admitted he hadn’t revisited since its launch. “I do kind of remember playing it back in the day when it first came out,” he said. “Remaking something from that era, as someone who has gone through the Remake series, sounds like a tough project to tackle.”

Giving any game the FFVII Remake treatment would indeed be a monumental task. Reports suggest that remaking Final Fantasy VII in that style could take over a decade. While that’s one way to honor the company’s legacy, it’s certainly not the only approach.

However, Hamaguchi’s tone doesn’t inspire much confidence that Square Enix has any plans to revisit the game in any form. If that’s the case, it would be a real loss. Xenogears is a wildly uneven experience, with its second disc notorious for being more of a visual novel interspersed with boss battles. Yet, it boasts some unforgettable mechanics and some of the finest storytelling ever seen in a Square Enix title.

Its original director, Tetsuya Takahashi, now leads Monolith Soft at Nintendo. While many of Square Enix’s non-Final Fantasy franchises have stagnated, Takahashi has transformed the Xenogears series into a sci-fi saga that spans multiple consoles and narratives. It’s hard to envision a Xenogears remake without Monolith Soft at the helm, and equally difficult to see Square Enix and Nintendo collaborating to invest in a revival of a game that lacks the widespread recognition of FFVII, especially if it were to be exclusive to Nintendo hardware.

At best, we might see an HD port that brings Xenogears to modern consoles and PC. Square Enix’s history with these ports has been hit or miss, but even a “smoothmaster” with subpar text would be better than nothing. Still, the fact that we got SaGa Frontier 2 Remastered before an HD version of Xenogears doesn’t fill me with confidence that we’ll see the latter anytime soon (I’m still waiting for an HD remaster of Vagrant Story, too).

Ideally, I’d love to see a comprehensive Xenocollection that includes not just Xenogears but also the Xenosaga trilogy on modern platforms. How amazing would it be if the launch of Xenoblade Genesis in 2027 was followed by making the entire Xenogames library available on Switch 2? There might still be hope; rumors circulated earlier this summer that Nintendo may have quietly acquired the rights to Xenosaga from Bandai Namco. Given their close partnership, it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

The only true tragedy would be if we somehow got all the older Xenogames on modern consoles except for the original Xenogears. I’m not holding my breath, though. In the meantime, fans may have to rely on an unofficial PC port effort that’s currently in the works.