Now that the first part of Final Fantasy VII Remake has released to critical acclaim and massive sales, all eyes are on the horizon, of when future chapters in the Remake project will release and how many games it will take to complete the whole tale. Final Fantasy VII Remake is set exclusively in the Midgar portion of the original game. In the original, Midgar was an extended prologue that takes up the first five or so hours of the experience, but it has been expanded to 30 or 40 hours in the remake. There's still a vast majority of Final Fantasy VII left to cover, and nobody knows just how many games will comprise the whole FFVII Remake.
First announced in 2015, it took five years for the first chapter of Remake to hit store shelves, but a big part of that delay came from the mid-development decision to remove external developer CyberConnect2 from the game and bring the whole project in-house. It's unknown just how much work was scrapped, if Square Enix's internal development teams built off the work done by CC2 or if they started from scratch. With that in mind, hopes are high that audiences won't have to wait quite as long for the sequels, especially if they're built on the same game engine as the current release.
While development has already begun on the next entry in Final Fantasy VII, there are still internal discussions as to how many games will be made, what parts of the original they will cover, and how long they will be. As reported by IGN, the FFVII Ultimania features an interview with director Tetsuya Nomura and producer Yoshinori Kitase, in which the two gaming icons discuss the debate of whether to make subsequent titles shorter so they can be released more frequently, or longer but with more protracted development cycles.
If they decide to make more games, an optimistic estimate would be that players could get 20-30 hours of Final Fantasy VII every year for the next five years or more. Then again, one only needs to look back at the enthusiastic ambition of the ill-fated Half-Life 2 episodes to see how schedules can fall apart, leaving stories incomplete and fans left hanging in the wind. Then again, when a sequel takes too long to develop, audiences can lose interest, so it will take a truly spectacular game for lapsed players to return after a prolonged absence.
As of right now, it's unclear how many games will comprise the FFVII Remake. In the interview, Kitase mentions that "many people think it will become a trilogy." If that turns out to be the case, the individual titles will likely be very long, with huge gaps between releases. Then again, if the story is told in five or six parts (or even more, who knows?), then players will get a more regular dose of Final Fantasy VII until the story runs its course. It's too early to tell how things will pan out, but the future is wide open for the world of Final Fantasy VII.
Source: IGN