Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is coming to PC in January, and you know what that means: nude mods. Game director Naoki Hamaguchi would really prefer if you didn't do that, though, saying in an interview with Epic Games that he hopes everyone will keep it clean.
There's a whole host of mods available for the Final Fantasy 7 Remake—we've got a roundup of some good ones, if you're in the market—and it's fair to assume that we'll see the same with Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Square Enix currently has no plans to offer official mod support, Hamaguchi said, but is happy (or at least willing) to let it happen. Just, y'know, mind your manners.
"We respect the creativity of the modding community and welcome their creations," Hamaguchi said. "Though we ask modders not to create or install anything offensive or inappropriate."
- Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth's director says 'I respect the modding community' and uses mods himself, though he still thinks we shouldn't use ones that 'detract from the intended game experience'
- Developer behind the Dino Crisis spiritual successor says 'vulgar' mods are the reason we're not getting a PC port
This is of course a statement that, to put it mildly, is open to interpretation. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is a game that seems to lean pretty heavily into the whole "swimsuit edition" thing, after all, and while that's still a good distance from full frontal nudity, going the full monty is hardly unusual in videogames these days, even without the magic of mods. I get an eyeful of Mini-V every time I change outfits in Cyberpunk 2077, and you will recall that one of the most pressing pre-release questions about Dragon Age: The Veilguard was whether or not we'd see any wang.
The Final Fantasy 7 community, to its credit, is responding exactly as you'd expect:
One redditor said Hamaguchi's request "is like asking the sky not to be blue." Another wrote, "If someone doesn’t put a massive hog on Cait so when it jumps it slaps the ground then the mod community is over."
"First mods are always about TAA, but once the collective post nut clarity begins to settle in, you start to see some actual useful and quality-of-life-improvement type of mods," a third redditor predicted. "But TAA first." Presumably they're not referring to temporal anti-aliasing.
This isn't the first time a developer has taken issue with "inappropriate" mods on PC. In 2015, Team Ninja warned mod makers to be "good and moral" with Dead or Alive 5 mods (a caution that held up for about 24 hours), and Final Fantasy 15 director Hajime Tabata said in 2017 that such things are up to the "moral sense" of players, although he pretty clearly had some trepidation about where that sense would lead. Just a few months ago, Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida said "we definitely don't want to see anything offensive or inappropriate" in mods for that game.
On the other hand, Mr. X became Mr. Sex thanks to a revealing Resident Evil 2 thong mod and Capcom didn't seem too bothered by it. Clearly there's no set industry standards in place on this one.
It all seems very silly to me, especially given some of Square Enix's own merch, but the bottom line is this: PC gaming is where it's at, and nude mods are where PC gaming is at. You can't have one without the other, so you might as well learn to respect it.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth comes to PC on January 23, 2025. I'm looking forward to what happens on January 24.
