The
absolute earliest I'd expect Part 3 would be Q1/Q2 of 2027, because that's when the Japanese Fiscal Year stuff happens, that's also when it'll be the 30th Anniversary of
FFVII. That's why
Remake &
Rebirth had releases in April 2020 & February 2024 respectively. Given that shareholders and money is what commands things FAR more than anything else, that's got a really strong influence on when Part 3 will be planned for release.
On the other side of things, I think that the dev team will want as much time as they can get to deliver it during the 30th Anniversary, and Marketing will want some build-up both before & after, so also having something like Q3/Q4 of 2027 could be likely. A lot of that depends on how roadmap stuff is going behind-the-scenes, because they'd most likely have planned things to try and be ready much earlier so that any delays still keeps things on track for the 30th Anniversary – since even while Japan will still be in the Fiscal Year from Jan-March 2028, it doesn't have the same impact from marketing and whatnot, so there's a bit of an ability to Venn Diagram around those influences to expect that they're shooting for an earlier release with the flexibility to land later.
That all comes into play with what other windows that they're gonna be trying to coordinate with (ex: summer when more people have free time to play games vs. winter holidays, etc), if there're other game releases and things that they want to space out around, etc. I'm sure that there're some other sorts of pressures that have some level of sway around what that is, but I'm not immediately aware of anything that'd be more influential than those things at the moment.
X 
