Typically, when heading into an organised, hands-on preview demo of an upcoming game, you expect to be shown a very specific, controlled slice of game that’s been engineered to show the project off in its best light. It’s not like that every time, of course – the degree of looseness around previewer agency tends to correspond with how much of a particular title remains shrouded in secrecy or even just the intended experience of the game itself.
Take my first hands-on with Final Fantasy VII Remake, a debut project still shrouded in a lot of mystery, and a fairly linear RPG that would have been simple enough to slice up into a demonstrable portion. And then there was the Final Fantasy VII Rebirth media event in NYC, also a very controlled and strictly apportioned demo designed to show attendees the highlights of the trilogy’s move to a semi-open world format.
So going into a preview session for Final Fantasy VII Revelation, the final installment of the Final Fantasy VII Remake series, I expected something similar again. What I didn’t expect was to be handed an enormous portion of the game’s open world to freely explore at my leisure. This is clearly Square Enix at its most confident in the decade-long journey to bring this trilogy to life, happy to let me roam, poke and prod at the corners of its game, only keeping the twists and turns of its story still close to its chest.
It also makes it real hard for someone with a cooked attention span to reasonably play and analyse the thing, with less than a couple of hours to frantically take it all in. That someone is me.
Thankfully, our session does begin with a bit of direction, starting with a tour of the Highwind – Cid’s iconic airship that acts as a world-navigating vehicle in the original Final Fantasy VII and makes its non-playable debut in 2024’s Rebirth. In Revelation, it finally returns as a fully-pilotable airship as well as a fully-explorable space, which is where I find myself now.
The Highwind in Final Fantasy VII Revelation is incredibly well-appointed, featuring everything from the bridge and sky deck to crew lodgings and a Chocobo stable, a bar and lounge and plenty of operational areas. As something of a hub for all of your exploits throughout the game, you’ve got all the important facilities here, such as a permanent space to play Queen’s Blood – with Rebirth’s card-slinging robot, Wize, back to perform game-hosting duties. There’s also a new spot for tracking and displaying special treasures found throughout the world, though now your loot-hunting efforts are seemingly rewarded with new interior customisation options for the Highwind, which is neat.
The other crucial facility found on-board is a new base of operations for everyone’s “favourite” android research assistant, Chadley. In reuniting with Chadley here, I discover that he’s responsible for one of Revelation’s big new gameplay features – the FITS system. This major addition is essentially a job system, or perhaps closer to something like Final Fantasy X-2‘s dresspheres (what a game!).
FITS are a way to further your customisation of each character’s combat abilities beyond equipment and Materia, essentially allowing you to layer a whole other specialisation on top. In our demo I had access to Warrior, Knight, Black Mage and Summoner, which meant I could push someone like Yuffie’s typical Ninja/Thief traits with some added strength, or mix it up with a more left-of-field designation. Each of the FITS also comes with a unique outfit for each character that can equip it as well, instantly adding a plethora of potential looks for your party. The best part is you can swap the cosmetic styles around agnostic of your equipped job, so you could make your whole team look like Summoners or Knights if you really wanted. You can also choose from quite a few bonus cosmetics like Barrett’s adorable Naval uniform and Nanaki’s hilarious Shinra disguise – I love a bit of dress-up in my Final Fantasy.
And so while Chadley is busy hand-stitching all of my wonderful garments (and trying to figure out how to stop an impending Meteor), it’s clear he needs some more help on the research side of things. That’s why Revelations also re-introduces his AI companion, MAI – though this time around he’s managed to give her a physical form. I’m going to assume for regular, non-weird reasons.
Which leads me to leaving the Highwind for the first time, and dropping down into the world below. As you may have seen in some of the early gameplay trailers, Final Fantasy VII Revelation is taking the Fortnite approach to navigation. Rather than force players find an appropriate clearing to land the Highwind a la the original game, Revelation simply lets you and your party jump out of the thing and skydive to pretty much anywhere on the map you’d like to go. It’s also a way for the studio to very emphatically say “Here’s your open world.” Like I mentioned up top, this is great for showing off the scale and scope of things – I could have landed anywhere among Gongaga to Corel, Junon, Mideel, Wutai and more – but less great for ensuring I saw all the important stuff before my time was up.
In spite of the allure of some new minigames to be found in Golden Saucer, I decided to focus on the spots that are new to Revelations, so my first destination is Mideel. But before I can even start exploring, two things become very clear. Firstly, it’s possible to do a “Chocolanding” where you drop right onto your mount from a skydive, which is sick as hell. But more to my experience with this preview, there is so much stuff to do in this game. Holy cactuar.
From the minute I touch ground, an absolutely smorgasbord of shiny icons appears on the map and on my in-game compass, showing me all of the many objectives, treasures, mysteries and other activities I might want to do instead of whatever it is I’m meant to be doing. At the same time, MAI starts rattling off a laundry list of research missions she needs me to complete in the area. And while I’m taking my first steps and running over items on the ground, the auto-loot feature means I’m also seeing a list of goods ticking over on-screen. To say it was overwhelming would be putting it mildly – if you like your RPGs with an extra serving of everything I think you’ll feel right at home here.
Now, to be fair, I’m not sure how much of this sudden influx of notifications and new information is a result of being dropped right into the game’s fourth chapter without any kind of on-boarding or previous progress factored in, so perhaps in the full game this won’t feel quite as much as it does now. Again, not the ideal way to demo this thing. Mideel was at least a lovely place to visit, exactly the kind of tropical, Southeast Asian hot springs town that the original game’s crude pre-rendered backgrounds implied. It remains a real joy to exist in these reimagined spaces, that once were a series of disconnected still images and are now fully-realised, explorable and sizeable places.
Of all of the number of things I could have tried to do at this point – seek out rare baubles, check off errands for MAI, attempt to secure this region’s unique summon, Typhon – most of my time was spent messing around with new toys and new friends. Running around in a party comprised of Yuffie, Cid and Vincent, I unfortunately spent more time just getting reacquainted with the game’s base combat than I did picking out the nuances of controlling the latter two newcomers.
The gadgets are cool, though! I had acess to a grappling hook, a “Makolamp” that reveals hidden secrets, a pair of binoculars and a fiend tracker, but the most interesting to me was the camera. Not only does viewing the world through it lens give you additional information about various points of interest, flora, technology and even characters, but snapping photos of the wild creatures that roam the land, sea and skies players directly into MAI’s research missions in very Pokemon Snap fashion. I know I just got done decrying the sheer amount of stuff to do in this game, but I’m so ready to be Final Fantasy VII’s top nature photographer.
Glancing at the clock, I realised I had very little time left at this stage, and had yet to venture into the all-important Wutai, a crucial location in this particular segment of the story and a place that fans have long been waiting to explore in the Remake series. Thankfully, zipping back up to the Highwind is as easy as a button press, and flying it to my next destination is a lot of fun.
Over in Wutai, I’m greeted by a lot of familiar sights and faces, of course in their very detailed, modern form. It seems the introduction to this place veers quite a bit from the source material, as Yuffie’s whole Materia-thieving subplot looks to be gone, and our first look at her pops, Godo Kisaragi, seems him being threatened by one of Rebirth’s retconned spin-off characters, Glenn Lodbrok. Wutai is another astonishingly beautiful new interpretation, of course, its traditional Japanese-inspired architecture and lush forests. Once again I was tempted to go wandering off, especially knowing that the obtainable summon in Wutai is Hades – who I was desperate to glimpse – but alas I had already run up my allotted time.
There’s a lot that I really didn’t get the chance to get a full picture of in this early preview of Final Fantasy VII Revelation. I’m sure folks have plenty of questions about combat, I myself will be glancing at my fellow games writer’s own impressions to see what I missed there, as well as side quests, new and returning characters and whatever else. It’s a blessing and a curse, that Revelation is shaping up to be an enormous beast of an RPG – a blessing for fans looking to spend weeks or months with the Remake Trilogy’s final chapter, a curse for anyone handed the controller and then politely asked for it back after an hour and a half. But that’s just how these things go.
The bottom line is that there is so much going on in Final Fantasy VII Revelation, too much to reasonably grasp in one preview. But getting just a taste of how big of an adventure lies ahead, and how many new secrets and discoveries Hamaguchi-san and team are stuffing into this long-awaited finale, has only made the wait for April 8, 2027 all the more excruciating.
Previewed at an event hosted in Sydney, with covergeek‘s flights covered by Bandai Namco Australia.
Born into the world of video games through SEGA, and in particular Sonic the Hedgehog, Kieron’s gaming tastes now consist of the latest, shiny AAA thing, an indie darling or two, and an embarrassing number of hours of Balatro.