Final Fantasy VII: Revelation Preview

I didn’t see the vision when the remake of Final Fantasy VII was revealed to actually be three games. That’s a bit much, isn’t it? But after doing almost everything there is to do in both parts so far, I get it now. Rebirth was a mind-blowing game because it took the globetrotting scale of a classic JRPG and brought it into the modern day without the abstraction. It was a game of excess to a degree that normally turns me off an open world game, but its exciting moment-to-moment gameplay and the overall quality of its side distractions made it one of my favourite games that year. That scale and that depth wouldn’t have been possible if it was all crammed into one. Now we’re approaching the end of the trilogy with Final Fantasy VII: Revelation, and like everyone I’m curious to see how they wrap things up. I got to sit down with a demo of the game, and from what I’ve seen so far the signs are positive!

The demo kicked off from when you first board the Highwind, a large airship that was used to navigate the world map in the original game. In Rebirth you got access to a watercraft late into the game that allowed you to sail the seas connecting each of the main areas of the map, and it was an astonishing moment when you could not just see how big the map was but also freely move between them. Taking the wheel of the Highwind saw that feeling and raised it. Zooming around the airspace above the world from the last game is fun in of itself, but when you look down at what seems like such a small map but is actually all the locations you spent dozens of hours playing through last time… it’s a wild feeling. And there’s a bunch of locations not in the last game either, so the world is even bigger! Among them were Midgar (the setting of the first part of the trilogy), Aerospace Cape (where I presume Cid’s hometown of Rocket Town is), and Yuffie’s homeland of Wutai.

Wutai was the focus of the story missions available in the demo, where Yuffie takes the gang there in the hopes of recruiting allies in their cause. She thinks things will go smoothly but the cutscenes the player gets shown along the way show that things in her homeland are very different since the last time she was there. Classic dramatic irony. For those expecting juicy story details though, be warned that I played this demo exactly how I’ll play the full game – by getting completely distracted by the side content. Exploring the world with the Highwind was the biggest unknown when it came to Revelation’s structure and I was keen to see how it worked. There was an overwhelming amount of activities and questlines to choose from, so this would let me pick and choose a bit of everything along the way to get a good sample of what Revelation had to offer.

The tutorials actually started off with an overview of Queen’s Blood, the addictive card game from Rebirth, which made me chuckle because clearly the designers received the message about how popular it was. This minigame is more or less the same as it was in Rebirth, but now you have a skill that lets you set one of your cards as a ‘trump card’ that will always appear in your opening hand. From the sounds of things, other characters you will play against could have their own unique skills that you’ll be able to unlock, kind of like in Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links. Queen’s Blood has its own storyline once again, and my intrusive thoughts told me I should spend the entire session following that, but I was responsible.

First I went about setting up my party. I wanted to try out Vincent and Cid, the two newest party members, so I threw them together with Barret to make my team. I assigned each of them a class from the new ‘FITS’ system, which is like a smaller scale job system. There were four classes available (Knight, Warrior, Black Mage and Summoner) which can be assigned to any character. These classes give characters access to different skills based around different playstyles. For instance, I gave Barret the Knight class because it revolves around defending allies and drawing enemy attention which works well with his tanky stats. Each character’s skill tree also has nodes relating to each class. Interestingly, there are stats boosts that kick in so long as the party contains a particular class, but that character doesn’t need to be the one in that class. This is an interesting take on a class system which finds a different way to encourage a balanced party. I set up my party with Barret as a Knight, Vincent as a Black Mage and Cid as a Warrior, and got into the pilot’s seat ready to set out on an adventure. Then I realised it’d been so long since I’d played Rebirth that I’d forgotten all the controls.

To get my bearings I decided to start in the Grasslands region, which is where Rebirth kicked off. Parachuting down near the city of Kalm, I found a side quest that seemed like a good starting point. A group of refugees from Midgar were trying to get through the gates of Kalm, but Shinra troops were blocking them. The group’s leader pleaded their case, saying that they were running out of supplies, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. Our group offered to help out in a direct (read: violent) way but were told to keep things peaceful and find a way to get the refugee leader an audience with Kalm’s mayor instead. At this point, I was presented with two possible paths through the mission – Yuffie could take the lead and infiltrate the city with ninja techniques, or I could go with Red/Nanaki’s plan to sneak into the city through the tunnels that we used to sneak OUT of the city in the last game. Something told me Yuffie’s plan would go horribly wrong and get messy fast, so I went with the plan that we’d already done before.

I rode my Chocobo around the perimeter of the city, realising that this special bird now had ALL of the special Chocobo abilities that were spread across different breeds in Rebirth. It could climb walls, glide, and ride water jets into the air, making traversal a lot easier this time around. But while the world is a bit more open, there are still limitations to stop you going anywhere willy-nilly. Unfortunately this does take the form of invisible walls and messages saying you can’t go that way sometimes, but this was usually only when I went off the beaten path. Along the way, Revelation’s greatest strength and biggest red flag presented itself – there’s a LOT of stuff.

Rebirth was similar, and while some people (hi!) loved the breadth of what was on offer, others found it repetitive and tiring. Particular ire was directed towards Chadley, a guide character who would give you missions and directives in each zone. He must have taken that to heart, because this time around he’s delegated the guide duties to his assistant Mai. The poor girl does not realise the online storm that will be coming. Upon landing in a new zone, Mai will contact you with an overview of the missions and side activities available for you there. This takes the form of a series of pop-ups and windows that would make even the Temu app designers afraid, before opening up your map and filling it with icons Ubisoft-style. And there’s a LOT of icons, covering all kinds of activities that I didn’t get time to touch upon. Ignoring the map would be one thing, but the game also points all of these things out to you any time you get close to one. A particular egregious example is the new photography activity which tasks you with taking photos of specific wildlife found within that region. Whenever you’re nearby one, a reminder of the questline appears on the side of the screen along with a huge list of the dozen or so animals you still need to photograph which takes up a bizarre amount of screen real estate. I was somebody who loved working my way through everything Rebirth had to offer, but even I felt that this was all a bit excessive. I hope that there’s an option to tone down or turn off all of these prompts and reminders.

Somehow I managed to stay focused on the task at hand and arrived at the entrance to the tunnels. Here, things went horribly wrong and got messy fast. It turns out the tunnels are guarded now, and the Shinra troops there spotted us (in a cutscene, there’s no stealth mechanics involved). Naturally, we had to fight our way out. Combat was mostly the same real-time gameplay as in Rebirth. You control one character at a time, but can switch between them at will, and each has their own moves and abilities. Each character has their own AP gauge which fills up over time and can be filled faster by landing basic attacks on enemies. AP is used to perform more advanced actions like using healing items or more powerful attacks. What makes things more interesting than a typical action game is the way that using your AP actions slows time down, allowing you to select actions and targets from menus like you would in a turn-based game. You can also assign actions to characters you’re not currently controlling, so you can heal and exploit enemy weaknesses without switching roles.

I spent the most time with Vincent and Cid throughout the demo because I wanted to see what they brought to the table. Vincent uses his pistols for his basic attacks, giving you another ranged option for the party. Build up enough AP from blasting your opponents and you can activate melee abilities that will close the gap between you and your enemies and allow you to get some combos going. He has a beast form that you can transform into, which has more powerful abilities but at the cost of temporarily lowering his maximum HP. Cid is a more melee-focused fighter whose gimmick revolves around timing. Whenever one of his basic combo moves makes contact he will start glowing shortly after. If you hold off from mashing the attack button and instead wait for the glow to kick in, you’ll branch off his combo into a different attack. This could result in more damage or an additional effect like launching opponents into the air. He has another ability that was supposed to be a ranged attack you can use to target multiple foes at once, but I couldn’t work that one out. Of the two of them, I found myself going back to Vincent more regularly because of the simple pleasure of shooting goblins in the face.

Back to the quest, we had now dispatched the guards in front of the tunnels… but still couldn’t go inside because the doors were locked. Yes, it’s one of those things where the characters who were cutting buildings in half during boss fights can’t make it past a rickety, old door. It’s contrived, but I’ve learned to roll with it after all these years. The key was being held by another squad out on patrol, but instead of being given a map marker to follow we were instead given a physical map that the party leader could pull out and zoom in on, and which had the locations of campsites marked on it. I had to compare this map with the regular map and work out for myself where these camps were. I went to each one, and you’ll never believe this, but they weren’t at the first two locations. Third time was the charm, and we found the troopers battling against a group of monsters. The troopers didn’t survive and the monsters turned on us, but at the end of it all I finally had the key. Phew.

Returning to Kalm, I found the mayor and told him about the refugee’s plight. He sent out supplies to them right away, but apologised as he couldn’t let them into the city. It turns out there’s been a series of bomb threats made in the city and so the gates have been on a strict lockdown until the situation is resolved. The refugees were understanding and appreciated the support, and more quests were unlocked that would explore the bomb threats further.

But I was off to Wutai! I set off in the Highwind, but as I passed by the desert region of Corel I received a transmission – a Weapon had emerged in the area! Weapons are powerful monsters that play an important role in FF7’s story. They are summoned by the planet itself to ward off threats, but don’t discriminate between friend or foe once they’re active and can become threats themselves. If the original game is an indicator then some of these will be fought during the main story while others, like this one, are optional encounters. I decided I was cocky enough to try and fight one and flew over to the Corel desert. Things got a bit dicey here, and not just because I didn’t stand a chance.

I attempted to skydive right in front of the Weapon to fight it, but as I descended I received a call from Mai telling me that the area was too dangerous to enter just yet (i.e. there’s a chain of quests to do before I could fight it). The game tried pushing me away from the site mid-fall, but it pushed me into the side of the Golden Saucer… where I was ALSO not meant to be, and so I got wedged in between invisible walls unable to move. I tried wiggling my way out fruitlessly, and there was no ‘reset’ option to return to the Highwind or teleport to the ground, so I was stuck there for a minute or so wondering what to do. Thankfully I did manage to get out, but I hope that the final game has a failsafe for the inevitable open world mishaps like this.

After I finally reached the ground and mashed my way through Mai’s pop-up onslaught, I got a quest to investigate the Weapon in the desert. I believe this was the Ruby Weapon but it hadn’t been named yet. The main body of the Weapon was encased inside a storm, out of reach, but red tentacles had been popping up in the area and I was tasked with eliminating them. This was actually quite hard! In each group there was a big, main tentacle and several smaller ones. The small ones were easy to kill, but were overwhelming in their numbers, and the big one was the main target. If you didn’t kill it quickly, it would start to resurrect the small ones you’d already killed, and if that wasn’t bad enough it had a powerful explosion attack of its own! I struggled my way through one of these encounters but had to give in on the second. It turned out this quest line had a recommended level around 15 levels higher than me, which explained a lot about why I struggled so much! But it’s cool to know that you’re not gated from higher-level areas if you want to challenge yourself.

This time I went to Wutai for real, but due to all my earlier distractions I didn’t get to spend too much time there. Wutai hasn’t been explored in the remake trilogy before now, so it was exciting getting to finally see it after all the build-up. Without spoiling too much it was clear right away that this part of the story would be following up on some of the new material introduced in Rebirth. I’m hoping there will be some proper closure to the Deepground plot set up in the DLC for Remake as well.

At the end of my hour of playtime I felt like I’d barely scratched the surface of the demo, let alone the whole game. It looks like the scope has been blown up even further than it was in Rebirth, which is either great or terrible news depending on how you felt about that. I personally loved it, but I don’t think Revelation does itself favours in the way it presents itself. There’s a lot of pop-ups and clutter that get in the way, so I hope there’ll be settings to have some control over those. Once I got past all that, the things I was actually playing were a lot of fun. Rebirth is a solid base to build upon, and the new party members and FITS are interesting additions to that. Let’s see whether they stick the landing with the story!

Final Fantasy VII: Revelation launches on April 8th 2027 on the Nintendo Switch 2. This demo was played on a PlayStation 5 Pro.

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