At PAX West, I got the chance to spend 45 minutes playing one of the most anticipated games of next year: Final Fantasy VII Revelation.
We start with a brief conversation on the bridge of the Highwind, as the party decides where to embark next on their quest to stop Sephiroth. It’s quick but impactful; I realized how excited I was to spend another 70-200 hours with these characters. The greatest strength of these remakes is how strong the writing is for all of them, and how good the performances are. It felt like meeting up with old friends, and I was immediately locked in.
Credit: Square Enix
Yuffie suggests heading to Wutai to gain an army of ninjas to help, and it’s hard to argue against that, but new party member Cid suggests checking out some side stuff before we do that, and I agreed.
From there, I was given control of the Highwind, and god did it feel good. Modern game design, especially around massive open-world RPGs, tends to favor fast travel, well, because it’s fast and gets you into the action quicker, but there’s something to be said about an airship. Physically traveling around the globe, banking around continents, really feeling the space as I moved around it really adds texture and reality to the planet. So often in games, spaces exist as barely connected rooms, but traveling in the Highwind, you feel how everything is connected. It adds to the ecology themes that are so core to the story of Final Fantasy 7. Seeing the world in all its splendor from above really sells why it needs to be saved, as well as how scary it is to see Sephiroth’s meteor over the horizon.
Credit: Square Enix
I decided to stop in Mideel, a new tropical location on the planet’s southern side that fans of the original might remember. We jump off the Highwind and parachute down below, dropping past the trees and buildings, seamlessly going from ship to ground with no loading screen. It’s incredibly impressive, and while you’re parachuting down, you see how absolutely massive the map is. Mai, a robot friend of the party, chimes in and shows the main map, and it populates with side activities like special monster fights, photography requests, and the locations of special plants. It’s overwhelming, especially in a demo, so I choose to ignore it for now.
I check out the sights of Mideel before taking on a quest to help find a missing purebred Chocobo. Both Red XIII and Cid have ideas on how to find it, highlighting a new system in Revelation, where you can decide who the “main character” of a sidequest is; whoever you pick becomes the primary character in cutscenes as well as talking to characters throughout the quest. It also seems that who you choose might change the flow of the quest, but I did not have time to see. Red seemed more interesting to me, so we headed off into the jungle.
Credit: Square Enix
Along the way, we finally found some monsters to fight, and I tried out the new party members Cid and Vincent. Cid is a Dragoon, a classic Final Fantasy class based around a lance and air-based combat, and he’s a blast to play. He’s all about stringing together bombastically animated combos by attacking, pausing, then attacking again when he flashes blue, which unleashes a multi-step attack based on the number of times you attacked before pausing. He can also throw his lance at enemies and impale them with it.
While Cid is all about getting close, Vincent is about range… and sometimes getting close. Vincent is about magic and guns; you fire your twin revolvers at enemies to build ATB like anyone else, then pull off crazy actions with that ATB, but he can also turn into a giant monster called the Galian Beast at any time by holding down the R1 button. In this form, it’s all about getting close and smashing enemies, but while you’re in the form, you slowly take damage. It also takes a while to transform in and out of Beast Form, but Vincent has abilities that let it happen instantly with ATB. So the goal seems to be building action meter to switch in and out of Beast Form, and the combo potential for this seems insanely fun.
Credit: Square Enix
I also got to mess around with the FITS system a bit, which is basically a light Job system. There are 4 FITS: Warrior, Knight, Black Mage, Summoner. Each is a classic FF job. The characters already had some pre-equipped to best fit what they do in combat. Barret was a knight based around tanking, while Yuffie was a black mage because she uses a lot of magic. The FITS add a few extra abilities to characters so you can really tweak what you want each one to do. For example: Summoner basically lets you call upon the summons in regular combat instead of just waiting for the meter to build up like you usually would. The FITS also changed the characters’ appearance, which I was worried about, but thankfully the devs said you can choose the character’s iconic classic look over the FIT look if you want.
From there, we finally found our Chocobo and continued the quest. It turned out to be a Lady and the Tramp-esque romp that took me all across Mideel. It was cute, but I wanted to see a bit more. So I went back to the Highwind and flew over to Wutai. This time it was a little less open-ended and more story-focused, dropping on the outskirts and working my way towards the city. I’ll leave it vague so you can experience it yourself, but it’s all very cool.
Credit: Square Enix
My demo was almost up, and I wanted to fly around in the Highwind a bit more, so I hopped back in and took to the sky. I got a notification that something big was sighted in the Corel, so obviously I had to check that out. Another impressive jump later, and I see a massive sandstorm with a pair of ominous glowing red eyes within. I steel myself, start to approach, and my demo ends.
Final Fantasy VII Revelation is shaping up to be something incredibly special. It’s the culmination of two of the best JRPGs of the decade, and you feel it. So much time has gone into this trilogy improving every aspect: the acting, the writing, and especially the combat. Here we are at the end, and it feels better and deeper than ever. If this is how I feel coming out of a 45-minute demo, I can’t wait to see how I feel with the full game in hand.
