Final Fantasy VII Revelation will have a built-in constituency of potential buyers when it's released on April 8 2027. It’s the third instalment in an epic project in which Square Enix took 1997’s Final Fantasy VII and expansively remade it, using modern technology, into a trilogy. So pretty much everyone who bought 2020’s Final Fantasy VII Remake and 2024’s Final Fantasy Rebirth will want to buy it.
In reality, it should be on the radar of anyone who has an interest in Japanese RPGs (JRPGs), and especially the long-running and genre-defining Final Fantasy series. At the recent Gamescom show, Revelation was playable for the first time and after about 50 minutes with it (which seemed to pass in a flash) it left me feeling that it easily passes muster when compared to the most recent and high-tech JRPGs – not bad for a reimagined version of a 1997 game.
Familiar but enhanced visuals
Aesthetically, Final Fantasy VII Revelation is easy to describe: it shares an art-style with the two previous games in the remade trilogy, as well as most recent iterations of the main Final Fantasy franchise. Namely colourful-looking 3D characters with a hint of anime-inspiration traversing lush-looking countryside environments and more industrial cities.
There was a clear progression in visuals between Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth, and that continues with Revelation. While its environments are mostly the same as those seen in Rebirth, they are also a tiny bit more detailed, crisper and colourful.
Plus Revelation adds some new locales: most notably Wutai, the mythical republic over the sea from Midgar, from whence team-member Yuffie hails. At the end of my Gamescom play-through, I was able to wander around Wutai’s Capital City briefly and found a charming new environment, with plenty of verticality.
Capital City is situated in a picturesque bowl surrounded by rocky mountains, and features a mediaeval Japanese village style of architecture, with large pagoda-style buildings with pitched roofs and blossoming cherry trees everywhere. Along with cats, which the game encouraged me to photograph.
Revelation seemed to have ramped up the sense of being a safari-style tourist, as it also encouraged wildlife photography elsewhere. And it provided plenty of environments which were a joy to traverse. Visually, it conforms to the classic modern JRPG style, but is as fine-looking as any of its peers.
Traversing the skies
And in Revelation, it’s easy to get to any of those lovely environments, since it’s the first instalment of the trilogy to be truly open-world. This time around, you get to traverse the game-world in an airship called the High Wind (a fairly steampunk-style contraption, a visual genre which has featured in many past Final Fantasy games).
The Gamescom play-through started at the beginning of Chapter 4, marking the first time Revelation’s party encountered the High Wind. Accordingly, it offered a tutorial in how to pilot it, which I ignored, not wanting to waste time. Anyway, it was simple to operate, chugging around serenely above the clouds, with the game-worlds different areas clearly labelled.
I headed to the Grasslands, an area seen early on in Rebirth, keen to investigate how it had changed between the two games. Once I had positioned the High Wind satisfactorily, a simple button-press took me to its side where I jumped off to parachute to ground level, discovering I could glide around precisely before deploying my chute. Cutely, pressing R1 just before landing spawned a chocobo for me to ride.
FITS: outfits with benefits
A bit of random traversal provided some random creatures to battle, allowing me to assess Revelation’s battle-system. Rebirth added one layer to Remake’s battle-system in the form of Synergy, allowing two party members to combine to land powerful attacks, and Revelation adds another layer in the form of what the game calls FITS.
FITS are simply new outfits, but they add new abilities and attributes while battling, and essentially constitute a means of bringing new character classes to the game’s battle-party members. There are four FITS outfits: Warrior, Knight, Black Mage and Summoner.
Warrior is attack-focused and Knight defence-focused (so Knights-equipped party members will receive defence buffs and draw fire from the rest of the party). Black Mage is magic-focused, whereas Summoner allows suitably equipped characters to summon helpful creatures much earlier in battles than would previously have been the case.
In battle, the FITS system lets you pick from a whole new menu of FITS attacks, along with the abilities, spells and synergy attacks that could be triggered in Rebirth. I tried a few and they were helpfully powerful, and were accompanied by some really flashy visual effects.
But in truth, I didn’t have enough time to explore the full depths of the FITS system, deciding which outfit could best be assigned to which party member, and which worked best in which battle situation. Clearly, one of the joys of Revelation will derive from working out how best to benefit from FITS.
Finding one of the Synergy Upgrade machines at the chocobo farm in the Grasslands, I was able to determine that the FITS system is intertwined with the Synergy one: I could choose FITS upgrades which applied when particular characters were operating synergistically. That added a layer of complexity to a system which is already a tad opaque. But Synergy and FITS upgrades, at least, can be respecced easily enough.
Plenty to do
Exploration of maps already explored in Rebirth yielded plenty of new activities, side-quests and areas of interest. At one point I uncovered a parachute-landing target which promised rewards if I landed on it from the High Wind. Returning to the High Wind at any point was a breeze – a simple matter of a couple of button-presses.
The new side-quests, according to Square Enix, have a new twist, in that some of them will play out differently according to which party member you choose to undergo them. There are two new party members in Revelation: Cid, a familiar character from the franchise, who captains the High Wind, and Vincent Valentine, a vampiric type.
I also found a handy new piece of kit in the form of a grapple-gun which whizzed me to designated grapple-posts. It came in particularly handy in Wutai’s Capital City, which is more or less built on the side of a cliff. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to investigate a new area called Rocket City, but shots of it – naturally featuring rockets – suggested a pretty industrial urban environment.
Nor, at a fairly early period in the game, did I encounter any of the Weapons, giant beasts that operate as guardians of the planet, which were seen in Rebirth but in Revelation operate as bosses which the battle-party will have to take on.
The biggest instalment yet?
I vastly enjoyed my short time in Revelation. Unsurprisingly, it had plenty about it which was familiar, but it took an already beautiful game-world, made it look even better, and added a whole new cornucopia of things to do in a world which had truly opened up for the first time (from the High Wind, I could have proceeded to Wutai for the next chunk of the main storyline, or could roam around the rest of the world to my heart’s content).
Its open-world nature surely means that Revelation will be the longest slice of the remade Final Fantasy VII trilogy – so it will be a very long game indeed, particularly for the sort of players who feel compelled to complete everything. It will surely be a must-buy for anyone who wants to discover the sort of heights that modern JRPGs are capable of hitting.
Final Fantasy VII Revelation will be released for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S Nintendo Switch and PC on 8 April 2027.
