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I’ve touched Final Fantasy 7 Revelation on PS5 Pro, but I’ll be brutally honest with you: I’m not entirely sure how to approach this preview.
At an event in London last week, Square Enix put me in control of the Highwind and set me free to explore the concluding instalment in its well-regarded remake trilogy.
I had an hour to play; I was told that if I was to complete everything in this area, it’d take me somewhere in the region of 20 hours.
There’s no question I came away from this preview impressed at the sheer scale of it all, but I’m not sure how much I can realistically tell you based on my limited playtime.
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The demo – which takes place during Chapter 4: House of Cards – starts out with an introduction to the explorable Highwind airship, although I was encouraged to skip the tutorials here as it was noted it would eat into my playtime.
So, from the cockpit of the Highwind, which is fully controllable, I searched for points of interest.
My main objective was to travel to Wutai, which I could have made a beeline towards in order to progress the plot. But the entire world is explorable, with an unfathomable number of “question marks” on the map to interact with.
I do think there’s an undercurrent of irony here: if it was Ubisoft making this game, I think it’d be criticised for the excesses of its open world design. Square Enix, at least for now, seems to be slipping by unscathed.
It is impressive, though: you can basically parachute out of the Highwind, Fortnite-style, whenever you see something interesting and embark on your adventure from the ground.
Running on the PS5 Pro, I didn’t notice any egregious examples of pop-in or poor performance, although it’s worth noting that the game isn’t due out until 8th April, so this would have been an unfinished build anyway.
To be totally and completely transparent with you, I felt utterly overwhelmed by the options presented to me; I wanted to explore the threads that would make for the best preview possible, but such was the wealth of options available to me, I experienced choice paralysis a little bit.
I ended up taking photographs of some of the wildlife in the Mideel Archipelago – there are side quests relating to this – and took on a combat gauntlet against a particularly aggressive group of hitmantis.
My party consisted of Yuffie, Barrett, and Cid – although I didn’t really get a chance to explore the widely promoted jobs system for any of them.
Cid is one of the newly added party members, so I was excited to get a feel for his aerial-focused, lance-style combat.
If I’m being completely honest with you, I struggled to find the “feel” for Revelation’s combat during my hands-on – it’s been a couple of years since Rebirth, after all – but Cid’s emphasis on ranged and aerial attacks seemed fun to me, and I’m interested to see how he complements all of the other characters.
My demo pulled me in about a billion different directions: I could have gone to the Golden Saucer to try out the returning snowboarding minigame; I could have collected medallions for a character called Freddie in return for rewards; I could have focused on rescuing Chocobos to expand the number of races available to me.
In the end, I teleported back to the Highwind and went directly to Wutai.
I think Square Enix has done a remarkable job of retaining the blend of Japanese and Chinese architecture from the original PS1 game, and the scale is simply remarkable.
I do feel like there are times exploring in Revelation where the controls and capabilities of its characters don’t match its scale, but perhaps I just need to play more to understand the limitations of the traversal.
But I got a little lost in the virtual tourism of Wutai, and ended up running out of time before I’d meaningfully progressed the plot. I don’t really want to say too much about the cutscenes I saw, because I imagine you’d rather see those in context.
So I’m not sure how useful this preview is to you – I don’t feel like I really learned much or used my time as effectively as I could have. (Although, I will accept some sympathy for being thrust into a demo so sprawling it was pulling me in about 50 different directions all at once.)
What I will say is if you’re looking forward to Revelation’s unprecedented scale, then this concluding chapter is going to deliver in abundance. As I mentioned at the start of this preview, it would have taken me 20 hours to see everything in this demo; I had just one.
I think you’re probably going to want to clear out your backlogs before 8th April, because extracting maximum value from this concluding chapter is probably going to take up weeks if not months of your gaming time.
There’s no doubt this ambitious remake project is getting the ambitious conclusion it deserves.