This takeaway comes from a 45-minute hands-on preview attended by Polygon at Gamescom 2026. And to be clear here, “most impressive” doesn’t necessarily mean “largest.” Though Revelation certainly is massive in scale, 45 minutes is by no means long enough to assess or even fully grasp what an open-world game is trying to offer. But weeks later, I’m still struck by how Revelation builds on its predecessor, using Rebirth as the literal foundation for a jaw-dropping feat of game design.
FF7 Revelation is redefining ‘open world’
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, the third and final (sorry) installment of Square Enix’s FF7 remake trilogy, puts a cap on this seven-year-long series. It picks up after the dramatic events of Rebirth. Aerith is dead (right?). Cid and Vincent Valentine have joined the party. The squad is en route to the ninja nation of Wutai. Oh, and you get an airship.
The Highwind is the crux of what makes Revelation such a revelation. My demo picked up a few hours into the game, at the start of the fourth chapter, “House of Cards.” The core crew is aboard Cid’s airship. A crop of ominous kaiju-like creatures called Weapons have popped up around the planet. Barret spends a lot of time shouting about how if they put his daughter, Marlene, in danger, oh boy, they’re gonna regret it, doesn’t matter that they’re 300 feet tall, by all that is holy, those bastards are gonna regret it. And then you’re off.
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation’s big gimmick is that you can fly the airship to literally anywhere in the world, park it, disembark, dive out of the hangar like you’re Tom Cruise, deploy a parachute, and gently float down to earth. And then you’re just there. Completely seamlessly. I could visit every location I spent hours in back during the Rebirth days: Mideel, the Grasslands, Junon, Gongaga, Costa del Sol, the Gold Saucer. It’s all there. (Wutai is a new region to Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, but going there in chapter four temporarily locks you into the main story mission.) And it’s all rendered exactly how it looked in the previous game, right down to the scooters of Costa del Sol.
You don’t often get video game sequels that reuse environments in follow-up games. You rarely get games that reuse every environment. The immediate effect this has on worldbuilding, giving the sense that you’re occupying a real place as opposed to a series of meticulously constructed levels, is truly second to none. Like rotating your first level in Fez or taking off into orbit for the first time in No Man’s Sky, it is one of those you-have-to-play-it-to-believe-it moments of video game wizardry that come along every few years. Maybe the novelty will fade once I’ve done it 10 or 20 times. For now, it’s nothing short of transcendent.
The rest of Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, at least according to what I played, keeps to the impeccable standard established in the trilogy’s previous two entries. It is clever and often silly without sacrificing dire narrative stakes. It’s as luxurious as ever; you can feel the Square Enix bucks dripping off every character model and baked into the background of every landscape. And the combat, a mix of real-time action and pause-time menus, is as engaging as ever.
There are a few notable additions to battles, though, that could inject fresh verve to what is now a seven-year-old system. The first is the Function-Integrated Tactical Suitwear (FITS) system, which lets you switch between four costumes on the fly: Warrior, Knight, Black Mage, and Summoner. Each outfit comes with various movesets and stat advantages, meaning you can effectively overhaul your party compositions in the middle of a battle. I did not experiment much with FITS (again: 45 minutes), though I can already see how it could open up worlds of possibility for high-level play.
Your two new party members, Cid Highwind and Vincent Valentine, bring new toolkits into the mix. Cid fights with a staff that deals ineffectual damage, and seems to bleed health like he’s covered in leeches. (I probably should’ve looked into FITS, but, hey, remember that thing about 45 minutes?) Vincent, on the other hand, is an absolute monster — literally. In combat, Vincent can transform into a giant wolf, the Galian Beast, who shreds through enemies like paper. My characters were around level 45, so maybe this was the result of playing high-level characters, but there appeared to be few limitations on spamming the Galian Beast’s attacks and obliterating every foe on the battlefield.
At least by chapter four, you’ll be able to find — and fight — various Weapons all around Final Fantasy 7 Revelation’s world. Whenever you land in a region for the first time, MAI (yes, she’s back) will pinpoint the location of that region’s Weapon, which you can then track down and fight. She’ll also tell you, through a string of pop-up notifications, about all the other various activities you can engage in: materia hunts, combat challenges, minigames, side quests, and so on. Each region seems to have a dedicated side quest chain; at the Gold Saucer, for instance, the speedo model Dio tasked me with tracking down a bunch of droids who are critical to the operation of the theme park’s revised and expanded minigame playground.
I opted to skip past all of that and focus on the main story. Wutai is, in short, glorious. Edo-era architecture is nestled into a cliff in the middle of a jungle, as if a Swiss mountain city was portaled into the tropics. Wutai is home to Yuffie, and she’s effervescently excited at the prospect of returning home. I, too, was thrilled at the prospect of exploring a brand-new region. MAI even told me about plenty of optional activities, including an altar for Hades, an optional summon from the late hours of the original game who did not appear in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.
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Then I found a Queen’s Blood opponent and that’s what I spent the remaining time of my demo on. Look, I’m only human. Queen’s Blood really is the greatest minigame. And as Polygon reported all the way back in January, Revelation will feature a significantly expanded version of it. You will, however, have to start your decks from scratch. In Rebirth, Queen’s Blood was technically a Cloud storyline. In Revelation, according to a representative for Square Enix, it will be a Red XIII storyline. (Remember how eager he was to play in Rebirth’s tournament?) It’s only natural that Red would have his own decks.
As the capstone to an ambitious multiyear project, it makes sense that Revelation is turning everything up to 11 — more party members, more customization, more minigames, more activities, more places to go, more, more, more — despite Rebirth fielding criticism from some players for being too bloated. In 1997, Final Fantasy 7 set the standard for what was then considered an expansive RPG. It was, in other words, a revelation. It may have taken three games for the full picture to coalesce, but 30 years after it first entered cultural canon, Final Fantasy 7 might once again set that new standard.
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation will be released on April 8, 2027, for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.
