The early hours of Final Fantasy 7 offer some of the best scenes of levity in the entire game, whether that’s infiltrating Don Corneo’s mansion by disguising Cloud Strife as a woman, or when Barret Wallace cusses out a whiny Shinra exec aboard a commuter train. One of the most memorable, however, is defined by the player’s choice: When climbing the Shinra Building to rescue Aerith, do you rush in, guns and swords a-blazin’? Or do you climb 60 flights of stairs and chuckle at the banter between the characters as you go?
Final Fantasy 7: Ascend the Shinra Building is a cooperative balance game co-developed by Square Enix and Arclight. It’s based on Arclight’s Cat and the Tower game, where a black cat named Toto must climb a perilous tower to reach the stars where his mother is waiting for him. Other cats along for the journey can help or hinder Toto’s ascent — because it’s quite literally a balancing act.
“Climb the swaying Shinra Building and face the crisis threatening the planet!” reads a translation of Square Enix’s official release. Players construct the building by combining floor and wall panels according to the instructions on cards that they draw. But because wall heights vary, the tower itself becomes unstable, so players will have to use wooden characters featuring Cloud, Tifa, Aerith, and more to counterbalance the structure. The goal is for Cloud to reach the eighth level without the structure collapsing to win, along the way dealing with enemies like the Turks and, eventually, the One-Winged Angel Sephiroth himself. Each session of gameplay is said to take anywhere between 15 and 30 minutes.
There are a total of 24 wooden character blocks, with art drawn by Fumio Minagawa and Sachi Hiruta. Production on the game was also supervised by Tetsuya Nomura, who was the original game’s character designer and collaborated on much of the game’s story. Nomura is well-known for directing the FF7: Advent Children movie and FF7 Remake. He was also the creative director on FF7: Rebirth, a role he remains in for the upcoming sequel currently in development.
FF7: Ascend the Shinra Building is scheduled for release on November 6, 2026 in Japan and is currently available for pre-order from the Square Enix store for 4,400 yen (that’s just shy of $28). The rulebook will include instructions written in Japanese, English, French, and German — so for any Americans wondering about a western release, you might as well go for it right now.