Final Fantasy VII Revelation Preview – Sailing the Highwind through the massive open world

And so it comes to this. Final Fantasy VII Revelation is all set to bring the epic retelling of the PS1 classic RPG to a close, and once again it promises a dramatic expansion of how the world and the game is structured. It’s not just kind of open-world, Revelation is almost a world without borders which you can freely fly around aboard the Highwind.

After the relatively closed and linear opening chapter in Final Fantasy VII Remake, Rebirth loosened the reigns, handed you a Chocobo and let you loose to explore various parts of the wider world beyond Midgar. Revelation is, well, a revelation for how it lets you explore the full world, setting you aboard the airship Highwind to fly around as you see fit. It’s a dramatic reinterpretation of the world map from the original Final Fantasy VII, still letting you fly at massive speed across the lands below, but with so much more detail and, crucially, the kind of “if you see it, you can go there” mentality.

That actually includes the Highwind. It’s a fully explorable space in its own right, with things to do, people to talk to, and a bevy of fresh tutorials to get players back up to speed. We didn’t spend much time here, though, keen to sail the high… winds? Oh, I get it now.

With Cloud embroiled in the timey-wimey stuff of the remake trilogy, it’s Yuffie, Barret, Cid, Cait Sith, and a bunch of others that are freshly aboard the skyship, trying to figure out the path ahead. Yuffie pushes to head to her homeland of Wutai to marshal a response and push back against Shinra and their evil plot. Of course, since this is a video game, you can take your time to explore and visit different parts of the world.

And at basically any time, you just leap out and glide down to the world below. The terrain is covered in many markers for points of interest and objectives below, and so you just hop over the guardrails, pop your parachute, and glide down. There’s not a massive amount of gliding range or control to the parachute, but it does the job of getting you down to the ground safely, whether it’s right in the heart of a village or out in the middle of nowhere, where your trusty Chocobo companion can meet you for a Chocobo-back landing that gets you right into the flow of exploring.

Again, this is the whole world of Final Fantasy VII here for you to explore, albeit with some places a little bit off-limits due to Shinra control and story reasons. There’s new locations like Mideel, Gongaga, and, of course, Wutai, but you can also return to Costa Del Sol, Gold Saucer, and Junon. Those latter locales are going to be different to how they were back in Rebirth, and with fresh stories and opportunities wrapped around them.

It can be pretty overwhelming, not least because visiting a place for the first time has the ship’s MAI spamming you with page after page of things to see and do here. Some of that will be down to the condensed amount of time we had to spend playing the game, trying to dip in and sample different regions, as well as trying to hastily dismiss tutorial pop-ups. I hope that, for the full game in April next year, MAI’s interruptions are a little more restrained and feel more a part of the general flow.

You can also get yourself into a little bit of trouble if you’re a bit overambitious. I dropped down right by a Great Malboro and almost got immediately stomped by the big tentacle monster – though maybe I was distracting myself by coming up with tobacco giant jokes in my head.

Combat in Final Fantasy VII Revelation is a further evolution of that found in Rebirth. You can happily start off on Chocobo and have your feathered friend leaping and clawing at enemies, but you’ll soon want to pull off a dismount attack for tougher enemies. A new FITS system allows you to assign more defined roles and abilities to your battle party, with Warrior, Knight, Black Mage and Summoner. Knight, for example, is the front-line tank role, taking the attention of enemies and allowing a Summoner to stand off in the distance and assist from relative safety. The Synergy Attack system has also been expanded and tweaked, amended in ways by the FITS system.

When the time is right, you can follow Yuffie’s demands and head to Wutai, looking to rally her people into the fight against Shinra. A cutscene with Glenn and Yuffie’s father Godo, sets out the political stage, and it’s clear that Yuffie is conflicted over her relationship with her father. She tells the rest of the gang that they need to pretend to be her ninja proteges, her bubbly personality shining through the early beats of the story in this nation.

While it feels that Yuffie is the natural lead through this part of the tale, this isn’t necessarily prescribed. You can switch your playable character when exploring the open world, and as you engage with quest givers and NPCs, you can choose who in your party will respond and take on the quest. This can shape and adapt the story, expanding on their individual stories. The full impact of this will only really be felt in the full game, but it shows great potential, even if it’s mainly to help flesh out these individual tales as opposed to the overarching narrative.

Also, I played a game of the returning card game Queen’s Blood against a dog and, thankfully, staved off the potential shame of losing to a canine.

Final Fantasy VII Revelation looks to be a huge conclusion to this trilogy remake, ramping up the scale and scope of Square Enix’s re-creation once again. It’s genuinely impressive how open the world now is to you, potentially overwhelming how much there is to do, but there’s also just a huge amount that the overarching narrative needs to do to wrap up this retelling and all the ways it’s been changed and expanded from the original. If the ending of Rebirth had you on tenterhooks, then April can’t come soon enough.

Tags: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy VII Revelation