The Final Fantasy 7 remake series just keeps growing. When Remake dropped, it was a lot of fun, but people wanted a bit more freedom to explore, so Rebirth moved into an open-world format with wide-open areas to explore, plenty of secrets to find, and oh-so-many side activities and minigames to complete.
But we, the gaming public, are an insatiable bunch, and so we demanded yet more from the third and final entry in this trilogy, and I am very pleased to report that Final Fantasy 7 Revelation does most certainly deliver more.
In my hands-on time with the game, I was given free rein to explore the world at the start of Chapter 4, when you first get to take the helm of the Highwind, and even by that point, there are so many places to go. Almost all of the regions from Rebirth are in this game too and will gradually fill with side-quests and activities to do throughout the game, with some areas like Costa del Sol getting a lot of attention.
But of course, with the Highwind is he possibility to fly across the ocean to brand new areas like Wutai, which – you’ll never believe it – is just as stuffed with things to explore, made even easier now you have the full Chocobo movement ability suite from the word go.
The game isn’t shy about the side content either. Queen’s Blood is still around if you want to rise the ranks again, and you’ll find opponents dotted all over, but even the more low-key side activities are heavily pushed.
As soon as you set foot in a region, you’ll get various pop-ups from MAI about side-quests and activities in the area, as well as the rewards you can get for doing them – it is perhaps a little intrusive, but it doesn’t go overboard. Other activities are more carefully woven into your adventure, like when you first visit the Wutai capital, and before you know it an NPC has run up and told you about photographing 20 cats around the city in exchange for Chococbo skins.
In any other game, stuff like that might feel like a tedious chore, but the FF7R series has made it such a central feature that it’s entirely part of the charm, and I was happy to do it. It all feeds nicely into this “go anywhere, do anything” vibe that the game is trying to push in between advancing the story, helped along by the fact that, as long as you’re over land, you can parachute out of the Highwind to touch down more or less wherever you want.
It also keeps the world feeling alive. You’re not just abandoning all the places you’ve been in Rebirth, and what you did had consequences that you can continue to see play out throughout Revelation. It helps tie everything together as one story, rather than three separate stories, which is an important thing for this series to not lose sight of.
The combat system picks up exactly where Rebirth left off. Things feel the same, but with a handful of additions that make roles in the party more defined and add just a little bit of extra depth to team building in the class system. I didn’t get a chance to dive too deep into this in my time, but messing around a little, you can feel the difference between the major classes; and most importantly, you get to dress all the characters up in a wide selection of different outfits.
It all confirms what I was both expecting and hoping for: Final Fantasy 7 Revelation takes what Rebirth did, and just does even more of it. Regardless of what you think of the narrative direction of the Remake series (which I didn’t get much of a sense of in this session), this has brought FF7’s planet to life in incredible fashion, and the deeper we get to explore it, the better.