Ok, hear me out: I love Final Fantasy 7 Remake, and I also love Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, but there are obvious issues with both of these games, at least for me. For Remake, while I really liked the linear nature and tighter narrative structure, the way that areas were organized led to confusing side quests where I had no idea where to go, and there's also a lot of padding going on to flesh out the game, such as having to control mechanical arms with Cloud and Aerith or slowly pushing boxes.
And a lot of that padding is also present in FF7 Rebirth, on top of annoying mini-games that are sometimes forced on you, such as the infamous Costa Del Sol section of the JRPG, one of my least favorite places in the story; there's also a lot of box pushing, box-throwing (I'm talking about you, Cait Sith), and a ton of open-world nonsense that did not need to be there. You got your Ubisoft towers, combat challenges, photo missions, World Intel, shrines, and then you even have the side quests themselves.
I'm not mad that all of this stuff was in Rebirth, but the team at Square Enix needed to take some inspiration from Breath of the Wild and let players organically discover these things instead of littering them all over the map and putting them in your face. To be fair, you can easily skip most of this stuff, but it's still overwhelming (and I just finished Rebirth the other day, so if anyone has something to say about it, it's me!)
And so, this leads me to my general opinion on Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, the long-awaited final chapter to the FF7 Remake trilogy project. I played about an hour of it at Gamescom 2026 at Square Enix's booth (behind closed doors). I was dumped into an earlyish section of the game where the gang gets on Cid's Highwind ship for the first time and, if you've seen the trailers for Revelation, you can essentially fly around the entire world of FF7 Remake and drop down (Fortnite-style) to an area of your choosing.
In my demo, we could explore pretty much any region from the previous two remakes, such as Junon, Corel, the Grasslands, Gongaga, and Nibel, plus some new areas to visit, like Yuffie's hometown of Wutai.
While our main mission goal was to essentially go around the map and defeat the big Weapons (these are planetary guardians that are named after precious gemstones like Ruby, Diamond, and Emerald), the demo was mostly meant for us to play around with the Highwind and explore a bit to see what side quests and activities we could find. And boy oh boy, there is an absolute ton of side content to dig into here in Revelation, so much so that it felt ten times more overwhelming and "in your face" than it did in Rebirth.
I thought maybe, "hmm, I'm sure the development team will take the negative critiques of Rebirth and fix the open-world bloat issue that critics and fans brought up about for this sequel," but no, no, no. They have gone absolutely bananas with the padding here.
I don't want to make it seem like the padding is outright bad, since I can see diehard Final Fantasy fans spending over 100 hours seeing and doing everything, but I like a more linear structure. And if I'm playing an open-world game, I want to discover things organically—it just feels more rewarding that way.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://gamerant.com/final-fantasy-7-revelation-open-world-preview-hands-on/
