Final Fantasy VII Revelation is the finale of Square Enix's ambitious project that began with FFVII Remake in 2020 and continued with FFVII Rebirth in 2024. A full trilogy that retells and remixes the story and world of one of the most beloved video games of all time is a crazy idea on paper, but in less than a year, it will be complete. IGN recently went hands-on with Revelation -- you can read Michael Higham's preview coverage for his in-depth thoughts -- and after playing for roughly two hours for myself, I sat down with two of the creators responsible for bringing this saga to a satisfying conclusion: Director Naoki Hamaguchi and Battle Director Teruki Endo.
I asked the pair (through an interpreter) about how they're keeping the third entry fresh, both with small adjustments to the combat system and new events in areas we already visited in Rebirth. But I was most fascinated to learn about Square Enix's approach to wrapping up this saga: How did they choose a subtitle for this all-important finale? What has this team learned from releasing three AAA RPGs in the span of eight years? And, how does Hamaguchi feel about Revelation releasing on a PlayStation 5 disc in Sony's final year of producing physical games? Read on to learn about all of this and more, including how Fortnite of all things inspired Revelation in one key way.
IGN: Thank you both so much for meeting with me. I appreciate the time. I played about two hours of Final Fantasy VII Revelation yesterday, and I really liked it. And something I'm most interested in is that there are new areas in Revelation, but a lot of it is the same map as Rebirth. I'm curious about the team's process for revisiting old areas and adding interesting content to differentiate them from how they appeared in Rebirth.
Hamaguchi: So I will say that all the various side quests and side contents that are going to be appearing in FFVII Revelation, those are going to be completely new. And with the meteor looming in the sky over the planet, there are a lot of, I guess, seismic shifts that have occurred because of the meteor approaching. So there are various geographical changes that you'll be able to see in the existing areas from Rebirth. So even though they are continuously appearing from various games, it is going to look a little bit different from the previous game.
But in terms of how the actual gameplay and the exploration might feel different from Rebirth is that when we were making Rebirth, the focus was on the open world aspect of the game. So we wanted to introduce a lot of large, vast areas that offered the horizontal width in terms of how big the area is going to look like. With FFVII Revelation, we want to take it a step above. So in addition to the horizontal width, we're now adding a vertical depth that allows players to explore using the Highwind or the Chocobo. So both of these modes of transportation allow you to fly and jump high in the air and things like that. So it does give you a more expanded feel of how the open world is going to look like in the world of the FFVII Remake series. So in that sense, even with the preexisting areas appearing in FFVII Revelation, the way you might approach, the way you might explore, and the way it feels when you explore these areas might feel different from FFVII Rebirth.
IGN: I did like the Highwind a lot, and being able to skydive down into different areas and steer where I landed. It indicates there will be a lot of freedom in how you re-explore areas. And I'm wondering if there were challenges in developing what appears to be a game that's maybe more freeform than Rebirth in how you can tackle objectives.
Hamaguchi: So this kind of ties into the first question that you had, but one of the goals that we had as a development team is to kind of expand as we step into the next installment. So from Remake to Rebirth and from Rebirth to Revelation, we wanted to take a step above. So from the evolution from going from Rebirth and then heading into Revelation was that again, “how can we expand the open world?” And the way we achieved that is to achieve this planetary exploration, the open world map scale where players can just really just explore the entire planet using the Highwind. So taking on that challenge was one of the rather difficult parts of the development for sure.
So the idea of the party parachuting down from the Highwind was something that we had pretty early on in the development of FFVII revelation. When you look at the original release of FFVII, the way it worked was that the Highwind would just land directly onto the ground and the characters would just exit out of the ship. But if we were to do that in this very high fidelity open world, we’d need to think of how the geography would work out in the map. So we needed designed surfaces where it would make sense for the Highwind to be able to smoothly land, if that makes sense. But that wasn't really realistic for us to consider. So that's why we had this parachuting idea. And when you look at other games, specifically like Fortnite, it did seem that players, modern audiences, were pretty familiar or welcome to this idea of characters flying down the air using parachutes. So I thought it would be a fun way to also introduce a seamless transition from the air to the ground. And I think the end result turned out well for us. I'm really happy with how that is in the game.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/final-fantasy-7-revelation-our-big-interview-with-director-naoki-hamaguchi-and-battle-director-teruki-endo
