We’re about six months out from Final Fantasy VII Revelation, and while that doesn’t seem like a huge wait, the anticipation to play the final chapter of the FF7 remake is palpable, especially since the first chapter dropped six(!) years ago now. We’ve also had the chance to go hands-on with Revelation before, and while the first couple previews were focused on flying around the open world in the Highwind, I got to play a much more linear slice at New York Comic Con.
My demo opened up early in Chapter 1, when the party arrives at the North Crater, and it starts a linear path to the center of the giant hole. In both of the previews we’ve done already, IGN’s Michael Higham and Logan Plant both described Final Fantasy VII Revelation as this massive and overwhelming experience, but this first chapter felt more like walking into a late-game dungeon to fight a massive boss.
Even my party members felt like late-game versions of themselves, fully decked out in Materia and equipment. But it’s important to keep in mind that this is just an early demo, so the balance could totally change before Revelation comes out in April.
But before I actually started wandering into the depths of the crater, I couldn’t help myself in digging through the menus a bit – after all, that’s half the fun of RPGs, right? Clicking into the Materia menu, there’s actually a new way you can level it up, rather than slowly absorbing AP as you kill stuff. There are now Materia fragments, each of which you can consume to add one AP ratio to your Materia.
The remake’s third part didn’t really explain how I was supposed to gather these fragments, but I did start with 200 of them, so I just shoved all of them into my Fire Materia, which got it about a third of a level. I’m not sure I’d just dump them willy-nilly like that in the full game, because I’m not sure how rare they’ll be, but in a short 30-minute demo, what do I have to lose?
The Item Transmuter has also returned from Rebirth, but crucially, gathering the materials for it should be much less of a pain. The auto-loot option that, for some reason, you had to beat the campaign to unlock in Rebirth is just enabled by default in Revelation. I was able to just run through the level and hoover up crafting materials without mashing the triangle button. That’s a huge improvement.
After I was done poking around in the menus, I started to dive deeper into the crater, and it was gorgeous. Regardless of what I’m playing, there’s just something about levels with ice and crystals that always blows my mind, and delving through this crystalline labyrinth never ceases to amaze me – and I wasn’t even playing on the ‘Graphics’ optimization mode. Both Remake and Rebirth looked incredible, though, so it’s not surprising that Revelation is carrying that forward.
But even though I was wandering starstruck through the crater, it wasn’t long before I ran into a group of monsters. The default party in the demo was Cloud, Cid, and Vincent, and of course I immediately swapped over to the new characters to see how they play. Cid immediately stood out. He has this rhythmic quality to his combat, where after one or two standard attacks, you wait for him to be wrapped in this weird blue mist, and then attack again to unleash a stronger attack. And those stronger attacks seem really strong, staggering a standard enemy almost immediately.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/final-fantasy-7-revelation-i-played-a-new-slice-from-the-early-game-with-a-boss-fight-ign-preview
