Preview: Final Fantasy 7 Revelation on PS5 Is So Huge I Got Lost in Its Demo

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Square Enix has given journalists an early look at Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, the concluding chapter of its remake trilogy, running on PS5 Pro at a hands-on event in London. Journalists were handed an hour with a demo built around the explorable Highwind airship, set during Chapter 4: House of Cards, and were told that fully clearing the content on offer in this single section would take somewhere in the region of 20 hours. The scale of what was shown left both journalists in attendance visibly struck, even as they came away with rather different impressions of the experience.

One writer described taking manual control of the Highwind from its cockpit and being free to chase an enormous number of map markers rather than heading straight for the plot-critical destination of Wutai. Players can reportedly leap from the airship parachute-style to drop into points of interest on the ground below, and during the session this journalist photographed wildlife in the Mideel Archipelago for a side quest, then fought off a pack of aggressive monsters called hitmantis with a party of Yuffie, Barrett and newcomer Cid, whose lance-based, aerial-leaning combat style stood out despite time constraints preventing any real dive into the game's much-touted job system. They reported no obvious performance issues or pop-in on the PS5 Pro build, while noting the game remains unfinished ahead of its planned 8th April release, and admitted feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer volume of choice on offer, to the point of experiencing something like decision paralysis.

A second preview took a more critical entry point, focusing on the volume of tutorial prompts and guiding chatter – including check-ins from the returning character Chadley and his Monster Assessment Instrument – that had to be dismissed before free play could begin, estimating a meaningful chunk of the hour was spent clicking through onboarding material. This account placed the demo in the context of development history, noting that director Naoki Hamaguchi began work on Revelation roughly a year before its predecessor, Rebirth, even launched, drawing inspiration from large open-world titles such as The Witcher 3, the Horizon series and Crimson Desert.

Both pieces touched on the wider debate around Rebirth's reception, where extensive open-world side content drew comparisons to Ubisoft's tower-climbing formula and was seen by some as needless padding, prompting Square Enix to later admit the game had underperformed the company's expectations. Where the first preview leaned toward simple astonishment at scale and cautious optimism about combat and performance, the second was more explicitly opinionated, arguing that fans should let Hamaguchi pursue his open-world ambitions freely rather than demanding a leaner, more faithful retelling. Neither writer felt able to offer a definitive verdict from a single hour with the game, but both agreed that Revelation is aiming for a far larger and more elaborate scope than its predecessor.

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