Final Fantasy VII Revelation Delivers Seamless Open World Through Airship Flight and Freeform Exploration

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Journalists who went hands-on with Final Fantasy VII Revelation at recent preview events have come away struck by how thoroughly the concluding chapter of Square Enix's remake trilogy embraces open-world design. Previews held at Gamescom 2026 and at a separate Square Enix showcase in London gave outlets between 45 minutes and an hour with a build set early in Chapter 4, titled 'House of Cards', which finds Cloud's party aboard Cid's airship, the Highwind, shortly after the events of Rebirth, hunting down a wave of giant creatures known as Weapons while making for the ninja homeland of Wutai. Several writers noted that this represents the culmination of a pattern established across the trilogy, in which Square Enix has repeatedly expanded on small fragments of the original 1997 game, turning a short prologue into a lengthy adventure with Remake and then a mid-game section into a sprawling, Ubisoft-style world with Rebirth. Revelation, due for simultaneous release on all platforms on 8 April 2027, is described as pushing that expansion further still.

The centrepiece across every account is the Highwind itself, now fully player-controlled and used as the mechanism that stitches the entire game world together without loading breaks. Reviewers described flying the airship over open ocean and terrain, then leaving the cockpit to parachute or dive directly onto the ground below, likening the transition to skydiving sequences in other open-world titles. What impressed several previewers most was that this let them travel seamlessly to regions first introduced in Rebirth — among them Mideel, the Grasslands, Junon, Gongaga, Costa del Sol and the Gold Saucer — all rendered as continuations of the same map rather than separate loading zones, alongside Wutai, a region new to this instalment. More than one writer remarked that it is unusual for a sequel to carry over its predecessor's environments wholesale, and that doing so gave the world a stronger sense of being a single, continuous place rather than a set of discrete levels.

Coverage diverged somewhat in where each writer chose to spend their limited time, and in what they took from the experience. One preview focused on the sheer scale of the reused map and the technical achievement of moving between air and ground without interruption, treating this as the standout feature. Another spent almost the entire session simply wandering Mideel and Wutai on foot, emphasising smaller environmental details and the sense that these were lived-in places rather than backdrops, and singling out Wutai's atmosphere as a highlight after the region's absence from the first two games. A third account, filed from a session on PlayStation 5, dwelt on the scale of the side content on offer — with Square Enix staff reportedly telling one journalist that fully exploring the area available in the demo would take upwards of twenty hours — describing a degree of choice paralysis brought on by the density of quest markers and points of interest, and drawing an explicit comparison to the kind of open-world design usually associated with, and often criticised when used by, other major publishers.

On combat and systems, impressions were more tentative. One writer tried out newer party members, including Cid, whose lance-based fighting style leans on ranged and aerial attacks, but admitted struggling to properly settle back into the trilogy's real-time combat given the gap since Rebirth's release, and noted they had little opportunity to test the much-publicised jobs system. Side activities sampled during the sessions included photographing wildlife in the Mideel area and fighting a gauntlet of enemies, though underpowered characters made some encounters, particularly around Gongaga, difficult to survive. A separate preview, written after seeing the game running on PlayStation 5, raised a specific concern not shared by the others: given how demanding Rebirth's open areas already proved on Nintendo Switch 2, that writer questioned whether the handheld platform would be able to cope with an open world reported to be considerably larger and more detailed than its predecessor's, noting that Rebirth's own Switch 2 port required visible compromises to performance and visual quality. All four previews stressed that their playtime, ranging from under an hour to around fifty minutes, was too brief to fully judge a game of this scope, and that the build played was not final, with launch still several months away.

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• collider.com
• www.nintendolife.com
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