Final Fantasy 7 Revelation’s World is Open to Explore From the Start With “Lots” of Side Content

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Whether you enjoy remakes or not, Square Enix is setting a high bar with Final Fantasy 7 Revelation. The addition of the Highwind airship is a major change, allowing for much more open exploration. Because it’s available right from the beginning, players have the freedom to go almost anywhere in the game world.

In a recent interview with Denfaminico Gamer (translated using DeepL), game director Naoki Hamaguchi explained that, unlike the previous game Rebirth, players will have access to the entire game world from the beginning. While the main storyline still progresses in a specific order, side quests and optional content are much more flexible. Specifically, although you need to defeat certain enemies (WEAPONS) as part of the story in a set order, you can challenge any of the optional WEAPONS whenever you like.

This game is very challenging – you’ll likely face tough battles – but success is still achievable. There’s also a lot of optional content that’s almost as difficult as the main story, giving you a chance to take a break and come back to the main quest when you’re ready.

While you can still explore optional content at any time, we’ve designed the game to gently guide you back to the main story when you reach certain points. This is similar to how the previous game worked – we’ll sometimes ask you to focus on the story for a while as you progress through each area.

While building on what came before, this game offers a different approach to exploration. The previous game gradually unlocked areas, revealing their interconnectedness only at the very end. Here, after acquiring the Highwind relatively early on, players are given the freedom to travel and explore any location they choose.

Unlike facing the WEAPONs, you won’t be instantly defeated, but the game’s difficulty will change a lot from area to area. According to Hamaguchi, you might find one area easy, but the next one very challenging. Instead of completing areas one after another, the game encourages you to move between areas and choose what you want to tackle next.

After finishing the main story and becoming more powerful, you might decide to revisit challenges you previously struggled with. Or, while exploring, you could stumble upon a new quest and find yourself asking, ‘Now what?’

There’s a ton of content, at least as much as the last game. Similar to Rebirth, you’ll probably feel a little overwhelmed with choices and not know where to begin.

This new design avoids the repetitive nature of the last game, where players who wanted to fully complete everything would get stuck in one area. The game director, Hamaguchi, explains that with so much to discover and content initially inaccessible, players will naturally need to prioritize and decide what to focus on, rather than trying to finish everything at once.

We’ve found that even when we’re testing the game, it takes a long time to experience everything it offers. Because of this, we sometimes focus only on the main storyline during testing. If players try to complete all the optional side content, they’ll likely get stuck and won’t advance the main story.

Whether this new method will let players completely ignore extra activities and focus solely on the main story is still uncertain. Final Fantasy 7 Revelation still includes some minigames, so it’s too early to say for sure. However, the amount of freedom it offers is still exciting, even if the director, Hamaguchi, doesn’t think it qualifies as a fully open-world game.

Scheduled for release in Spring 2027, Final Fantasy 7 Revelation will be the first game in the Remake series available on Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, PC, and the new Nintendo Switch 2 at the same time.

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2026-06-07 12:42