Flying the Highwind above Final Fantasy VII Revelation is a little overwhelming. There’s the map underneath you, filled with places you recognise and plenty you don’t, and then the game basically asks where you want to go. I spent a good part of my hour-long Gamescom session doing exactly that: flying around, looking down and wondering where I should land next. See something interesting? Fly towards it, jump out of the Highwind and parachute down. I did that several times and still felt like I had barely seen anything by the end of my appointment.
It’s quite a change when you think back to where this remake project started. Final Fantasy VII Remake was a much more linear adventure through Midgar. Rebirth opened everything up considerably and suddenly gave us large regions to explore. Revelation now puts the Highwind in our hands and allows us to fly above all of it. Seeing that world from the air was probably the easiest way to understand just how enormous this final game is going to be. Locations are spread out far below you, I could fly towards whichever one caught my attention and jumping out of the ship meant I didn’t necessarily have to approach an area from one specific direction. It gave me this slightly ridiculous feeling that I should probably hurry up and see everything before somebody came over to tell me my demo was finished.
I found a jungle, so I jumped
Most of my exploration took place in a new jungle-themed area. From the air it was already incredibly green, but dropping down into it showed just how dense the vegetation actually is. Trees and plants cover huge parts of the landscape, the lighting coming through all that greenery looks gorgeous and there’s a lot of verticality once you start moving through it. Revelation is obviously building on what Square Enix already did with Rebirth, but this was easily one of the prettiest environments I saw during Gamescom. I didn’t have one big objective pulling me through the jungle either. There were several things I could do and I mostly picked whatever happened to be nearby. At one point I was looking for creatures that needed to be photographed and defeated, elsewhere I could land on platforms and deal with the enemies waiting there, and there were stronger mythical creatures to hunt as well. I could also simply ignore most of that and continue with the story. Considering I only had an hour, that freedom was almost a problem. Every time I opened the map or went back into the air, there was something else I wanted to check.
And there was always something else. The Highwind changes how I looked at that exploration. In Rebirth I would travel through a region and gradually discover what was around me. Here I could first see a huge part of the world from above, decide that something looked interesting and go there. Jumping out and parachuting towards the ground is a simple idea, but doing it over a Final Fantasy VII world of this size is pretty damn cool. It also means that the Highwind isn’t simply a fancy fast-travel menu. I was actually flying the thing.
Yuffie had other plans for my final twenty minutes
Eventually I had to stop randomly jumping out of an airship and actually continue the story. I spent roughly the final twenty minutes of my session in Wutai, where Yuffie naturally became much more important. After all the freedom I had just experienced, this section was noticeably more directed. I knew where I needed to go, there was much more dialogue and the mission followed a more traditional quest structure. I didn’t mind that change at all. After spending so much time choosing my own destinations, Wutai gave me an opportunity to slow down and concentrate on the characters again. Yuffie has an obvious connection to this place and you immediately feel that the story is going to spend serious time here. I’m not going into the details of what happened during those twenty minutes, but there was considerably more talking and story development than during my jungle exploration.
Wutai itself also looks completely different from the jungle I had just left. That sounds obvious, but seeing those areas so close together helped sell the size of Revelation better than staring at a giant map ever could. I had gone from freely flying around and dropping into a dense green environment to following a much more controlled story sequence somewhere with its own architecture, atmosphere and characters, all during the same hour, and I still hadn’t seen most of the game.
One hour was a terrible idea
I mean that as a compliment. An hour is normally plenty of time for me to get a decent impression of a Gamescom demo. With Final Fantasy VII Revelation, I spent that hour becoming increasingly aware of everything I wasn’t doing. I could have stayed in the jungle longer. I could have hunted more creatures. I could have flown somewhere else entirely. I could have pushed further into the story. Every choice basically meant ignoring several other things. That scale is what I took away from the demo more than anything else. Square Enix already went big with Rebirth, but giving us the Highwind changes how that world can be explored. I’m especially curious to see how much freedom the final game actually gives us once everything opens up, because during my demo I already felt tempted to fly off in random directions just to see what was there.
There’s obviously a huge story that still needs to be finished as well. This is the final part of the remake trilogy, Wutai has an important role to play and Cloud’s journey is heading towards its conclusion. My hour barely touched any of that. Instead, I spent most of it parachuting into a jungle and getting distracted.
Early conclusion
Final Fantasy VII Revelation is enormous. That’s the main thing I took away from my hour with it. Flying the Highwind, choosing somewhere to land and then finding several things to do once I got there made that hour disappear ridiculously quickly. I saw one jungle region and a little bit of Wutai, and somehow came away feeling like I had barely started. I really want to know just how many hours this thing is going to steal from me.