Director of Final Fantasy 7 Revelation Naoki Hamaguchi has made no secret of the fact that the third entry of the Remake trilogy is going to be massive. Speaking to IGN Japan during Tokyo Game Show, Hamaguchi has now revealed that players might have to experience the entire game multiple times to catch everything that the developers have worked on.
This includes dialogue between characters that can be missed depending on when a player takes on a side quest and with which character. As Hamaguchi puts it, “we have prepared many cases where it changes not just whose perspective the quest is told from, but the story experience, the gameplay experience, and even the conclusion.”
A full playthrough of Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is expected to take around the same amount of time as Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. “But there’s also a lot you can’t experience in a single playthrough,” explains Hamaguchi, “so in that sense, I think it probably exceeds Rebirth.”
On the subject of the structure of Revelation and how its world will open up for players, Hamaguchi says that the first five or six hours of the title will be fairly linear, with the world then opening up all at once. Comparing it to Rebirth, Hamaguchi also noted that the team worked on adding more verticality to the world. He went on to talk about how Revelation will also allow players to explore parts of the map that were previously present in Remake and Rebirth.
“We’re doing all the areas. But if we do them, leaving them exactly the same won’t work either, so—with Meteor appearing and things changing—we’re altering their layouts and adding new quests and content. You can go to Midgar in the game, but the explorable area isn’t just Midgar: the entire area surrounding it can be explored, and it connects directly to the Grasslands.”
Earlier this week, Hamaguchi had spoken about how he has played through the title 46 different times, and how a single playthrough for him could “easily” take more than 100 hours.
“In a standard playthrough from beginning to end, if I were to review and check every single asset and element in the game, it’ll easily take over a hundred hours. Obviously, I can’t do that in each and every single playthrough. As the director, I don’t have enough time for that, so sometimes I would just skip combat and focus on checking the main story.”
A big way the development team is hoping to avoid open-world fatigue amongst players in a game this massive is by offering plenty of guidance to make sure that players don’t feel lost. However, this has also raised questions about Revelations being too easy, especially for players who like getting lost in large open worlds. Hamaguchi has said that the development team is looking into how it can offer options for players to disable some of that guidance as well.
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is coming to PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2 on April 8th.
