// KOTAKU — GAMING
How Final Fantasy 7 Revelation Is Going All Out For The Big Finale: Having Less Content Was ‘Never Part Of The Conversation’
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is a massive game, perhaps the biggest mainline game in the entire Final Fantasy series, outside of the MMOs. It adopts the cornucopia approach to open-world design, bursting with side quests, minigames, recreational activities, and more for you to partake in—all while Cloud and company are supposed to be saving the world. Some players enjoyed the ability to lose dozens of hours to these distractions, but for others, it was all a bit much, with this content sometimes pulling the focus away from the stuff they cared about. Nevertheless, based on the first hands-on demo of Final Fantasy VII Revelation, the team behind these games has doubled down on that open-world design ethos.
“We’re well aware of players and critics, how they felt about the abundance of content we had in Rebirth,” Final Fantasy VII Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi tells Kotaku. “But that being said, this whole discussion and debate about ‘is more better or is less better?’ is not the really important part we need to think about. At the end of the day, it’s really all about the discussion of preferences. It’s about how certain players feel about this approach of having more content, but also just the game design of how we can present this.”
Revelation significantly ups the ante in terms of the remake trilogy’s open-world design, adding entirely new regions like Mideel and Wutai, while letting players return to every single location from Rebirth. In the demo I played, I was dropped right into the thick of the open world as the party gains access to Final Fantasy VII’s famous airship, the Highwind. Right off the bat, there’s a half-dozen regions open, each filled with a handful of quests, new photo opportunities, collectibles, hints of the fearsome Weapon battles, and much more. In a word, it’s overwhelming. But Hamaguchi says this sort of scope has been the intent all along.
“When you look at the original FF7, one of the big appeals wasn’t just the main story; it was also the fact it had a diverse amount of side content in quests and minigames,” Hamaguchi says, “For both Rebirth and Revelation, the core design philosophy that we had to reflect was that diverse amount of side content. After Rebirth, should we have less content for Revelation? That was never part of the discussion. That being said, we did see a lot of ways we could improve in terms of how intuitive the gameplay could be.”
It certainly seems like the intent with Revelation is additive, like adding another layer on top of an already towering cake. A precarious idea, to be sure, but one that could pay off. According to Hamaguchi, this round will be far more about player freedom and preferences, what each individual player wants to engage with. At Gamescom, a trailer showed off the new cutscene-skip option, but Hamaguchi also notes that players will be able to skip minigames if they wish—while minigames will also now have difficulty options included.
This sort of idea extends to almost every part of the game, as much more thought has been put into the actual rewards for doing side quests and other pieces of optional content, directly addressing criticism from Rebirth. Hamaguchi tells me a major point of feedback from the previous game was that too many rewards were tied directly to combat, such as equipment, weapons, skills, and so forth. This is why the team has strived to add far more variety to the rewards that can enhance things outside of combat, such as alternate costumes for every character. Coinciding with that, Hamaguchi stresses they’ve also made it clearer what rewards players will get from each minigame or other side activity, thus letting them better decide whether they want to engage with something or simply skip it.
But, of course, the other element here is that this is the finale of the trilogy, and a literal meteor looms large on the horizon, ready to smash the planet to pieces.
“What [the party’s] responsibility is in terms of stopping the meteor