This takeaway comes from a 45-minute hands-on preview attended by Polygon at Gamescom 2026. And to be clear here, “most impressive” doesn’t necessarily mean “largest.” Though Revelation certainly is massive in scale, 45 minutes is by no means long enough to assess or even fully grasp what an open-world game is trying to offer. But weeks later, I’m still struck by how Revelation builds on its predecessor, using Rebirth as the literal foundation for a jaw-dropping feat of game design.
FF7 Revelation is redefining ‘open world’
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, the third and final (sorry) installment of Square Enix’s FF7 remake trilogy, puts a cap on this seven-year-long series. It picks up after the dramatic events of Rebirth. Aerith is dead (right?). Cid and Vincent Valentine have joined the party. The squad is en route to the ninja nation of Wutai. Oh, and you get an airship.
The Highwind is the crux of what makes Revelation such a revelation. My demo picked up a few hours into the game, at the start of the fourth chapter, “House of Cards.” The core crew is aboard Cid’s airship. A crop of ominous kaiju-like creatures called Weapons have popped up around the planet. Barret spends a lot of time shouting about how if they put his daughter, Marlene, in danger, oh boy, they’re gonna regret it, doesn’t matter that they’re 300 feet tall, by all that is holy, those bastards are gonna regret it. And then you’re off.
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation’s big gimmick is that you can fly the airship to literally anywhere in the world, park it, disembark, dive out of the hangar like you’re Tom Cruise, deploy a parachute, and gently float down to earth. And then you’re just there. Completely seamlessly. I could visit every location I spent hours in back during the Rebirth days: Mideel, the Grasslands, Junon, Gongaga, Costa del Sol, the Gold Saucer. It’s all there. (Wutai is a new region to Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, but going there in chapter four temporarily locks you into the main story mission.) And it’s all rendered exactly how it looked in the previous game, right down to the scooters of Costa del Sol.
You don’t often get video game sequels that reuse environments in follow-up games. You rarely get games that reuse every environment. The immediate effect this has on worldbuilding, giving the sense that you’re occupying a real place as opposed to a series of meticulously constructed levels, is truly second to none. Like rotating your first level in Fez or taking off into orbit for the first time in No Man’s Sky, it is one of those you-have-to-play-it-to-believe-it moments of video game wizardry that come along every few years. Maybe the novelty will fade once I’ve done it 10 or 20 times. For now, it’s nothing short of transcendent.
The rest of Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, at least according to what I played, keeps to the impeccable standard established in the trilogy’s previous two entries. It is clever and often silly without sacrificing dire narrative stakes. It’s as luxurious as ever; you can feel the Square Enix bucks dripping off every character model and baked into the background of every landscape. And the combat, a mix of real-time action and pause-time menus, is as engaging as ever.
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