Final Fantasy 7 Revelation: I Played a New Slice from the Early Game With a Boss Fight

Key Preview Takeaways:

• Previous previews have focused on the open world, but my slice was focused on the more linear, story-intensive sections.
• Materia has a new way to level up.
• Difficulty was a bit lacking in this demo, but then again it was the first chapter of the game…

We’re about six months out from Final Fantasy VII Revelation, and while that doesn’t seem like a huge wait, the anticipation to play the final chapter of the FF7 remake is palpable, especially since the first chapter dropped six(!) years ago now. We’ve also had the chance to go hands-on with Revelation before, and while the first couple previews were focused on flying around the open world in the Highwind, I got to play a much more linear slice at New York Comic Con.

My demo opened up early in Chapter 1, when the party arrives at the North Crater, and it starts a linear path to the center of the giant hole. In both of the previews we’ve done already, IGN’s Michael Higham and Logan Plant both described Final Fantasy VII Revelation as this massive and overwhelming experience, but this first chapter felt more like walking into a late-game dungeon to fight a massive boss.

Even my party members felt like late-game versions of themselves, fully decked out in Materia and equipment. But it’s important to keep in mind that this is just an early demo, so the balance could totally change before Revelation comes out in April.

But before I actually started wandering into the depths of the crater, I couldn’t help myself in digging through the menus a bit – after all, that’s half the fun of RPGs, right? Clicking into the Materia menu, there’s actually a new way you can level it up, rather than slowly absorbing AP as you kill stuff. There are now Materia fragments, each of which you can consume to add one AP ratio to your Materia.

The remake’s third part didn’t really explain how I was supposed to gather these fragments, but I did start with 200 of them, so I just shoved all of them into my Fire Materia, which got it about a third of a level. I’m not sure I’d just dump them willy-nilly like that in the full game, because I’m not sure how rare they’ll be, but in a short 30-minute demo, what do I have to lose?

The Item Transmuter has also returned from Rebirth, but crucially, gathering the materials for it should be much less of a pain. The auto-loot option that, for some reason, you had to beat the campaign to unlock in Rebirth is just enabled by default in Revelation. I was able to just run through the level and hoover up crafting materials without mashing the triangle button. That’s a huge improvement.

After I was done poking around in the menus, I started to dive deeper into the crater, and it was gorgeous. Regardless of what I’m playing, there’s just something about levels with ice and crystals that always blows my mind, and delving through this crystalline labyrinth never ceases to amaze me – and I wasn’t even playing on the ‘Graphics’ optimization mode. Both Remake and Rebirth looked incredible, though, so it’s not surprising that Revelation is carrying that forward.

But even though I was wandering starstruck through the crater, it wasn’t long before I ran into a group of monsters. The default party in the demo was Cloud, Cid, and Vincent, and of course I immediately swapped over to the new characters to see how they play. Cid immediately stood out. He has this rhythmic quality to his combat, where after one or two standard attacks, you wait for him to be wrapped in this weird blue mist, and then attack again to unleash a stronger attack. And those stronger attacks seem really strong, staggering a standard enemy almost immediately.

I’ve already written about how Game Director Naoki Hamaguchi is going to make the platinum trophy easier to unlock. And it seems like that approach has carried over to combat. I was able to just melt through standard enemies without much thought. There were even larger enemies that spawned in with little mini-cutscenes, and I was able to dispatch them with just a couple of ATB abilities. Again, this is the first chapter, so it’s a little early to really get a feeling for how difficult the game will be when it opens up.

Game Director Naoki Hamaguchi is going to make the platinum trophy easier to unlock. And it seems like that approach has carried over to combat.“

That difficulty (or lack thereof) made testing the new FITS system tricky. I wasn’t able to move FITS jobs around, but Cloud was assigned the Summoner job, and at the cost of one segment of the ATB meter, I was able to summon Ifrit, Shiva, or Titan to enhance my attacks. It was cool seeing some of my attacks land with explosions of fire or ice, but the real draw to this job, in my eyes, is the Synergy attacks each summon has.

Synergy attacks work just like they do in Rebirth and Remake, where you have to use abilities to fill up a little bar. Use enough of them on specific characters and you unlock powerful abilities. The appeal to the summons’ synergy attacks, though, is that I only had to build up ATB on one character to use them, which should make it a lot easier to just churn through them. But most enemies died before I was able to use enough abilities to get to the Synergy ability.

As I get deeper into the crater, I start running into Sephiroth clones – a ton of them – until Cloud has one of his signature visions of Sephiroth. I won’t go into too much detail on the particular nature of Sephiroth’s taunts here in the crater, but if you’ve played Final Fantasy VII on the PS1, you probably have a pretty good idea of what he’s saying.

Eventually, creatures start fusing with the Sephiroth clones to create even more monstrous enemies, until I end up face-to-face with Gigas. And, unlike a lot of the smaller enemies before this, I was able to work up to one of Cloud’s synergy attacks with Ifrit, which ended up being a sort of fusion of the summon’s classic Hellfire attack with Cloud’s sword. However, before the animation finished, Gigas died. But, you know, we’re getting there.

After facing a couple of subsequent enemies, I finally got to a whole crowd of Sephiroth clones surrounding a purple glow of some sort. A cutscene played, and, again, I’ll spare you the details, but it ended with Jenova Deathmourner hatching from one of the clones. Finally, something that can actually put up a fight!

The boss fight plays out pretty similarly to other Jenova battles throughout the series, only this time the tentacles that spawn and make the boss invincible breathe fire. The fight is comprised of three phases, and so I was finally able to actually use multiple synergy abilities – Cid and Vincent, along with Cloud and Shiva. And they’re just as bombastic as they are in Rebirth.

Eventually, after three phases of dodging fire and chopping down tentacles, the boss died and the demo was over. I would have liked the combat to be a bit more difficult, but it is still very early in the game, and there is likely going to be a lot of balance tuning as Final Fantasy VII Revelation gets closer to launch.

Finally, while our earlier previews described a giant open-world game absolutely chock-full of activities, it was nice to see that the story-intense linear bits are still there, and just as dramatic as they were in the first two games. Final Fantasy VII Revelation will ultimately be the conclusion to this massive remake trilogy, and I can just tell that some of the content that was maybe a bit rushed in the original PlayStation game is going to be massive.

While you’re here, check out these recent previews of other big upcoming games we’ve checked out recently!

Jackie Thomas is the Senior Tech Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. She’s been covering gaming hardware for more than a decade for IGN, TechRadar, Gizmodo, PC Gamer and more. You can follow her @Jackiecobra