Last week, Square Enix announced that Final Fantasy VII Revelation, the remake trilogy’s much-awaited final installment, is coming in the spring of 2027. Evolving from FFVII Rebirth, the new entry will put a greater and more deliberate emphasis on players making choices, affecting both the order of game progression and the narrative experience itself. Although FFVII Revelation’s will have only one ending, it will include enough branching content to make sure no single playthrough is the same, and experiencing everything the game has to offer won’t be possible in just one run, as the series’ director Naoki Hamaguchi recently told us.
Interestingly, in a new interview with 4Gamer, Hamaguchi says he considers increased player agency and room for individualized playthroughs to be characteristics that games need to offer in today’s market, and he associates this with the prevalence of gaming streams. “One thing RPGs like Final Fantasy need to be careful about today is the possibility that people might simply watch a stream and feel satisfied without ever playing the game themselves. This is a bit of a crisis for the work itself, or rather, it’s not something game creators can wholeheartedly celebrate,” he comments.
While Hamaguchi explicitly clarifies that he isn’t being dismissive of streaming, he says that if a game’s experience is limited to progressing through a story, users may find it more enjoyable to simply watch their favorite influences play them instead, ultimately affecting the game’s reach. Instead, he says, “if people watch a stream and it makes them think What would I do in that situation? or How would I experiment with that?, then hopefully they’ll be inspired to try it themselves.” Believing that entertainment should evolve and adapt with the times instead of stubbornly clinging to old ways, Hamaguchi says he’s been trying to challenge himself in this regard throughout FFVII Remake, Rebirth, and now Revelation.
On a related note, “Choices” also happen to be ono of FFVII Revelation’s core conceptual themes. In line with the game’s role as the trilogy’s finale and the story that awaits the characters, the game will depart from the sense of security FFVII Rebirth offered and put players under “tension” to make crucial decisions.
Final Fantasy VII Revelation is scheduled to release in Spring 2027 for PC (Steam, Epic Games Store, Xbox on PC), Nintendo Switch 2, PS5, and Xbox Series X❘S.
