Here's our first real look at the Final Fantasy 7 Remake

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The new, one-minute trailer shows off some actiony combat and lots of pretty graphics, with more to come at E3.

Well, I'll say this: the Final Fantasy 7 Remake is, at least, very pretty. To cap of Sony's "State of Play" livestream on Thursday, Square Enix finally showed off a minute of footage of the remake, which was first announced at E3 2015. Since then we've seen virtually nothing of the game, though Square Enix has said it aims for "quality that surpasses the original."

Today's trailer all seems to pull from the first hours of the game, focusing on Cloud and Barret's attack on a Mako reactor in Midgar. Aerith makes her debut, and it caps off, of course, with Sephiroth. It's hard to tell exactly how the game's going to play: There's a brief shot of Cloud shimmying along a ledge, and combat looks more action-RPG than Final Fantasy 7's classic turn-based system. But a few seconds of footage isn't much to go on.

To go along with the trailer, Square Enix dropped this statement from Tetsuya Nomura on Twitter: "Most of the plans are already in place in the run up to launch, so please bear with us a little longer until we can release more information next month." It doesn't specifically call out E3, but June almost certainly means a big unveiling at this year's expo.

Obviously FF7R is launching on the PlayStation 4, and there was no reference to a PC version in the State of Play trailer. If previous Final Fantasy releases are anything to go by, we can expect a PC port some months after the console launch.

The most important question—whether the Final Fantasy 7 Remake will retain the Fort Condor and snowboarding minigames—also remains unanswered.

Wes Fenlon
Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).