If there's one thing that's become daunting about the modern RPG, it's the ballooning time investment. There's no better example than the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy, a reimagining of a classic that has stretched itself out between three entire fully-fledged games.
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation just had its release date dropped alongside a 10-minute gameplay deep dive during PlayStation's State of Play. In it, we got to see a closer look at the airship overworld.
It's pretty dang impressive. Your airship'll let you zip around the open world in record time, showing you a charming mini-model of each zone—it's not one hundred percent seamless (there's a cutscene between choosing a landing spot and parachuting down that's doubtless there to disguise some loading) but the ability to parachute down anywhere is neat, and it feels like a modern-day realisation of what the classic airship overworld of older RPGs were trying to do.
We saw this in practice in a couple of locations, including Wutai—wherein Yuffie was able to grapple hook to a nearby roof and have a roam around. And yet, despite how impressive this all looks, I can't help but feel a certain dread set in.
I haven't played FF7 Rebirth yet, just Remake—owing partially to a lack of spare hours to pour into it on my part, but also a resistance to the idea of playing what my co-workers have told me is a great big stonking open world. To settle down and follow that shot up with the chaser of yet another massive, expansive open world just to round out a trilogy is enough to make me want to sleep for a thousand years.
Assuming a similar playtime to completion as its past two games, and assuming you don't do everything these games have to offer, that'll be a stonking 150-odd hours to round out the entire trilogy—quite literally tripling the game it was originally remaking. Are we sure, strictly speaking, that all that's necessary?
Then again, I'm not one to judge. I'm an evangelist for Final Fantasy 14, a game that takes an unreasonable amount of time to complete, and the prospect of another FF game with a great huge world to explore is bound to match somebody's freak. Final Fantasy 7 Revelation releases April 8, 2027.
