Final Fantasy VII Revelation Hands-on Preview – First Look At The Final Arc

While we were at PAX West 2026, we got the chance to go hands-on with Final Fantasy VII Revelation, and this demo wasn’t like the ones we usually get from publishers. There was a short scripted scene, about 10 to 15 minutes, where you explore the Highwind. Once that wrapped up, we were free to go wherever we wanted.

Oddly enough, the first thing I did was head to the back of the Highwind, where I found a robot carrying a message from Regina, from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, asking to meet up with the team. After a short round of Queen’s Blood, Nanaki got a starter deck so he could explore and challenge other people to duels of his own.

Freedom Takes Flight

Once I grabbed Nanaki’s deck, I was free to helm the Highwind and go anywhere I wanted. The story wanted me to head to Wutai. Instead, I aimed for Mideel, a village tucked into a forested jungle area (not to be confused with Gongaga). Luckily, it isn’t nearly as tricky to find as it sounds. I rounded out my party with Cid, Vincent, and Yuffie, enrolling Cid as a Knight, Vincent as a Summoner, and Yuffie as a Warrior thanks to the new FITS system.

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You can spend SP to boost your stats and passives in any of these FITS classes, and it’s worth putting some thought into how you build each character out before you set off. After gearing up and leveling my trio, I set course for Mideel. Piloting the Highwind is simple: hold the right trigger to accelerate, the left to slow down, and once you’re hovering above your destination, you hold a button and your whole team dives off the airship, aiming themselves down toward the ground below. I ended up stuck on a cliffside on the way down, convinced I’d trapped myself somewhere I couldn’t get out of. Luckily, calling Piko the Chocobo with the right trigger solved that. Piko jumped the rest of the way up the mountain for me, and from there I was able to glide myself down and land right in the village. Once I touched down in Mideel, I checked the community board for whatever requests were available.

There are grapple symbols all over the railings now. While you’re piloting the Highwind, you get a new grappling gun that lets you scale buildings or ramps with railings instead of hoofing it up the stairs or the normal ramps. It’s a much faster way to get around, though I’ll admit the grapple icons get a little overwhelming when you’re trying to spot a sidequest or main quest marker mixed in among them.

Once I got moving, I ditched the white Chocobo quest for a bit to try combat instead. Honestly, I loved playing as Cid, so much that I spent most of my demo time with him and think he might become my main once this section of the game releases. If you’re not aware, Cloud and Tifa are out of the party for story reasons, so the rest of the team has to handle the weapon threats on their own. In previous games, Tifa was my go-to combat character because I loved her hand-to-hand style. The good news is you’re not forced to switch to Cloud outside of combat either.
You can play as anyone, and even during quests, you get to choose which party member takes the lead. For the Chocobo quest, I could either let Cid figure out how to bring the Chocobo home his way, or let Red XIII talk it down in his own.

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Cid comes with his lance, and the Knight FITS gives him a handful of extra skills to play with. One lets him unleash a shockwave and pull aggro onto himself. My favorite loop was baiting enemies in close, hitting the shockwave, then chaining into his Dragoon Jump. From there I could bounce from enemy to enemy while they scrambled to figure out how to hit me back. It was genuinely satisfying.

Queen’s Blood Restart

In Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, you went from a basic starter deck to one that could go toe-to-toe with the game’s own creator. This time around, Cloud is out of commission, so Red XIII takes over Queen’s Blood duty. You’re back to a basic deck, and you’ll need to grind out wins against other players to build it back up. Your first goal is tracking down Regina, which means a handful of battles across the continent. From what I played, the core rules haven’t changed at all.

You draw five cards each match and start with your three home spaces already under your control. Every card you play carries a rank, along with a footprint for how much ground it claims on the board. Spaces start at rank one, but if you play a card that overlaps and adds more control to a space you already own, the rank of that space goes up. Rank is determined by the pillars sitting inside each square: one pillar in your color means you own that square at rank one, two pillars bumps it up to rank two, and three pillars is the highest it can go.

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The goal is simple on paper, whoever ends the match with the higher total wins. I got through the tutorial by grabbing as much territory as I could early and boxing my opponent into their original three home spaces so they couldn’t expand. Once they were stuck, I spent the rest of the match slowly upgrading the rank on my own squares and stacking high-rank monsters on top of them to run up the score.

The story side of things has Red XIII discovering what cursed cards actually are and what they do to the people who use them. He picks one up early and sets off on his own quest to prove he’s worthy of wielding it. These cards can swing a match hard in your favor, but fair warning, Red XIII isn’t the only one carrying one.

My Thoughts

One thing I stumbled into by accident was how the compass works. Aiming the Highwind at a location doesn’t always make it obvious where you’re actually headed. I set my sights on what I thought was Mideel, only to land and realize I’d touched down in Midgar instead. I hopped back into the Highwind, recalibrated, and shot myself back toward the real Mideel. The turnaround was fast. Final Fantasy VII Revelation has a genuinely massive world, and the Highwind is what makes covering that ground painless. I walked away impressed with how quickly you can move between air and land.

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Combat is the smoothest and most fluid it’s ever been in this trilogy. I loved having a team of three and how easy it was to build a strategy around a character I’d never played with before in this format. I could fight straight off Chocobo-back, then transition into normal combat with the grappling gun, which cut the downtime between exploring and fighting down to almost nothing. Square Enix really nailed the system this time and made it feel seamless. It’s already hard for me to go back to Remake after playing Rebirth, and now I have a feeling Rebirth is going to feel like a step down after getting a taste of this.

If you’ve been following this remake trilogy, you’re going to love Final Fantasy VII Revelation. If the first two didn’t click for you, this one probably won’t either. I loved the progression and the way the scope keeps expanding with each release, and I’m hoping we get more Zack Fair by the time this one lands.

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Final Fantasy VII Revelation releases April 8th, 2027, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.

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