BODY: The Highwind is finally in players' hands — and so are Cid and Vincent.
Japanese games outlet AUTOMATON has published hands-on footage from an advance play session with Final Fantasy VII Revelation, the concluding chapter of Square Enix's remake trilogy. The video is the clearest look yet at two things fans have been waiting on since Rebirth closed: a fully playable Vincent Valentine, and an airship that actually flies where you point it.
The battle segments put Cid and Vincent into the party proper rather than the guest-slot cameos they occupied previously. Cid's spear work gives the lineup a long-reach bruiser, while Vincent's kit leans on his gunslinger identity — a pairing that reshuffles the synergy-heavy combat Rebirth built its endgame around.
The exploration footage is the headline, though. Rather than the chapter-gated regions of the previous game, Revelation lets players take the airship up and set down anywhere on a world map that AUTOMATON describes as a kōmitsudo field — high-density, meaning the ground-level detail doesn't thin out just because the map got bigger. It's the open-world structure the original 1997 game implied and that two installments of remake have been building toward.
Final Fantasy VII Revelation launches April 8, 2027 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC. Character designs come from Tetsuya Nomura and Roberto Ferrari, with logo artwork by Yoshitaka Amano.
The insider take
The Switch 2 listing is the detail Japanese commentators keep circling back to. Square Enix spent years as a PlayStation-exclusive partner on this trilogy, and domestic sales for Remake and Rebirth badly undershot expectations in a market where Nintendo hardware dominates household penetration. Shipping day-and-date on Switch 2 is the company publicly correcting a strategy its own shareholders questioned at successive annual meetings. Whether a dense, airship-scale open world runs convincingly on that hardware is the question Japanese forums are already asking — and the preview footage, notably, doesn't say which platform it was captured on.
Originally reported by AUTOMATON (Japanese).