Naoki Hamaguchi bryter ner de stora förändringarna i Final Fantasy 7 Revelation

Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is the end of the road. The third and final chapter of Square Enix's remake trilogy, announced last month at Summer Game Fest, lands in 2027, and director Naoki Hamaguchi has started explaining how the finale reworks the pieces fans already know.

In a wide-ranging Eurogamer interview, he laid out a new job system, a bigger open world, and a rethink of fast travel, all pointed at one idea: giving players more choice. The trilogy has run since its first tease at E3 2015, and Revelation is meant to give it a proper ending, a rarity for a series this size. It ships simultaneously on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2, dropping the timed exclusivity that shaped the first two parts, with launch expected in spring 2027 to line up with the original game's 30th anniversary.

The most surprising change is to combat, and the reasoning is counterintuitive. Hamaguchi thinks Rebirth already nailed it. He says the hybrid action-and-command system "reached a perfected state" in the last game, which left the team with an odd problem: how do you follow perfect without repeating yourself? His worry was that reusing it wholesale would feel "a bit stale," offering nothing new.

The answer is FITS, which stands, improbably, for Function Integrated Tactical Suitwear. Each party member gets four outfits that unlock classic Final Fantasy jobs, so Cloud can fight as a Warrior and Tifa as a Dark Mage, with more presumably to come. If Rebirth borrowed a stripped-down version of FFX's sphere grid for progression, FITS reads like the same treatment applied to FFX-2's dress-sphere system.

The push behind it came from a limitation Hamaguchi discussed with combat director Teruki Endo from the earliest stages. Because each character had a fixed role - Cloud up close, Barret at range and tanking, Aerith supporting from the back, players kept reaching for the same fighters in the same situations. Hamaguchi felt the setup "didn't truly offer that freedom" of character choice. FITS is the fix: pick the job, build the party, and field whoever you actually want rather than whoever the encounter nudges you toward.

That agency theme runs straight into the bigger conversation around the trilogy: open worlds, and how tiring they have become. Rebirth drew criticism for a sprawling map stuffed with mini-games that some felt dragged its pace. Hamaguchi doesn't dodge it. He calls open world fatigue "a very important concept" to him, and he's candid that he has personally been dropped into open worlds with no idea where to go or what to do. His stance is that a huge world needs strong signposting. A creator, he argues, should "offer proper guidance" so players always know where to head next. He points to how Rebirth made the amount and difficulty of its content legible, and says that philosophy carries into Revelation, where players "have all the guidance that they need." The catch is scale: Revelation's world is bigger than Rebirth's, which makes that guidance harder and more important at the same time.

Fast travel is where the design gets interesting. The returning Highwind airship lets you leap from the deck and parachute into anywhere on the map, and Hamaguchi splits the move into two phases. Jumping and opening the chute is the first; picking your landing spot is the second. On the way down, you see markers for objectives and mini-games, but as you get closer to the ground those cues vanish, and you "rely on your memory" to touch down where you meant to. It's a neat compromise between freedom and direction, and it does double duty: the descent quietly hides loading screens while letting the party cross the continent without bumping into oceans, cliffs, or invisible walls. It is the open-world-fatigue philosophy expressed as a mechanic, guidance that fades out right when the game wants you paying attention.

The interview also underlines how much of the trilogy's charm comes from a cross-generational team that grew up on the 1997 original. Hamaguchi laughed about how Vincent Valentine wears his parachute differently from everyone else, belt crossed rather than strapped on like a backpack, an in-character touch proposed by a team member rather than something he directed. He compares it to Red XIII awkwardly riding a chocobo in Rebirth, a small, funny beat that became a fan-favorite meme and also came from the dev team. Those details, he argues, are what happen when the people making the game care about honoring who these characters are.

This is the exact kind of game I clear my schedule for: a single-player, story-first open world with an ending finally in sight. The fatigue talk lands hardest for me, since Rebirth's mini-game pile-up was the one thing that wore me down in an otherwise great game, so hearing the director name the problem outright is encouraging. I'm cautiously sold on FITS, though a job system can add busywork as easily as it adds freedom, and signposting that fades as you parachute down could read as elegant or as fiddly depending on how the map actually plays. A trilogy that gets to end on its own terms, on every platform at once, is a rare and welcome prospect, and Hamaguchi has earned some benefit of the doubt across two strong games.

Read also: Square Enix is closing Final Fantasy 7 Ever Crisis on October 6, 2026, ending the mobile RPG's run just over three years after launch. The game's final story chapter arrives September 6 to mark its third anniversary, with farewell events running until the servers go dark.