Final Fantasy fans are feasting today with the reveal of a new trailer and release date for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth during Sony's State of Play livestream. The follow-up to 2020's Final Fantasy VII Remake and the second part of a planned trilogy, we got a bunch of our burning questions answered; chief amongst them how much of the original game's story will be covered and where the inevitable cutoff point will be.
Vague location spoilers for 1997's PS1 system-selling classic, Final Fantasy VII, incoming!
Over on the PlayStation Blog, a roundtable of crucial Square Enix staff, including creative director Tetsuya Nomura, director Naoki Hamaguchi, producer Yoshinori Kitase, and music supervisor Keiji Kawamori, discussed the scope of the title in surprising (and refreshing) detail.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth will culminate with the infamous events at The Forgotten Capitol, and it's there that this particular tale will end. Of course, as players of Remake well know, we shouldn't expect things to play out in precisely the same way they did all those years ago. Square Enix has already shown they're capable of revising events we might have once considered sacred, so this is all very exciting, indeed.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth picks up where Remake ends, with Cloud and company having escaped Midgar in dramatic fashion. Pursuing Sephiroth, Nomura teases that "the order in which you can explore the locations is not the same as the original Final Fantasy VII, and there are some shifts in the order." An example is that Wutai, a significant and iconic location, is not a part of Rebirth's route and will be visited in the next game (which we must imagine won't be called Reunion, a truly missed opportunity).
Apparently, "nearly 100 hours of adventure awaits", and we'll likely be counting down the days. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth comes to PS5 on 29th February 2024.