Never let anybody tell you dreams don’t come true. After years of radio silence, we’ve finally been given a fresh look at the long-gestating Final Fantasy VII remake, and it is looking gorgeous.
The surprise trailer dropped as part of PlayStation’s State of Play livestream last night, confirming recent reports that the Square Enix title would indeed be getting a “re-reveal” during the show, alongside updates on the MediEvil remake, and a few other cool looking new titles.
Check out the short teaser below.
The Final Fantasy VII remake was first announced at E3 2015, and it’s fair to say that the project has had a pretty troubled development process in that time.
Game director Tetsuya Nomura did admit last year that the long awaited remake of the classic PlayStation JRPG was probably revealed a little too early, as Square Enix took development duties away from third-party studio CyberConnect2 in 2017 to move development in-house.
This would understandably have caused further delays to the project, but the most recent trailer gives us a fresh look at gameplay, implying Square is very much back on track. The combat system does still look to have left behind the turned based strategy of the original game in favour of something a little more action oriented.
While I’m still not entirely sold on this move, it’s hard to deny that it looks incredibly pretty, and terribly exciting. Oh, and then there’s Aerith. Poor, sweet Aerith. I’m not ready to get hurt again.
Square previously confirmed that the Final Fantasy VII remake would be episodic, and while this might have changed during the development switch-up, the fact that this new trailer is made up entirely from scenes from the game’s first few hours suggests that we’re still on track to get FFVII in chunks.
With the overhauled combat, visuals, and lord knows what else, it certainly seems more appropriate to describe Final Fantasy VII as a re-imagining in the style of Resident Evil 2, rather than a straight up remake.
Mercifully, we won’t have to wait another two years before we see more of the game. Square Enix has promised it’ll be showing off Final Fantasy VII in more detail in June, presumably around E3.
Hopefully the next Final Fantasy VII update comes with a release date. Probably late 2030 at this point.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.