Final Fantasy VII Revelation fans certainly got a healthy dose of news and new footage lately, between the Opening Night Live trailer and the appearance during Sony’s State of Play, which also revealed the release date of April 8, 2027.

At gamescom 2026, we had the chance to play the game, which our Francesco De Meo absolutely loved, as you can read in his hands-on preview. Separately, we were able to speak with Hamaguchi-san, the man behind the whole Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy. Naoki Hamaguchi proved generous with his time, and the conversation ranged from the philosophy behind the trilogy’s escalating scale to very granular system details that haven’t been discussed anywhere before.

On the bigger picture, he explained why Revelation had to go planetary rather than settling for another regional open world, and confirmed something a lot of completionists will want to hear: no side content will be locked off once you pass a certain point in the main story, because he isn’t a fan of games forcing players to tackle quests on a specific schedule.

We also got details on the Moogle idol group taking over the Gold Saucer, how Knights of the Round will be handled, Johnny’s return with his clones in tow, and the thinking behind the FITS system. Plus a genuine first: Hamaguchi told us armor in Revelation can carry three linked materia slots, something he confirmed no other outlet had asked about yet.

To start with the obvious question you’ve probably been asked many times: what made you decide to go fully open world for the finale of the trilogy?

Naoki Hamaguchi: I thought that if I didn’t scale up the game experience across the trilogy, players wouldn’t be as interested. So I felt we needed to make it bigger than Rebirth. That doesn’t just apply to the step from Rebirth to Revelation, but from Remake to Rebirth as well. Throughout the trilogy, the core concept we had in mind was to take it a step above with each release. For Revelation, that meant taking a step above Rebirth in terms of the scale and scope of the world we’re showing.

So scaling up the open world to a planetary scale is a very important part of scaling up the trilogy. There are a lot of open world games coming out right now, but I think most of them are limited to a certain area. When you look at other open world games, you’re not really exploring the world or the planet. It’s typically confined to one specific region, but presented in an open world format. With Final Fantasy VII Revelation, being able to explore the entire planet is the core concept of the game design. I think players will get a really unique and fresh experience in terms of the exploration.

There’s certainly a natural flow to the progression. During the demo, when entering the Corel region, there were level 65 enemies. It’s great that the game encourages players to return to those areas.

Naoki Hamaguchi: I’m really glad you brought that up, because Rebirth and Revelation have a very different design approach in that respect.

In Rebirth, players would typically progress through the different areas in sequential order, following the main story. Revelation is going to be a bit different. As you say, there’s going to be content in certain areas that you probably won’t be able to complete at the level you’re currently at. It’s purposely designed to encourage players to revisit that area at a later time. So any given area can have a multitude of content, separated by suggested levels.

Will there be any side content or side quests that players might be locked out of if they progress too far into the main story?

Naoki Hamaguchi: I’m glad you brought this up, too, because it’s something I’ve thought about. Personally, I’m not a fan of games locking content in that manner. I think it defeats the purpose when you make certain content inaccessible after a certain point in the main story. What you’re essentially doing is forcing players to play a specific side quest at a specific time, and that’s not what we’re trying to do with Rebirth or Revelation.

The goal is that it’s really up to the players whether they want to play all this side content. So to answer your question, no, there won’t be any side content locked off after a certain point in the main story.

It’s always fun in open world games when there’s a calamity coming — in Final Fantasy VII’s case, Meteor — but you can go off to the Gold Saucer and go snowboarding instead of worrying about the world-ending threat in front of you.

Naoki Hamaguchi: Yes, I think so.

On the topic of minigames, are there any new ones you’re introducing with Revelation that you can talk about?

Naoki Hamaguchi: There was a lot of feedback from fans and players about the volume of minigame content in Rebirth. Having a diverse range of minigames, and an abundance of them, is one of the defining elements of Final Fantasy VII, so what I can say right now is that in Revelation, we’re still sticking with that concept.

Rebirth players might remember a minigame where you play tag with a group of small Moogles. A similar minigame is going to appear in Revelation, but this time the Moogles have formed their own idol group, and Cloud and the party will be doing activities to support that idol group. So I hope fans look forward to this new version of the Moogle minigame.

Would you say they’re going to be the headlining attraction of the Gold Saucer?

Naoki Hamaguchi: It’s going to be one of the most popular attractions at the Gold Saucer, yes. I’d like players to discover the details in the game, but you’ll go around the world map supporting the Moogles and their idol activities in different places. If you do that, you’ll gain more fans in different locations, and more NPCs will support you in the cities.

You’ll see fans wearing the merchandise of the Moogle idol group. It works something like a world tour, and at the end, there’s a big stage event at the Gold Saucer. I think it’ll be a great stage event, so please look forward to it.

Could you talk about the space section in a way that doesn’t spoil it?

Naoki Hamaguchi: We’ll go to Rocket Town and the rocket area first, which I think was part of the teaser video. There will be a moment in the game where you get to go to space.

When you think about space gameplay, I think there’s a lot of fan expectation, given that this is a modern remake. But the team was able to make it happen in a really creative way, so I hope fans look forward to that moment in the game.

The original Final Fantasy VII had notable side quests involving Chocobo breeding to unlock ultimate materia and items. With how you’re approaching the open world, how are you redesigning those quests for something like the Knights of the Round summon materia?

Naoki Hamaguchi: I don’t want to spoil too much, but there was the Gilgamesh content in Rebirth. How Knights of the Round plays out in Revelation is going to feel similar to how Gilgamesh was treated in Rebirth.

Knights of the Round is going to have its own dedicated storyline, split into multiple pieces. Cloud and the party will follow that story as they engage with the summon materia. That’s all I can say for now.

For players who did literally everything in Rebirth: will Johnny be returning, and will he have a similar number of requests?

Naoki Hamaguchi: I’m not sure whether the Johnny question is something people are actually wondering about. But I like him. Yes, Johnny will make an appearance in Revelation, in the same manner as he did in Rebirth. He’ll have his own requests, which take the form of side quests. Some are single side quests, and some are a bit more expanded, taking the form of multiple story moments. Some of them are very much Johnny-esque side quest stories, so I’m hoping players enjoy them.

Rebirth players might remember that Johnny was affected by the spell cast on Yuffie, and that towards the end of Rebirth, the clones disappeared and it became just one Johnny again. But in Revelation, somehow he gets those clones back. It might be fun for players to see all the various Johnny clones roaming around in the game.

Jumping to the FITS system, was it inspired in part by Stranger of Paradise?

Naoki Hamaguchi: When I first came up with the idea, I didn’t want it to be too much of a reference to anything. I thought about what would be interesting to add to the current Rebirth system, and from there, when I was thinking about each element, I would refer to other things. But I didn’t build the core by referring to specific existing works. I try not to be influenced too much by existing material.

So when I first started thinking about how I could expand the combat in Rebirth, that’s how I came up with the FITS system. Once I had that foundation, I might have started looking into other material I could reference. But in terms of inspiration, there isn’t a single title that serves as the system’s core.

Final Fantasy has had so many iconic jobs across its entries. How did you settle on the current roster for Revelation?

Naoki Hamaguchi: This ties into my answer to the previous question, because it followed a similar process. I didn’t originally set out to include these four specific jobs. What I wanted to do was expand the combat system beyond Rebirth and make sure each character had their own personality.

After the release of Rebirth, I was thinking about ways to expand and evolve the combat. The thought process was that if I expand this particular role in the game, then maybe I could include this job. So it became: a Black Mage job or a Warrior job would make sense for the FITS system in Revelation. It wasn’t a case of me liking a particular job and wanting to put it in. It was about what was best for the game design, specifically the combat design, and I made rounds of considerations from there to eventually land on the four jobs we have.

I have a behind-the-scenes story to share about this. When Endo first brought forward the idea of customizing the characters’ combat roles, we weren’t thinking about applying a job system the way the FITS system works now. In the earlier development stages, our response was: how about we just add a Warrior symbol or a Black Mage symbol to part of their outfits?

But since this is the final battle system in the trilogy, if we were going to make it a core part of the game and didn’t change the characters’ look, there wouldn’t be any richness to it. We felt it wouldn’t really add to the game experience if it were just a simple symbol added to part of an outfit. So we ultimately decided to give them a full outfit for each of these jobs, for each character. That’s how we ended up with unique character designs for each of the FITS.

After that, we discussed how to name it. In the initial stages, we were planning to call it the Job System, but when you say “job system” in the context of Final Fantasy, a lot of people imagine a more diverse set of options, ten or twenty of them. Once we realized that, we decided FITS was the better name, because four probably isn’t enough if people were going to treat it as a job system. It’s a little different from that.

Are there materia locked to one specific FIT? Some of the ability materia, for example?

Naoki Hamaguchi: Yes, there are materia locked to specific FITS.

Are there going to be Master Materia in Final Fantasy VII Revelation?

Naoki Hamaguchi: No, there aren’t. Master Materia would break the game. We understand there are a lot of requests for them, and we’re a little scared about it, but it won’t be in the game, unfortunately. Hypothetically, if there were a Master Materia for summon materia, from a functionality perspective, we’d have to think about how it even makes sense for players to be able to call upon all those summons at the same time. It just doesn’t feel feasible to implement.

As far as magic materia goes, it’s great that there’s the combination of Fire and Lightning materia, but as players get further in and keep unlocking new abilities, they have to make difficult choices about which few to use. It’d be nice to see more combination materia, where two or three abilities are combined into one to free up slots.

Naoki Hamaguchi: In terms of combined materia, where two materia become one, we’re going to see new ones in Revelation. The number of materia that combine into one has increased, and there are also some materia that can’t be combined with others, so the number of materia you can customize has increased quite a lot. That’s going to expand the customisability of your materia loadout.

One more thing is that the armor customization is going to be a bit different this time. So customizing your materia loadout in Revelation is going to be further expanded compared to Rebirth.

Can you talk about the changes to the armor system?

Naoki Hamaguchi: In Remake and Rebirth, armor had materia slots, and some of them were linked, but it was usually two. In Revelation, some armors have three linked slots. That’s the big difference. What that means is that you can amplify the effects of each materia depending on which ones you equip in those slots.

That’s great to hear, especially for builds that need to be that powerful by the time you reach level 99.

Naoki Hamaguchi: Yes, it’s going to be very powerful. I’ve spoken to a lot of media so far and nobody has asked me about this level of detail, so this is the first time we’re revealing this information. This is the first time we’ve ever talked about the three linked slots with any media.

With the Nintendo Switch 2, were there any challenges in making such an expansive open world work on a handheld platform?

Naoki Hamaguchi: It’s definitely not an easy feat to bring that kind of open world exploration to a portable device like the Switch 2. But our team’s experience porting Final Fantasy VII Rebirth to Switch 2 was incredibly helpful, because we already had that knowledge and expertise.

Most of the development work is done first on PC or PS5, because those are the platforms we’re most familiar with. But when we do the main development on those platforms, I direct my team that we’re not going to make any compromises just because we’re porting to lower-spec platforms. Alongside the main team, there’s a team dedicated to porting. They take the assets built on PC and PS5, and it’s their responsibility to work out what adjustments need to be made: what to do with the textures, the polygon level, whether to adjust the shading level, and how much optimization they can do.

The important thing is that we’re not directing the main development team to build things at a lower resolution so it runs properly on Switch 2. Their creativity isn’t hindered by the fact that we’re releasing multiplatform, because the porting team knows what they’re doing. They’re very talented individuals.

Are you planning to release this title as a Game-Key Card on Switch 2 as well?

Naoki Hamaguchi: Yes, it’s going to be released as a Game-Key Card.

One thing about the materia system: would a Double Cut or 4x Cut materia make sense in Revelation? It was in the original Final Fantasy VII, where your attack command would hit two or four times.

Naoki Hamaguchi: We actually played around with that idea back when we were making Remake. There were ideas about including that materia, but because of the nature of it, it didn’t mesh well with the action-based gameplay. For certain characters, the way they behave in battle and the actions they perform didn’t fit well with how that materia worked. So we ended up not moving forward with it.

On PC, will Final Fantasy VII Revelation support NVIDIA DLSS 5?

Naoki Hamaguchi: Please look forward to our future announcements on that. In terms of the PC version, we’re still working on the recommended specs. But we do have a goal to make the PC version run a lot more smoothly than Rebirth did, and we’re trying a lot of different things right now.

For our last question: with the soundtrack for Revelation, should we expect a similar track count to Rebirth, or will you go beyond it? The number of songs in Rebirth’s soundtrack was insane.

Naoki Hamaguchi: In terms of the music, the same people who handled the sound and music design on Rebirth are handling Revelation. We’re going to go beyond the budget we had originally set for them, so I’m telling them to reduce it a little. But I’m sure they’ll deliver something fans will be satisfied with. Let’s see what happens with the track count.

Great. Thank you for your time.

About the author: Kai joined the gaming team of Wccftech in 2016 and has since penned over a hundred reviews and interview pieces, covering a bit of everything from one-man indie gems to AAA masterpieces and whatever lies in between. Over the recent months, Kai has expanded into preview and interview coverage of not only the gaming side of the industry but also tech and consumer electronics.

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