I admit, I’m going into Final Fantasy VII Revelation jaded, as I’ve mostly found the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy to be an excessively long and padded experiment that refuses to lean into some of its most interesting metatextual narrative threads, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t pop off during a demo session playing one of the third and final game’s early segments.

If I’m loyal to anything in Final Fantasy VII, it’s my chainsmoking daddy Cid Highwind. He’s a lot nicer in the remake, but he’s still got an old soul and a spear to fight with. Though the pottymouthed pilot debuted in 2024’s Rebirth, this is the first time he and Vincent Valentine are playable in the action-oriented reimagining of Final Fantasy VII’s turn-based combat, and what little I got to play of both in my demo was enough to tell me that these two have some of the most engaging and interesting kits across the party, and may get me out of my habit of mostly just playing Cloud in the interests of simplicity.

By and large, the Remake trilogy’s battle system is one of my favorites in all of Final Fantasy . It marries the strategic playmaking of turn-based games with a slick action system that is engaging, varied, and requires more game sense than simply hacking, slashing, and dodging around a battlefield. Each character plays pretty differently, swapping between them is encouraged to execute powerful Synergy attacks, and managing shared resources across your trio of fighters gives you a lot to deal with in its real-time battles.

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