Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Goes Open World and Reviews Are Split

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Final Fantasy VII Revelation was officially unveiled by Square Enix at Summer Game Fest 2026, and director Naoki Hamaguchi told Automaton West that the game is being defined outright as an open-world title. The headline is not just a bigger map: it will keep all continental regions from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, add new areas, new content, and new exploration systems, and fully connect the planet into one world. With Final Fantasy VII Rebirth already sitting at 145GB, that has already prompted the usual debate over scale, storage, and whether the world can stay dense enough to justify its size.

The pitch is easy to understand. If this planet really can be stitched into a single traversable map, the appeal is not just size, but continuity: mountains, ports, wastelands, and horizons that lead naturally into the next area. For players who like to poke into every corner, what matters in an open world is not simply whether it is large, but whether it keeps giving you a reason to move forward.

The most important detail, then, is not that the map is bigger. It is that Square Enix is no longer leaning on softer labels like "open areas." Hamaguchi said that during the marketing for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the team hesitated between terms such as "open area" and "open field." The reason was straightforward: even though that game spanned multiple continents, those regions were still separated by inland seas rather than forming one truly connected whole. In Final Fantasy VII Revelation, the studio is willing to call it open world from the start because "the entire planet" will actually be connected.

That makes the handling of old regions especially important. Plenty of games promise returning areas, only to drop familiar terrain back into the game with little more than nostalgia attached. What Square Enix is saying now is more encouraging. The returning continents will not be reused as-is, but expanded with new content, new gameplay, and new exploration elements. The goal, apparently, is not to retrace the same route, but to return to familiar places and find new reasons to explore them.

The more practical concern is the one every open-world game faces: will it end up huge, but empty? Hamaguchi's response was direct. He said the team has been tackling content density since the early stages of the project, and that each continent will have its own unique activities, gameplay systems, and interactive elements. Because players may explore in different orders, they should also come away with different experiences. At least on paper, that is the right approach. The genre is at its weakest when every zone becomes the same grassland, the same icons, and the same checklist.

Compared with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Final Fantasy VII Revelation sounds less like a straightforward final installment and more like a push toward greater spatial continuity and player freedom. Square Enix has also stressed that this is not a simple upgrade over Rebirth, but a further expansion in both scale and freedom. That leads to the real question. The larger the game becomes, the harder pacing is to control; the more seamless the map is, the more demanding its content design becomes.

The response so far is fairly predictable. The optimistic side is focused on the immersion of finally traversing the entire planet, while the skeptical side is watching file size, repetition, and late-game length. Given that Final Fantasy VII Rebirth already weighs in at 145GB, any future platform details or storage figures for Final Fantasy VII Revelation will likely trigger another round of debate. For now, what seems clear is that the game is trying to scale up the series' quieter strengths - scenic wandering, music, and slow exploration - across its largest world map yet. Whether that world will actually feel like somewhere players want to spend time in will depend on the gameplay footage still to come.