Final Fantasy 7 Revelation’s Highwind forced major changes to the game’s story and world design, with Fortnite even inspiring its parachuting mechanic. Find out how Square Enix built the game around its airship.
FF7 Revelation’s Director Had His Team Center the Whole Game on the Highwind
Nobody Would Build Its World Map Like This From Scratch, Says Game Director
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation was designed around the Highwind, and bringing the airship into a modern open-world RPG forced Square Enix to rethink parts of the game’s design and story, according to director Naoki Hamaguchi.
Hamaguchi explained in a September 10 interview with Japanese outlet AUTOMATON—translated here via machine from the original text—that the original Final Fantasy 7 created an expectation the remake trilogy had to meet. The original eventually gives players access to the Highwind and opens up its world for free exploration, so recreating that sense of scale became a requirement for Revelation. Hamaguchi described the third game as a title designed "with the airship as a premise."
That decision, however, reached even beyond the game’s exploration. Hamaguchi revealed that the scenario itself had to be rewritten after the team committed to unrestricted Highwind travel. The original version of the script still treated the game as a more conventional story-driven experience, with characters reaching certain locations and using predetermined methods of transportation.
However, as Hamaguchi explained, "Once we decided to include travel by airship, we removed all of those restrictions in the scenario." He added that Nojima was asked to rewrite the script to accommodate the change.
It remains to be seen how that change ultimately impacted the overall structure of Final Fantasy 7’s narrative, but the scale of that decision becomes more evident when Hamaguchi discusses what the Highwind means for a modern open-world game. He told AUTOMATON that he would not have chosen to build an open-world action RPG around an airship that lets players fly freely across an entire planet if he were creating a "brand-new game." Final Fantasy 7’s existing design created an expectation that the team had to meet, even though Hamaguchi acknowledged that "nobody would choose to build a world map this way" for a game because it would be "too much work."
Regardless, the team still saw the Highwind as essential to the remake. Hamaguchi had already identified the airship as an important part of the third game. His latest comments reveal how deeply it became tied to the game’s world design.
That design introduces an emphasis on vertical exploration. Dengeki Online reported (translated from Japanese) that Hamaguchi viewed height as an important way for Revelation to distinguish its world from the environments of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. The trilogy’s progression was deliberate: Remake focused on its story, Rebirth expanded the series’ sense of width through its open world, and Revelation adds height to that foundation.
The Highwind is central to that change, with players able to approach areas they’ve been to before from above alongside other aerial traversal options such as parachuting, flying Chocobos, aerial dashes, and even the wire gun.
Hamaguchi offered the Grasslands as an example of what this means for returning locations. Seeing the area from above gave him a different perspective on a map he had already helped create. "Grasslands had scenery like this?" he recalled thinking when he first saw it from above.
Hamaguchi said that there would be little value in bringing back an existing map from the previous two games if it simply existed without providing a new gameplay experience. The team therefore changed how players interact with those spaces and introduced new ways to explore them.
Fortnite Influenced FF7 Revelation’s Parachuting Mechanic
The same goes for the Highwind itself. In a September 4 interview with 4Gamer, similarly translated from Japanese, Hamaguchi described the airship as a "portal" within the game, with its interior changing as the player progresses and crew conversations reflecting what has happened throughout the journey. He wanted the ship to develop alongside the player’s experience of the world, to the point where players might find themselves thinking, "I want to go back to the Highwind for a bit."
That makes the Highwind a place players can return to throughout the adventure. It also means the team had to figure out how players would leave the airship once they were ready to continue exploring the world below.
Revelation lets players jump from the Highwind and parachute toward the ground. The idea may look familiar to anyone who has played Fortnite, as Hamaguchi confirmed that the battle royale was a direct inspiration for the mechanic.
"The whole parachuting mechanic in Final Fantasy 7 Revelation was inspired by it," Hamaguchi told VICE in another interview published on September 10. "We directly took inspiration from Fortnite.
The comparison is fairly literal. Like in Fortnite, VICE’s hands-on preview described flying the Highwind over a region, locating a quest marker below, jumping from the airship, and parachuting directly toward the objective. MeriStation’s Gamescom preview adds that players can steer during the descent and open the parachute earlier for more control. The reviewer also managed to land with a Chocobo and continue exploring immediately after reaching the ground.
For all the ways the Highwind shapes Revelation, Hamaguchi ultimately wants it to feel like somewhere players will want to return to. He told 4Gamer that experiences on the world map are reflected inside the airship, so he’d "be happy if you’d come back from time to time."
Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is scheduled to launch on April 8, 2027, for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2. For more on the upcoming JRPG, check out our article below!
Source:
VICE | Final Fantasy 7 Revelation Preview: Square Enix’s Most Ambitious Game Yet
AUTOMATON | 『ファイナルファンタジーVII リベレーション』浜口Dが目指した、“RPGが苦しい現代”ゆえの進化。飛空艇ありきのオープンワールド、「自分でプレイする意味」があるシリーズ最終作
Dengeki Online | 『FF7リベレーション』浜口Dインタビュー。ウータイ位置変更の理由や前作超えのデータ容量に迫る
4Gamer | ［インタビュー］「FFVII リベレーション」はなぜ広大な世界を作ったのか。空へ広がる探索，ハイウインド，ウェアシステムについて浜口直樹氏に聞く
