Square Enix has revealed that Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth will release on February 29, 2024 and will require two disks.
Today was already a busy enough day for gamers thanks to Nintendo's September Direct just a few hours ago, but PlayStation decided that wasn't enough and held its second State of Play of the year just a few minutes ago, which featured Resident Evil 4's Separate Ways DLC, Spider-Man 2 footage, and, the biggest surprise of all, a detailed look at Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.
The lengthy trailer showed a ton of different things, from racing on Chocobos and Cloud's motorbike to footage of the party engaging local wildlife in combat, but the biggest bit of news from the trailer was the release date of February 29, 2024, which is shockingly soon and still lives up to Square Enix's initial "Winter 2023" promise, funnily enough.
Some of the other highlights from the trailer include footage of Cait Sith, who has been confirmed to be playable, as well as a cutscene that seems to show the first interaction between Cloud and Vincent Valentine, who is looking as suitably broody as ever.
If you're here for the remade universe's weird brand of time travel and multiverses, then this trailer had you covered too, as we also got to see a little bit more of a somehow-still-alive Zack Fair carrying around a comatose Cloud Strife. How that's happening while the Cloud we know and love is sauntering around the world isn't clear, but it looks like we don't have that long to wait until we find out.
Square Enix also confirmed towards the end of the trailer that Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth will require two whole disks on the PS5, making it one of the first games of the generation to need more than one. We knew this from the last trailer we got of the game, but it's nice to get a reminder that this thing is going to take up a whole bunch of space.
Following the trailer's release, Square Enix started sharing messages from the game's development team that revealed a little bit more information. One message from the game's director, Naoki Hamaguchi, suggests that the game will embrace the concept of "free exploration" and that it will offer players nearly 100 hours of gameplay.
That's a bold statement considering one of the main issues that fans had with Final Fantasy 7 Remake was that it was rather linear and didn't give the player many reasons to come back after beating its 20-30 hour story, a problem that seems to have been a focus for the sequel.