Final Fantasy 7 Revelation: 46 Playthroughs and Counting—Hamaguchi Can't Put the Controller Down
Between stops on his press tour, Naoki Hamaguchi pulled a PS5 controller from his bag and kicked off his 46th playthrough of Final Fantasy 7 Revelation. That’s over 100 hours per run—and he still hasn’t seen it all.
For months, the director of the final chapter in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy has been living and breathing his own game. Each new run lets him zero in on a different aspect of this colossal adventure, unveiled in detail at State of Play and set to launch April 8, 2027 on PS5, Xbox Series, PC, and Switch 2. After the recent Tokyo Game Show reveals, this playtesting obsession says a lot about the project’s ambition.
Image credit: Square Enix
46 runs of 100 hours: how Hamaguchi survived this playtesting marathon
The math is dizzying: 46 full playthroughs, each clocking over 100 hours—that’s potentially more than 4,600 hours spent in the same game. “On a standard run from start to finish, if I had to check every asset and every element, it would easily go over a hundred hours,” Naoki Hamaguchi explained. This marathon of playtesting, stretched over months, shows the scale of a project announced at Gamescom 2026 as the trilogy’s most ambitious entry.
It’s impossible to inspect everything on every run. So the director devised a surgical rotation method: “I don’t have enough time for that, so sometimes I skip battles to focus on the main story. With each new playthrough, I focus on different elements.” One run is all about side quests, another about boss fight balancing, a third about the narrative pacing of the final act. This methodical approach lets him cover all the content without spending a decade, while keeping a fresh perspective on every part.
A game designed to respect your time (even with its massive scale)
Over 100 hours of content can be as intimidating as it is exciting. Square Enix knows it, and the team has worked to turn that abundance into freedom, not a chore. Here’s how the design choices reflect that:
- Mini-games are totally optional and never block progress in the main campaign
- All cutscenes are skippable—a huge plus for New Game+ and speedrunners
- The overall pacing has been reworked to smooth out the slow stretches that sometimes bogged down Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
The philosophy is crystal clear: deliver a dense open world with no artificial padding, where every side activity exists for a reason—not just to pad the clock. Players in a hurry can blitz through the main story without feeling punished, while completionists will find enough to keep them busy for dozens of extra hours. A delicate balance that few RPGs of this scale ever achieve.
What else we know about Revelation (and what’s next)
Beyond the director’s obsessive playtesting, Final Fantasy 7 Revelation still has surprises in store. Red XIII might just steal the show in the returning snowboarding mini-game—a legendary sequence from the original that fans are dying to see again. As for inspiration, Hamaguchi openly cites The Witcher 3 as a key influence on his vision for a believable, living open world. Chadley, the young researcher from the first two games, is also back—though his role is still under wraps.
The simultaneous launch on PS5, Xbox Series, PC, and Switch 2 on April 8, 2027 is a turning point for the franchise, fully embracing multiplatform from day one. And the end of the trilogy doesn’t mean the end of the adventure: two story DLCs are already confirmed to extend the experience beyond the credits. This universe is far from finished.
Somewhere in a press tour hotel, Naoki Hamaguchi is probably already deep into his 47th playthrough. That obsessive attention to detail, that inability to put down the controller—even between interviews—might just be the best guarantee that Final Fantasy 7 Revelation will live up to the hype in April 2027.
