Sony shows off Final Fantasy VII Remake footage at PSX

Sony and Square Enix unveiled a gameplay video for the highly anticipated Final Fantasy VII Remake title coming to the PlayStation 4.

Sony made the announcement at its PlayStation Experience event in San Francisco. The video showed the first gameplay scenes from the remake of the classic Final Fantasy game that fans have called the best in the long-running series, which has shipped more than 100 million units over time.

The trailer showed a wide range of gameplay, including high-resolution graphics and some awesome combat that looked like it was real time.

Shawn Leydon, the head of the Sony game business in the U.S., came out on stage before a crowd of 5,000 people (with more watching online) and said it’s been an “incredible ride” and “we would not be able to achieve this success without all of you here.” Sony also showed a new scene from Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End.

The crowd roared when Final Fantasy VII’s main creators, Yoshinori Kitase and Tetsuya Nomura of Square Enix, came out on stage. They said Remake was a labor of love, and they couldn’t wait to make it available next year.

“If your impatience is just getting the best of you, the PC port version [of the original game] is available today [on PS4],” Kitase said.

The crowd, quite naturally, roared at just about every scene in the trailer.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.