I already love what Final Fantasy VII Revelation is doing with the boss battles after fighting the Ruby Weapon

When the Final Fantasy VII Remake series was first announced, right away one of the biggest questions I had for it was how the monolithic Weapons would be handled in the modern era. These living behemoth guardians of the planet were not only the cause of some of the biggest set-piece moments in the original PlayStation title, but also a couple fulfilled the role of the game’s super bosses. Now, after 11 long years of waiting to see how the Remake project would handle them, I have my answer.

While getting some hands-on time with Final Fantasy VII Revelation at PAX West, I got to not only get an up-close look at Corel Desert’s Ruby Weapon, but also got to fight it. It did not go well for our heroes. In typical Ruby Weapon fashion, it was very good at killing my party, but I can report on how things went down and how, at least Ruby, was handled.

Dropping into the Corel region from the Highwind, I had a quest pop-up pointing me in the direction of some “strange readings”. Arriving at the designated spot, eerie crimson tentacles were protruding from the ground, and after taking them out, I was alert to other spots nearby with similar tentacles I needed to deal with. At this point, a mysterious, impassable tornado was in the vicinity that seemed to be absorbing energy from giant pillars of crystallized lifestream that had shown up. 

After running, or should I say soaring through the skies, around the map on my faithful chocobo, Pico, I dispatched each group of tendrils. Each group consisted of a handful of weaker ones and one strong leader tentacle. After a couple of deaths (even these groups of enemies could destroy my party) I figured out that taking out the weaker ones was almost a necessity, not only because doing so made staggering the leader easier, but also because the leader could cast a special fire-absorbing shield. Doing so would make any surviving minions hurl fire spells at it, healing the minuscule damage I had done up until that point. 

With my strategy of focusing down a few of the weaker ones so I could stagger the tougher one, I made my way through the few mini-missions to take care of the tentacles, learning a bit more about what was happening and what Weapon may be trying to do. With the tentacles down, the desert whirlwind dispersed and the main event made its appearance. The hulking red form of Ruby Weapon now loomed on the battlefield. Hard to miss, and imposing. After making its grand entrance, a swath of new points of interest populated my map - SHINRA artillery points and interception points.

Quickly hopping on my chocobo, I made my way to the nearest artillery point to see what that was about. What I found was a busted-up camp with heavy weapons strewn about and a chest nearby containing some item I needed to get everything up and running again. Hayes, another one of us RPGSite folks who got to check out Revelation (and made famous, with his foot’s inclusion in a recent tweet by Hamaguchi), got the site repaired, using the gained resource to build a weapon to use against the giant. These points look to have a small selection of possible armaments that you can construct to use on the Weapon, but specifics on how each is different are still a bit up in the air. 

I, unfortunately, opted to forgo the artillery for the sake of time and made my way, after a quick investigation of the artillery site, straight to a nearby interception point. Due to events in the story that had taken place prior to Chapter 4, where our demo took place, large pillars of what seemed to be materia had spawned around the Corel Desert region, and the Ruby Weapon was making its way to them to drain their power. Reminiscent of having to intercept the Diamond Weapon on the plains before Junon in the original PlayStation release, our heroes' job was to reach one of these points and put an end to the target. Running up to its foot (my party was roughly about the size of what I could only describe as the Weapon’s toenail), I attempted to smack it a bit just to see what would happen, and besides getting a sinking feeling that this wasn’t going to end well, Ruby Weapon didn’t make any indication that it noticed our presence, so onward I went.

Using my faithful chocobo Pico and the host of new abilities it has in Revelation, I made it to a high-up plateau where Ruby waited. I had one last chance to turn back with a button-press confirmation, followed by a 10-second countdown, after which the battle began. At this point, according to Hayes, the restored artillery fired at Weapon.

Ruby Weapon consisted of its body and a large, glowing core of materia that could be targeted, but, as in the original FF7, you don’t have just the body to worry about. Alongside the brutal swings by the Weapon itself, it is joined by the same tentacles that you had to deal with before you could take on the boss. What followed was defeat after defeat, where even after bumping it down to easy, I could barely lower the health bar of Ruby Weapon, and in no time, my session with Final Fantasy VII Revelation was over. Despite never making it far into the fight, I think it’s a safe bet that other surprises would no doubt occur as the boss’ health dipped low.

While nothing has been confirmed regarding how the encounters between Emerald, Diamond, Ultima, and perhaps even Sapphire Weapons will play out in Revelation, I feel there are still some aspects that can be extrapolated from the Ruby fight. I would imagine that most, if not all, the weapons will follow a similar quest-like structure of tasks that must be completed before you can actually take them on. On PlayStation, you had to chase Ultima Weapon around in the Highwind, beating him a number of times before finally claiming victory, and Emerald Weapon was fought underwater and had the added gimmick of requiring a special materia to be equipped; you force a time limit on yourself. Out of all of them, Ruby had the most straightforward battle of them all, where all you needed to do was run into it once it had appeared, and in this new game, it almost has adopted parts from the other Weapons from the original game, so I can’t imagine they would dumb down all the others.

Honestly, the Ruby Weapon fight was everything I had hoped these fights would be back when I first imagined them in 2015, when this Remake was announced. The team at Square Enix nailed the sense of scale, and seeing it loom like a mountain was both terrifying and exhilarating. I can’t wait to see what the other tricks and surprises Ruby and the other Weapons have in store for players. That April 8, 2027 can’t get here soon enough!

Be sure to check out the rest of our coverage of Final Fantasy VII Revelation from PAX and Gamescom, including Alex's hands-on, and an all-new interview with Naoki Hamaguchi (Revelation’s Director) and Teruki Endo (Revelation’s Battle Director) both here on RPG Site  and on our sister site Respec.