Modern Graphics Forced FF7 Revelation to Cut Jobs to 4

"It did make me realize all over again how hard it is to develop games these days. When you look at some of the early Final Fantasy games that have job systems, you could put a lot in there."

That's Final Fantasy 7 Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi, speaking to GamesRadar+ at Final Fantasy 14 Fan Fest Berlin, explaining why the trilogy's grand finale will only give each party member four job classes. In a series that once let you slap 20+ jobs on every character in Final Fantasy 5, four feels like a steep drop. But Hamaguchi's reasoning is hard to argue with: every one of those jobs now requires fully bespoke character animations, detailed outfit models, and visual effects that simply didn't exist when the series was working in pixel art.

Revelation's version of the job system is called FITS, which stands for Function Integrated Tactical Suitwear. Each character gets four FITS that change both their combat role and their appearance. So far, Square Enix has shown Cloud in a Warrior outfit and Tifa dressed as a Black Mage. Hamaguchi says that having 20 or 30 jobs in a single standalone release is "just insanely difficult" unless you're running a live-service game that adds content over time, pointing to Final Fantasy 14 as the exception that proves the rule.

This is one of those trade-offs that rarely gets discussed openly, and I appreciate Hamaguchi being blunt about it. We've spent a decade watching AAA budgets balloon while the scope of individual systems quietly shrinks. Final Fantasy 5 shipped with 22 jobs in 1992 on a cartridge. Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, running on hardware that would have seemed extraterrestrial back then, can manage four per character. The fidelity goes up, the systemic variety comes down. Nobody's at fault here, but it's a trend I think players should be paying attention to, because it's not going to reverse.

Four jobs, many characters

Hamaguchi did push back on the idea that four is limiting. "The FITS system has four different outfits for each character, and each of those is quite a defined role," he said. "In the end, that has added quite a lot of breadth of strategy for players to engage with, so I think it has resulted in a really good addition to the battle system." He also noted that Revelation has a large playable cast, so even with only four FITS each, the total workload was significant.

There's a version of this argument that holds up. Four well-designed, mechanically distinct roles per character across a full party could produce more meaningful build variety than 22 shallow jobs on four identical sprites. The question is whether Square Enix actually delivers on that depth or whether four FITS per character ends up feeling like a cosmetic swap with minor stat tweaks. Rebirth's combat was strong enough that I'm inclined to give the team the benefit of the doubt, but the proof will be in the system's flexibility once players start min-maxing party compositions.

What sticks with me is how clearly this illustrates the cost of modern graphics on game design itself. Every pixel-perfect animation, every cloth simulation on a new outfit, every particle effect on a new ability eats development time that used to go toward raw mechanical breadth. Studios aren't lazy; they're trapped by the visual expectations that players and platform holders have collectively set. It's the same pressure that turned open-world side content into copy-pasted icons and shrank RPG skill trees into streamlined wheels. Hamaguchi just said the quiet part out loud.

Final Fantasy 7 Revelation launches spring 2027 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.