Vincent Valentine’s been somewhat of an enigma ever since the original Final Fantasy 7 introduced us to the brood-maxxing goth icon 30 years ago, but Final Fantasy 7 Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi is promising that’ll all change very soon.
“Unlike the other optional character Yuffie, [Vincent’s] hometown and where he comes from wasn’t actually shown in the original Final Fantasy 7,” Naoki Hamaguchi explains during an official Gamescom livestream. Revelation aims to shed a little more light on the coffin-dweller, though. (Good spot, Genki!)
“So Vincent obviously is an ex-member of the Turks,” Hamaguchi continues. “People know about some of his background, but rest assured that in Revelation we go even deeper into his backstory, and there will be some new reveals about things that he did in the past and what made him as a character that people have never seen before.”
The Remake trilogy lead assures fans that anyone “looking to go even deeper into Vincent Valentine” will be quite happy when Revelation drops next spring. “We really have got the game in just the right place, and I can’t wait to see people experience that.”
The OG Final Fantasy 7 left things pretty vague for the brooding, sleepy guy. Vincent’s subject to awful experimentation decades before the game begins and we get a little bit of insight into his tragic, potentially one-sided love story, but that aside, we know very little about what his life looked like prior to becoming a Shinra puppet. His arc also ends quite abruptly even if you do choose to tackle his late-game side quest, so there’s plenty to expand on in the finale, on top of the Dirge of Cerberus references we’ve seen so far.
Talking on the character’s combat style, Hamaguchi jokes he’s actually “worried how well we’ve done Vincent in the game” because players “will just want to control Vincent and gravitate too far towards him and not the other characters.”
It’ll take a miracle to pull me away from Tifa’s kickass combos, but Vincent might just be the one to do it. He can apparently transform into a horned beast at will to deliver devastating damage up close, before zipping back into his beautiful human form to spray enemies with bullets from afar.