FF7 Revelation Rebuilds Knights of the Round for Handhelds

An emergency meeting over a video game boss is usually code for a bug hunt. Not this one. Square Enix pulled its directors — art, motion, the works — into a room because Knights of the Round, the 13-knight summon that anchored Final Fantasy 7’s 1997 endgame, wasn’t brutal enough. Combat director Teruki Endo’s verdict, relayed by game director Naoki Hamaguchi, was blunt: ‘We need to make them stronger.’ So the team rebuilt the encounter from scratch.

That’s a thrilling headline if you remember grinding chocobos just to unlock the thing in the first place. It reads very differently if most of your Final Fantasy time happens in twenty-minute windows on a train, because everything we know about this fight points toward long, punishing, unskippable spectacle — the exact shape of encounter that collides with portable play.

The Summon So Long Players Glitched Past It

The original Knights of the Round animation ran well past the minute mark — 13 knights storming in, one after another — long enough that players engineered a glitch just to skip it. That detail matters more than the trivia suggests. Hamaguchi’s team isn’t tweaking a damage value; it’s building a full boss fight around an entity whose entire identity is grandeur, and Endo’s first pass got scrapped because it wasn’t mean enough. Expect phases, expect length, expect a fight designed to be replayed.

Difficulty itself isn’t the handheld problem — nobody’s scared of a hard fight. The failure loop is. A boss rebuilt specifically to punish you means more attempts, more repeated phase-one cutscenes, and more time watching animations you’ve memorized. Steam Deck and Switch 2 both handle suspend-resume cleanly enough that a train announcement won’t cost you the run, but an encounter engineered for grandiosity fights the short-session rhythm of portable play. If the summon flourish can’t be skipped and there’s no mid-fight checkpoint, this is the stretch of Revelation you play docked. Valve and Square Enix haven’t disclosed performance targets, so we can’t say how it holds up at a 10W cap — but heavy-particle spectacle bosses are historically exactly where handhelds start sweating.

Rebirth Ate 150GB. Revelation’s Disc Still Wants a Download.

The other handheld tax is storage, and it’s already being advertised. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth landed around 150GB on PC, and Revelation is the trilogy’s finale — the entry Hamaguchi keeps describing as huge. Square Enix has confirmed the physical disc won’t even contain everything, still pulling a download because the studio ‘didn’t want to make any compromises.’ That’s a clean tell that the digital footprint is going to be enormous.

Do the math against your actual hardware. A base Steam Deck ships with 256GB of internal storage, and so does the Nintendo Switch 2 — meaning a single finale-sized Final Fantasy could claim more than half your usable space before you install anything else. Switch 2 owners are looking at a microSD Express card, which carries a real premium over standard microSD, while Steam Deck owners face an SSD swap or a high-capacity card that will crawl during the open-world zones. So here’s the takeaway: decide now whether Knights of the Round is a docked, big-screen event for you. Plan the storage in October, not the week Revelation lands — because the emergency meeting made the boss meaner, and it didn’t make it shorter.