Playable Demo of Final Fantasy VII Remake inadvertently contains a lot of information

About three months before the release of Final Fantasy VII Remake, a playable demo has been released that leaks a lot of information about the game. This includes hours of music and some spoilers. It is suspected that someone at Square Enix has committed a blunder.

Final Fantasy VII Remake’s playable teaser demo was supposed to be a nice gift for fans of the franchise. Remarkably, the demo appeared completely unannounced online just hours before the turn of the year. According to Ars Technica, the demo also turned out to be full of ‘uncleaned code’, so that a lot of information about the final game is now known.

Using some commonly available PC tools, a number of users discovered a package of content in the 10-gigabyte file, which remains hidden while playing the demo. This includes about four hours of music. Half of the soundtrack belongs to the first chapter of Final Fantasy VII Remake, while the other half contains a mix of classic Final Fantasy VII songs.

According to Ars Technica, some users have managed to get certain .pkg files to work in Unreal Engine 4 for PC. It would also have been possible to isolate and animate character files from the package, and to get a minigame working.

Unconfirmed reports suggest that the PS4 demo in question was relatively easy to download to a Windows PC via a spoofed IP address. To actually play the demo, a debug version of the PlayStation 4 or a modified PS4 was needed. The demo ends with an invitation to pre-order the final game through the PlayStation Network, from which it can be concluded that this version was indeed intended for the general public.

Square Enix has since taken the leaked demo offline, but extensive gameplay videos are still circulating on places like YouTube.

Update, Friday 14:08: The video on YouTube referred to in the article has since been taken offline.

Source: Ars Technica