Final Fantasy VII Becomes a Stacking Game in January 2027

Final Fantasy VII fans, this one is a curveball. Square Enix has announced Ascend the Shinra Tower, a cooperative stacking game where 1-5 players try to build the iconic Shinra Tower out of wooden Floor Tiles and Wall Tiles without it tipping over. It arrives January 2027 at $34.99, modest pricing for a Square Enix licensed product.

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The hook is that the tower wobbles. Think Animal Upon Animal with a JRPG paint job: as you stack floors upward, the structure tilts and gets dicier, and the team has to coordinate placements to keep Cloud climbing toward the eighth floor without sending the whole thing crashing. Once Cloud reaches the top, a final showdown with Sephiroth waits. A 15-30 minute family-weight cooperative for ages 13 and up.

What sets it apart from a generic stacking game is the artwork. Co-developer Arclight is one of Japan's largest tabletop publishers, with original FFVII character designer Tetsuya Nomura supervising every wooden piece. The components show Cloud, Tifa, Aerith and the rest of the cast in a storybook style, with character work from Roberto Ferrari, who designed for FFVII Remake.

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This is not the deep tactics RPG board game fans have asked for since the original game launched in 1997. It is a 30-minute party-weight cooperative built around a familiar piece of FF iconography, which is fine. The Shinra building has been getting wrecked across every retelling of FFVII for decades, so a game where you stack it and then try not to knock it over has a certain charm.

Pre-orders are live at the Square Enix store. If you have FFVII fans in your group who have been waiting nearly thirty years for an excuse to sit down and topple a Shinra tower together, this is finally that excuse.

Sources: Final Fantasy | MonsterVine | Square Enix Store