Play As José Rizal In Civilization VII

No way, José Rizal? Civilization VII sure is stepping up with its Southeast Asian representation with a new-to-Civ leader added to the upcoming game’s launch roster.

Filipino revolutionary icon José Rizal makes his debut in the historical 4X series.

With Civ VII decoupling leaders and civs, allowing players to mix-and-match them, and opening the leader selection beyond heads of states, this perfectly opens the opportunity for a figure like Rizal, who in many ways sparked the birth of the Philippines as we know today, as a playable leader.

Playing As Rizal gives Culture and Gold bonuses in completing Narrative Events, a new-to-civ feature where you follow a questline of sorts. If you’re familiar with the random event chains in many grand strategy games from Paradox Interactive, then it’s more or less like that. Narrative Events trigger more often. And should you trigger Celebration, the duration and Happiness it brings are increased.

When controlled by the AI, Rizal will be buddies with the leader that has the most active Endeavors and conversely will have a relationship penalty against the leader with the most active Sanctions.

From the looks of it, there will be no representation of the Philippines, or any civ that preceded the nation, in Civ VII, making José Rizal one of the handful of leaders that doesn’t have a “home” civ across the three Ages. The First Look video suggests to pair him with Hawai’i in the Exploration Age, which is thematically is close enough given how the Philippines and Hawai’i has that USA connection between them.

Civilization VII will launch with 31 civs and 26 leaders (counting 5 Personas, leader variants with different abilities) at launch. From what’s been revealed so far, Southeast Asia is represented by two leaders (José Rizal, Trưng Trắc) and three civs, one for each Age (Khmer, Majapahit and Siam for Antiquity, Exploration and Modern Age respectively).

Starting with Civ V, developer Firaxis has brought more Southeast Asian civs to the world stage either as playable civs or NPC city-states (which are now called Independent Powers in Civ VII). There are a lot of SEA reps already on the base game already, which is something cool to see, though there’s definitely more parts of the region’s culture to be explored when the inevitable expansions and DLCs roll out.

If the community is already hyped up about our man J. Rizzler here, they won’t be ready should sort-of-real but without a doubt legendary Malay admiral Hang Tuah opens his stance and enter the civ ring, especially now that English speakers saw that other Tuah… thing.

We have had some hands-on time with Civilization VII, check out our first impressions here.

Civilization VII launches on February 12, 2025 for the PS5, PC (Steam, Epic Games Store), Xbox Series X|S and Switch.

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