Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Let’s start by just saying that the Final Fantasy series has been struggling to keep up with the times for at least the last twenty years, and that Square Enix’s approach for this “remake” trilogy stands out as their most successful attempt yet. Despite drawing on familiar material, they’ve managed to capture the same sense of scale and diversity of the classic games, delivering not only the most refined ATB-led combat experience to date, but also a plethora of minigames, side quests, areas to explore, and even temporary changes and additions in the gameplay dynamics to go along the story or the character you are focusing on. While some elements may feel obsolete and reminiscent of Ubisoft's open-world titles (like activating towers and mechanically uncovering points of interest), they're counterbalanced by the remarkable variety of engaging activities. Some players might even find themselves overwhelmed by the abundance of content this time around. Additionally, the length of individual sections, which occasionally dragged in "Remake," has been significantly tightened.

The pacing really depends on how much of a completionist you are. f you aim to simply explore the main environments and complete side quests, it won't demand an excessive amount of time compared to the average open-world action RPG. However, pursuing all achievements presents a different challenge altogether. This choice alone can transform the experience into a real nightmare. Completing all side quests, uncovering all points of interest, and, particularly, mastering all minigames will require not only considerable patience but also a minimum of 130 hours. Following that, you'll have an additional 20 hours to tackle a hard mode replay (manageable) and possibly a dozen more hours to conquer the combat simulator's "brutal" and "legendary" challenges (impossible). I found myself throwing in the towel halfway through the brutal challenges, as they proved nearly insurmountable regardless of my build, including cheese tactics. I wish I had known this before “wasting” 160 hours on all other objectives…

Unless you are planning to spend 200 hours perfecting your combat style and leveling up all materia, I highly recommend you only enjoy the main campaign and freely explore the open maps without worrying too much about the degree of completion. Otherwise, the things you initially liked about the game will all turn into extreme turn-offs.

The narrative largely stays true to the original, with a few additions enriching the main plot or establishing intriguing connections between events. For instance, the roles of the Gi tribe and Wutai have been reimagined to integrate into the overarching storyline. However, much like in "Remake," I still think the multiverse was the last thing we needed, especially at a time when all entertainment is seemingly obsessed by it. While it introduces a handful of new ideas to complement the familiar FF7 narrative, potential complications could arise in future installments. We will see.

The overarching narrative and occasional dramatic moments generally hit the mark, but the comedic relief felt a little off. While I am aware that the original was just as goofy… experiencing it in fully acted cutscenes with actual voice actors somehow makes it feel remarkably cringeworthy and redundant, comparing the experience to a not particularly well-directed anime. However, I have to say that the English localization has much better dialogue writing than its Japanese counterpart, despite the inevitable liberties taken in translation. It’s an issue common to most Japanese videogames, but the writing and direction are really the biggest issues making them decades behind international AAA titles like “Baldur’s Gate 3” or “The Last of Us”.

FFVII Rebirth is such a huge improvement from Remake. The decision to make one game out of Midgar never sat right with me, it’s still a great game, but one that often feels like it’s wasting your time with padding, with the countless sewer sections and literal entire chapters based off of like two pre-rendered backgrounds from the original game. Don’t get me wrong, I liked some of the expanded lore and world-building, but I feel like that game could’ve had like 5-10 hours cut and it honestly would’ve been a smoother experience.

Rebirth, however, does not have that problem. Sure, there are a few short sections that probably only exist to extend the runtime, but they are less egregious and more enjoyable (for the most part) than Remake. Put it this way, the best part of Remake was easily the time you spend in Wall Market; Here, almost every major town feels like a Wall Market. Each city just feels full of life, with so many great character interactions and interesting things to do.

The side quests also have received a major overhaul, way better than anything in Remake or Final Fantasy XVI. Plus additionally, the game gives you a ‘dynamic’ level scaling difficulty option, that way if you don’t want to stray from the main story but still want to come back to quests later without feeling overleveled you are well within your power to do so. There are also a lot of minigames this time around, and while not all of them are winners, the few that stand out rival some of the best RPG side quests to date. Even the worst ones are somewhat enjoyable, this is not like Final Fantasy X, where even for that games time the mini games were just bad.

The combat has received a slight overhaul and is just as good, if not better than before. The difficulty is significantly increased due to how much more options you have. Synergy attacks, similar to techs from Chrono Trigger, are a welcome addition and add some strategy to bigger fights.

The main story is paced much better than Remake, simply because this game just has so much more to work with. If there’s one thing I think the VII Remake games get right, it’s these characters. They really have portrayed these characters in such a way that is faithful to the original, while also expanding upon characters motives and ideal.

However, there are two low points in this game that are, in my opinion, worse than the worst parts of Remake. I can’t really get into them without using spoilers, so proceed with caution.

>!There is one section where you play as Cait Sith that is just bad. I get that they want to have a section where you play as every character, but we really did not need this. Plus, you play as him solo, which doesn’t make it any better. Out of combat he controls so clunky and it just is not fun. Instead of exploring the Shinra Manor we get another crappy Hojo’s lab section from Remake, but this time it’s worse and slows the pacing wayyyyy down. There’s a great boss fight at the end of it, but for some reason Cait Sith is locked in your party even though your entire team literally is together at this point. I liked Cait Sith a lot more as a character here than the original game, but this was just too much.!<

>!That section of the game can be forgiven with how much this game gets right. Going into the ending, it was literally my only complaint with the game. But holy shit that ending is hot garbage. I know the ending of Remake wasn’t great either, but I was cool with the idea of an alternate FFVII story. Here they go full on multiverse slop, and absolutely butcher THAT scene in the process. I won’t go into too much detail, as there really is a lot wrong with this ending, but I’d go as far as saying that the ending killed my interest in the whole Remake meta/alternate timeline/whispers subplot in these games. I like some aspects about it, but on the whole it just does not work at al, and it makes me worried for how this trilogy will conclude..!<

Going into the ending, I was really feeling a solid mid 9 on this game, but I think the ending drags it down to a low 9 for me. It doesn’t completely ruin everything great that came before; but unfortunately I feel like this game’s mishandling of an iconic scene will be a big part of its legacy. I feel like Square just really needs an editor, because these low points feel like they could’ve been so easily avoided, you just wish the writers would get their heads out of their ass sometimes. Without these low points this would honestly be really close to a 10 for me.

Regardless, this is still probably the best Final Fantasy in like 20 years, as it really translates the classic Final Fantasy experience (ie. IV-IX) to a modern day AAA experience. Ironically, it feels like a more accurate remake of Final Fantasy VII than the actual Final Fantasy VII Remake. It’s just a shame they couldn’t stick the landing.

Pros
- Combat is tactile, challenging and strategically varied. You can choose Dynamic difficulty if you want to go through the story and skip side content but still want a robust challenge that you won’t get on Easy mode.

- The environments are beautifully designed and rendered. There are some really cool locations to see (my favorite setting was Junon).

- Soundtrack is awesome overall

- The graphics and cinematics are of course incredible, and load times are quick

- Some great lines and dialogue moments, and fun character interactions are to be found herein

- Although it doesn’t always pan out for the best, I appreciate the addition of new modes of traversal such as grappling hooks that add some variety to gameplay. The ability to vault over fences and climb over rocks and other obstacles makes it a smoother experience in comparison to Remake's restrictiveness.

Cons
- Suffers from poor narrative construction, one-note characters, and fails to improve on the original game’s evocative, yet ultimately disordered and inconsistent central storyline. As a remake it should address the original's flaws but it mostly just recreates or exacerbates them. Moreover it doesn’t work as a sequel because the alternate reality stuff doesn’t make sense and doesn’t really matter to the plot anyway. It’s basically the original plot but with some parallel timeline spookiness that has nothing interesting to say and completely nullifies the impact of character deaths (just like Whispers did in part 1).

- Content is copy-pasted across the various open zone areas. There are some decent side quests but the ratio is massively in favor of repeated and/or not-fun activities, which is why I stopped engaging with the overworld areas eventually. When you’re in an open area the game is always pestering you with hooting owls, baby chocobos, a soulless AI named Chadley, and other mechanisms that tell you where to go without letting you discover things on your own through exploration.

- Environments are absolutely littered with pick-ups. The items all look like bean bags sitting on the ground regardless of what type of item it is. Picking up stuff by pressing triangle isn’t an entertaining mechanic in the slightest, and having these digital lines shooting up from the ground everywhere you turn is very immersion breaking. Sadly, these pick-up indicators cannot be turned off in the menu.

- Pick-ups are only there to serve an irrelevant crafting system; anything you can craft can also be purchased in shops or found in chests throughout your journey. It seems like this feature (among others) is only here to check a box of “things that stereotypically appear in open-world games.”

- Some of the new musical arrangements aren’t nearly as effective as the original FF7 themes (examples include North Corel Theme and City of the Ancients Theme)

Conclusion
I somewhat enjoyed my time with it, but whenever I started getting into a flow some annoying thing would drag it down again. By hours 30-35 I was eager for it to conclude. The way it tells this story doesn’t generate suspense to where I'm excited to see what happens next, and how. Too often, characters don't react to events in ways that are apropos of the situation. Important conversations between characters are generally avoided, or botched entirely when attempted. Supposedly pivotal scenes don't give us the needed information to care about what's happening. Lots of things happen but there's no weight to them. The script almost feels like a first draft where they forgot to go and fill in the texture and details that were left out.

Ultimately what seems to take precedence over all is the sheer scale of the production bringing that script to life, because every AAA title has to have a million hours of content, but a solid narrative framework is missing and the recycled content lacks soul. At the end of the day, I would've preferred something akin to an "HD mod" of original FF7 with modern graphical fidelity, a revised script, and modernized combat system, instead of this overreaching and cumbersome trilogy.