Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (2024)

Finished this one up tonight at about 50 hours, did some of the side content but not all of it but I have some thoughts:

The Good

• The characters and their interactions were awesome to see, I especially love how Tifa and Aerith are such good friends and get to hang out a lot in this one.
• The combat was fun throughout the whole game.
• Seeing the locations out in the world in HD was very refreshing after only seeing Midgar for the first part of the "Remake Saga".
• Some of the side quests are really good and let you get to know characters better.
• The music (of course), this game is stuffed with tracks for every situation.

The Meh

• I got bored of the open world activities pretty quickly. There was a point where I felt fatigued at looking at all the icons on the map and was just like "don't feel like doing this anymore".
• Some of the sidequests are really boring or have obnoxious ways of completing them.
• Slightly related, but there are too many minigames. I enjoyed quite a few of them, but then they started to overstay their welcome, especially in dungeons. Example: Throwing boxes as Cait Sith was just frustrating and annoying. There were a lot of minigames that felt tedious like that one.

The Ugly - Shocking, its the plot and especially the changes to it. I'll just dump all of my thoughts into a spoiler tag: I think that multiverses have been used well in certain creative instances, but shoving it into this story does not sit well with me. Its not interesting and to me it just completely makes stakes vanish. You can just fell them trying to be "subversive" and it just doesn't work for me. Also, we have fought Sephiroth so much in these remakes, I just groaned when I got to the end of the game and had to fight him AGAIN. Its like Square can't resist dangling that carrot.

It's a good game but there are a lot of problems that that bring it down for me. If I had the option here, I'd probably round it down to a 7/10. I would replay it again for the combat if anything.

I have to say, I didn’t get the Chadley hate I’ve seen floating around the web. Polygon published an article saying,

If Cloud scans a Lifespring or a tower, he might talk about any local regional phenomena. He frequently pops in with basic facts about the region, and then dips out. And his excited, pubescent voice doesn’t hold up well over long stretches.

Maybe I don’t find him annoying because I’m playing it in Japanese and I don’t have to put up with bad English V.O. 🤷🏽‍♂️

The Gamer had this to say,

I Get It Now, I Hate Chadley Too Dorky little no friend having, android being, card cheater Chadley. Nothing worked in the face of his dweebiness. I played offensively into his space and he destroyed my cards. I played defensively to shore up my backline and he attacked the space. I played big value cards and he destroyed them. I played small value cards to expand into and he blocked them.

It was a severe difficulty spike for a minigame that I now felt was being given increased importance, all while he had a better deck than me. I used the different preset decks and tried to play to their strengths, but Chadley always had a counter. I picked my highest value cards and couldn't get them out. I played low value fast cards and Chadley's few outnumbered my many. It felt impossible.

Maybe I didn’t find that annoying either because I didn’t think it was a particularly difficult Queen’s Blood bout, so he didn’t really have a chance to get on my nerves. But I also didn’t really find he said anything specifically annoying.

I guess from a handholding standpoint he can be annoying, but I don’t find the handholding that intrusive, at least not as intrusive as several other recent AAA games. But even if handholding is understandably annoying, I don’t find Chadley intrinsically annoying . He seems fine to me.