I was always going to like a sequel to Final Fantasy VII Remake to at least some degree. The source material and remade foundation were too good for this to not be good. That is how we arrive at a point where I'm giving Final Fantasy VII Rebirth a good rating, yet still find it to be a conflicting and somewhat disappointing experience. Another slice of Final Fantasy VII has been expanded here into a detailed and memorable game with many great moments, but enough tedious ones that I'm not sure anymore if I'm into the three-game approach to this remake project.

Part of the problem is that it's just trying to do too much for my taste. Even more than in the original FFVII, there's an overabundance of forced minigames and other gimmicky gameplay segments. Sometimes they’re fun, but they’re often tiresome or just feel unnecessary and mess up the flow of the game. Several large zones feature more standard open world style side content that I didn't really care to engage with after the initial early game dump of it. Crafting feels nearly pointless on Normal difficulty, and it and some other new ideas are used in some rather boring side quest designs. I wanted the game to give me a break at points to just chill with its characters in its world, but its idea of a break usually felt more like chores to me.

I wouldn't mind the fluff as much, I guess, if the main story quest weren't so exhaustingly paced. As the overarching narrative spins its wheels on a continent-wide hunt for Sephiroth, it tries to give each location and character chances to shine. Shine they mostly do, I suppose, but it becomes too much. Parts where the party splits up, for example, are on paper a great way to explore different party dynamics in combat and dialogue; in practice, I felt that seeing things from multiple perspectives often overly dragged out individual areas and disrupted their narrative flow. The ending chapters cram in a lot more interesting story stuff, but themselves also feel hours longer than I wanted them to be. It's just a lot at almost every turn.

Party progression is another thing I'd like to see streamlined a bit in the third game. The new weapon upgrade system feels oddly minimal, while the new skill trees for each character have a poorly-designed interface and make me wish that some of this character development stuff was merged into some better system. Materia is still a good concept in theory, but it's far too cumbersome swapping it around as your party changes throughout the game. Of course, you could just not do that and keep everyone equipped, but you never know when you'll need certain things, and I found that materia leveled up so slowly that it would be a waste to keep several duplicates of the same things equipped.

For all the flaws, when it's good, it can be really, really good. The main story features some truly exciting and beautiful scenes and a great balance between playfulness and seriousness. The iconic characters are so well-realized that they make some side NPCs and even characters from other recent Final Fantasy games feel like total bores. The combat feels as good as it was in Remake with more challenging encounter designs, even if the new playable characters aren't quite as fun as those from Remake and its Intermission expansion. The audiovisual presentation has some hiccups—a somewhat ugly-looking "performance mode", some out-of-place music tracks, and a few audio mixing issues, for example—but is largely excellent and well-directed. The regions feel distinct and have detailed towns, some of which are fun just to be in.

I focused more on negatives here, but that's only because what's good from Remake is still here and I don't have much else to say. In the end, I mostly wish it was more focused on what it was actually good at than on adding more and more detail and stuff to do on top of it. Is that even possible when tasked with blowing up an old game into one more than 3 times its length and trying to one-up yourself with each installment? I mean, I thought Remake did the remaking just fine, but here for a player like me it feels like it ballooned out of control. In any case, it's hard to fault the game much for its fundamentals, which offer a mostly entertaining and polished (partial) take on a classic.

Can't even bring myself to write about it. 30 hours I felt like I just threw into a paper shredder for no reason. I should've learned my lesson with Square Enix and AAA in general, but I guess the parts without ghosts in Remake made me hopeful maybe they did something nice here.

Turns out all they said about the game needing 3 parts to become modern was bullcrap, bc they made up 80 hours of filler on this one that weren't there originally and that bring nothing to the table.

In case anyone's curious, I gave up and became furious when after god knows how many hours twiddling thumbs about gold saucer areas, when I was already fed up with filler, card games and nonsense before that, they bring me ot corel prison, make me eat 30 minutes of annoying quirky character cutscenes, and force the otherworldly powerful characters that are protagonists of this game to get money for a goon with bats and a couple machine guns because (get this!) if not, he will get money selling the girls in the group to prostitution!

WOAH! The writing is so incredible! Why would Cloud not cut them all in half in that precise second? Why wouldn't the girls themselves disintegrate them for the mere thought of the threat???? The game had been reasonable about this before, having sidequest goons only annoy the characters before being pummeled in a cutscene or made to run away, but now... THIS goon with a larger than life manner of speech deserves to be stronger than the literal god summoning resistance force opposing Shinra, and to THREATEN THEM WITH FORCED SEXUAL WORK, BECAUSE I GUESS IT'S THE 90S AGAIN!

What a piece of trash. I hope anyone considering this the best videogames has to offer will do literally anything else with their time and find better stuff.

/Anger off

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is the second in Square Enix's three-part expansion of the legendary 1997 RPG, and it's a doozy. 2020's Remake adapted the opening hours of Final Fantasy VII's first disc, a section of the game that acts as a sort of prologue to the story. This section grounds the characters in an entirely linear run through the massive city of Midgar and its slums. As such, Remake featured mostly linear, corridor-like environments that did not leave much room for exploration.

Once you leave the city, Final Fantasy VII opens up, allowing you to explore its world map. It's still a largely linear experience, but the game expects you to wander a little as you search for your next location. Rebirth interprets this by switching to large, open regions that allow you to spend hours simply taking in the sights and partaking in a large variety of side activities and mini games.

"Open world" is a term I've heard to describe this, but Rebirth largely retains the linear nature of the original game by partitioning its environments into distinct zones, not unlike the Xenoblade series. Exploring the world and completing objectives feels a little reminiscent of The Witcher 3, which has a similar system of slowly revealing points of interest on your map for you to seek out. It works quite well here, thanks to the inherently wondrous nature of Final Fantasy VII's world. This is just a heck of a fun world to be in.

Final Fantasy VII is a humongous game in its own right, but it was hyper-focused on its story. It's a character-focused tale, and as such it doesn't really spend a lot of time detailing the world's history and how it got to be the way that it is. It alludes to a war between Shinra and Wutai that took place in the past, but most details are left to the imagination. Rebirth goes the extra mile by filling in those details. NPCs will reminisce about the days of a republic that existed before Shinra used their monopoly on mako energy to take over the world. You can see how Shinra's neglect has allowed the regions to fall into disrepair, with nature beginning to reclaim a lot of the republic's infrastructure. I can't describe how awestruck I was to see this world become fully realized and deepened in this way.

In Remake, I felt that the new additions often felt intrusive and interrupted the very deliberate pace of what was otherwise a pretty straight retelling of Final Fantasy VII. But the remainder of the original's first disc also features a change in the tone of its story. The sense of urgency is lessened, and the game becomes a world tour of sorts, as our heroes hop from location to location hunting for the elusive Sephiroth. Because of this, the addition of side content feels much more natural, and I felt totally comfortable taking breaks from the main quest to go explore and level up a little.

And of course, Rebirth goes absolutely ham on adding side content. Even outside of the standard "open world" objectives, you can complete side missions with their own stories. You can partake in a mind boggling array of mini games, including Queen's Blood, a ridiculously addictive card game. Not everything is a winner, and there's certainly a few duds, such as the Fort Condor mini-game. But the beauty of it is that a lot of the content is purely optional, and the game encourages you to take things at your own pace. Because of that, it completely avoids the sense of burnout I felt with Remake, despite being so much bigger.

The battle system is also expanded here. Combat was already one of the best things about Remake, and Rebirth adds in its own twists. There are three new playable characters, and they are all pretty darn enjoyable during combat. Synergy abilities are another new addition that give you access to unique skills depending on which characters are active in your party, making your choices on what characters to use feel more significant. Each character also has a Folio, which is a skill tree that grants stat bonuses, as well as new skills and synergy abilities. The weapon skill system rewards you for using a particular weapon by letting you carry skills over to another once you master them. All of these systems come together so nicely, and feel complex without being overwhelming. If you like JRPG systems like I do, Rebirth is a wonderful shot in the arm.

Rebirth's story has an incredibly good start, with an expanded retelling of the Nibelheim incident that serves as a thunderous reintroduction to one of the most iconic villains in gaming. It's great. But most of all, I love how Rebirth not only retains, but leans into the goofiest bits from the original game. From accidentally ending up as a soldier in a military parade, to an extended beach vacation and a stay at the world's gaudiest theme park, Rebirth continuously put a smile on my face by painstakingly devoting itself to re-creating almost every setpiece from the original game. However, it isn't able to completely avoid all of the stumbles that dragged me down in Remake.

Eventually, the maximalism that is so core to Rebirth begins to take a toll. You are often forced to go on lengthy excursions that put you in the shoes (Or paws) of a specific party member. These often have their own mechanics, and while some are fun, such as Yuffie's grappling hook, others completely miss the mark, such as Cait Sith's completely superfluous box-throwing excursion. Much like in Remake, Rebirth's late game is filled with many such sections that overstay their welcome, while completely minimizing or cutting other sections of the original. The fact that the City of the Ancients or Rocket Town are not explorable is positively criminal.

Changes are introduced to the story from the very start of the game, and for the most part they are innocuous, such as a new subplot regarding Wutai. However, some changes completely alter the context around the most important twists and revelations of Final Fantasy VII. While I'm not totally against recontextualizing them, the way it has been done here just doesn't work for me. There's a new storyline involving Zack Fair that does not justify his return in any way. Sephiroth continues to be ridiculously overused, making him annoying instead of threatening. And most horrendously, Rebirth fails what is perhaps THE most important moment in all of Final Fantasy VII (You know the one), completely defacing it with more of the same metatextual Kingdom Hearts-level bullshit nonsense that was present in Remake's ending. It completely misses the soul of that moment, taking one of the most emotional scenes in the game and turning it into a confusing, grueling mess.

After cooling off from my disappointment at the final hours of Rebirth, though, I do think that this is an incredibly good game. On the whole, I find that it's much better than Remake at luxuriously expanding the 1997 original. As a fan of Final Fantasy VII, I felt completely spoiled by this experience. But in some ways, Rebirth is a victim of its own ambitions, being so big and so expansive, that by the end of its journey it runs out of steam in adapting a few of disc one's late moments with the same love and care it had earlier in the experience. But I'll be darned if this isn't simply a fun as hell game. It's the best game Square Enix have produced in the Final Fantasy series in years, and if the third title in this remake series is anywhere near as good, it'll all feel worthwhile in the end.

SPOILERS

Most of rebirth is a triumph. The world space, the party characterization, the animations, music and voice acting are brilliant. The combat, while certainly not up to the caliber of a dedicated action game, is a significant improvement on remake/16. The focus on non-combat gameplay is refreshing if a bit overdone at times.

However, the defining element of the title is the narrative and it is here where the game seems to teeter with pacing and tonal issues throughout, before failing catastrophically at the very end.

------------------- Combat and Gameplay -----------------------------

Its amazing how incentivizing use of multiple characters, with slightly different play patterns, keeps the experience generally fresh through a marathon experience.. that and adding a generous and effective parry.

Considering the game is a AAA JRPG, where combat is historically less relevant to the experience, rebirths combat is more than passable, with certain fights (the 1v1 human fights and summons especially ) bordering on great and satisfying. The new synergy builder/spender system works well and there are less MMO style raid mechanics, ala 16, and more dodge/parry punish windows.

The open world is exactly what you'd expect, whether you like that gameplay loop or not. I personally full cleared every region, but I strongly recommend against this for other players. The open world bloat of copy pasted objectives certainly pads the game length and content but at the not-worth-it cost of destroying the pacing of the meandering and listless story. I think most of the 'green' sidequests, all of which have an explicit purpose of exposition for your party members, are the worth doing however.

The minigames are likely to be divisive- at times they are overbearing (specifically the long stretch of junon - boat - costa del sol and golden saucer which dips into levity and recreation for far too long at the expense of the story) and I'd recommend skipping and returning if you genuinely care to engage with this content (which almost universally doesn't provide meaningful story exposition or advance the narrative). With that said the abundance of non-combat content and objectives feels true to the JRPG genre and helps break tension and combat repetitiveness. I think an unsung credit to the combat system is the frequent breaks from it, which keeps it fresh over a too-long experience.

------------------ Performance and Design -------------------------

The game runs exceptionally well and deserves a good deal of credit for running silky smooth with basically no frame drops or poor frame pacing. There are times (in performance mode) where the mediocre lighting engine washes out detail though... the game's graphics are at their best very zoomed in, with hand painted lighting and strong depth of field effects obscuring background imagery.

As most of the character models, faces and animations are brilliant and expressive this general focus on cropped portrait shots in cutscenes keeps the graphics looking great during the most important moments even if any significant level of zoom out erodes the performance mode graphical fidelity (but not frame rate) fairly harshly. There were a few rough spots... elevators, etc. where you really notice the detail washout but they are rare and more than a fair trade off for smooth gameplay.

The music is familiar but great... the new or original songs fit in well. There were more than a few times when the music is poorly balanced and overbearing on scenes. I recommend, as blasphemous as it seems, turning down the music volume relative to others... it will still be prominent and blaring, but hopefully alleviates this issue to an extent.

The open world level design introduces verticality to great effect, and uses quality foliage and textures. They seem to use a blend of black desert and forspoken inspired textures, which is a tremendous compliment. The regions are geographically distinct and a lot of love went into the world spaces and general level design (which makes sense considering we'll be revisiting these areas in the upcoming game).

----------------- the elephant in the room.. story and narrative -------------------

For all of the conceptual good in the game... ultimately a 50+ hour story game can and will be rightfully judged on the merits of its story, themes and execution. And rebirth fails in this regard.

The pacing of the story is problematic; it loses focus as the themes of the remake (defying fate, protecting the planet, etc.) are abandoned for a 'book 2 style' aimless benevolent meandering throughout the world. This is intentional, and flaw of the OG games as well, but it doesn't really excuse the issue. There are stretches where for hours at a time there is no meaningful progress of the core story threads.

More importantly, remake was presented as a faithful recreation of a beloved older title that, awkwardly, pivots into something different... with the cost of the unexpected shift being a lessening of pivotal scenes, and new plot lines and narrative threads that seemed needless or weak. Square Enix dedicated an entire game to shifting the core theme and message of FF7 to DEFYING FATE, 'actually this isn't a remake, this is something new' and both within the game, and the external discourse, and all the marketing, was saturated this idea that FF7 remake series was something new and distinct. The promise wasn't the game you knew and loved, but something new and unique, for better or worse. The significant deviations to the story in remake, executed poorly or otherwise, were presented as a promise of future change. It was literally in the closing scenes and taglines, and the DLC.

Rebirth is a soft retcon of this philosophy. The ending of remake promised a story free of the constraints of expectation. Rebirth basically immediately abandoned this conceit in practice, while pretending to preserve this approach in theory. The plot ghosts are gone for the majority of the title, Aerith, Red, and Sephiroths prescient knowledge of the future is retconned clumsily, and we are presented, with some exceptions, a fairly faithful recreation of disc 1 of the OG FF7. Nibleheim is presented differently, there is a new section for Tifa, Dyne's story is softened for the worse, etc. but all of these changes while mostly neutral could be overlooked. Especially as a ton of the 'filling in' stories added like Cissnei and others are effective and engaging. Adding new story telling to the setting isn't inherently bad in rebirth.. expansions of minor OG plots are generally good, just as in Remake.

While square does a great job embellishing the parts that don't matter, its literally the reverse for the actual story beats that matter.

The important story elements in rebirth are a disaster. It follows almost the same path as remake- a great game that inexplicably ruins and fundamentally changes seminal moments for no apparent purpose. Its bloated and convoluted. The most important moment of the game has to be an example of one of the worst presented scenes I've ever experienced. I am referring only to execution here; there is a separate discussion about whether this scene, in conception, is a worthwhile change.

Square wants the best of both worlds- they want to tell the same story as the original, faithfully, while pretending there is something new and novel to the game. Its intellectual cowardice; either recreate the experience so a new generation of players can enjoy a timeless story, or create something distinct and new.

It reeks of shameful marketing juju; they want to titillate, and misrepresent this game as something novel and new, packed to the brim with unabashed fan service, but not alienate people who just want the OG game.

• Zack, a character whose lengthy inclusion in rebirth is seemingly purposeless, is featured for no reason (even on the cover..)
• Sephiroth, an iconic villain from the original specifically because he almost entirely absent and mysterious until the very end of the game, is constantly everywhere, and presented as shortsighted and weak. We, the player, have now fought and defeated like 10 different versions of this character, including the literal iconic ending form, before even encountering him in game.
• All of the potentially unanswered questions that should have been addressed in this game have been punted to the next game, with rebirth basically not addressing any of the ongoing mysteries, character motivations or important plot details. There is functionally no resolution at the end of rebirth; the player knows basically nothing about the key story elements (holy, black materia, zach, multiverse garbage, aerith, seph, etc.), which seems impossible after 50-100 hours of play. Intentionally misdirecting and obfuscating your audience about core plot details for the sake of it doesn't make the story fresh and mysterious, it makes the story incoherent and unsatisfying.

Square seems to be using fan service, spectacle and nostalgia (its Zack! and Aerith is alive somewhere! and 10 stage Sephiroth fight, so cool!) to cynically sell an incoherent story which keeps promising it will explain, deliver, resolve... eventually. I don't know why anyone would have faith they are going to deliver a meaningful, quality narrative with what they have provided so far.

This game, like its precursors, is a tremendous time investment... and the payoff narratively has not been worth it. If the low bar of seeing your favorite characters from the OG realized and well characterized, and seeing the iconic locations from your childhood memories on modern tech are enough for you to appreciate this game, then you will enjoy it. If you don't care about the story quality in a story-focused game with decent peripheral content, you'll enjoy this title.

For people hoping to experience the brilliance of a game from another generation for the first time, this game is confusing and shallow, with a weird focus on nostalgia and meta-references you won't understand or appreciate.

For people who already love FF7 and were excited to see the promised variation or twist on the story, you've instead received a bastardized version where its somehow too conservative, but the few changes they made are terribly conceived and poorly executed.

The formula- the combat, the graphics, the adherance to traditional JRPG tropes, is great. The banal and minor writing and world building is good. However, the most important narrative elements ruin what could have been.

The good news is square has already indulged in two unwanted bait-and-switches; 1) remake isn't actually a remake, but the start of a distinct and new story... and now 2) rebirth actually isn't a distinct and new story as expected, but just a worse and poorly presented version of the OG story with the same major story beats and outcomes.

Media doesn't get a pass because the potential exists in the future to re-contextualize poorly presented prior story telling. Rebirth has to be evaluated on its merits; its a good game with a pretty weak and frustrating story. The third game, with the total lack of meaningful plot commitment so far, could be anything... but it likely won't be the story anyone wanted.

Throughout my roughly 90 hour playthrough of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, I felt amazed by how fresh the game continued to feel no matter how many hours I poured into it. It never felt as if it overstayed its welcome-- even as I scoured each of the world's regions looking to complete any quest or small research task I could find. I was a bit let down to discover that the final set of research tasks is designed to be approached with a max level party. This was something I still was 20 levels short of when I finished the game, even having done nearly every side quest and optional combat I could as I played. I guess I'll have to save that final stretch for whenever I decide to come back to this game.

---The Good Stuff---

This small disappointment aside, the gameplay presented within Rebirth feels like a massive accomplishment overall. The combat is stellar, with the addition of the synergy system really nailing the feeling of having your party of characters work together to take down every opponent to stand in their way in a way few games can manage to. The game doesn't do much new with its semi-open world approach, but exploring each of the regions almost always felt like so much fun I couldn't help but keep going until there was nothing left but to move on to the next one.

Side quests for the most part feel like a triumph, as many of them expand on the game's main cast in satisfying ways, giving them more opportunities to let each of their personalities shine. There is maybe a bit too much of Yuffie though, if you can believe it. It feels like the game really pushed her into the forefront of the vast majority of side quests following her induction into the party in an attempt to maybe make up for the chunk of the game where she isn't present. However Cait Sith isn't afforded the same treatment so it feels more fanservicey than it should be. I often found myself rolling my eyes when she would show up in the cutscenes for the side quests because I wanted to spend more time with the rest of the cast but instead I got more of her.

---The Meh Stuff---

Rebirth also goes totally ham with the minigames which made the original Final Fantasy VII so goofy, and many of these minigames are packed into side quests, for better or worse. These minigames are a bit of a mixed bag, with some being great fun that could honestly be their own standalone games (Queen's Blood!!!) and some being absolute bottom-of-the-barrel shit (Crunch-Off is pure AWFUL and I hope to whatever god may exist that it doesn't return in the final entry of the trilogy). What's unfortunate is you often need to put up with these minigames, whether you like them or not, in order to experience the worldbuilding offered by the side quests. I had done every side quest up till near the end of the game where the game demanded I play and win 8 consecutive rounds of the Chocobo Race minigame to even be allowed to play the hard version of that same minigame which was required for a quest. Ugh.

Rebirth looks and sounds great like 90% of the time. There's so much vibrancy in the environments and the lighting is almost always turns these environments into pure eye candy. The character models continue to impress with their level of detail and animation. The music is really really good and well integrated into the cutscenes and general gameplay. It left me humming the songs to myself even when I wasn't playing the game. The remaining 10% is made up of just how dead certain characters will look outside of the major cutscenes. FFVII Remake had a similar issue where many characters just won't emote at all with their eyes. Cloud and Tifa are the biggest victims here, with Tifa especially coming off as though the animators were afraid to give her expressions outside of her usual "slightly happy but also empty inside" look. There are story reasons for both of these characters to be kind of vacant-looking, but it was too often that this got in the way of the tone a scene seemed like it was trying to get across. It's a weird issue but one I couldn't help but notice all the time ever since I picked up on it in Remake.

---The Messy Stuff---

My main criticisms mostly fall where everyone else's seem to as well-- with the plot. For the most part, this game is a fairly faithful retelling of the remaining chunk of disc 1 in the original game following the gang leaving Midgar. This is kind of odd, considering Remake seemed to promise more significant deviations from the original story with the way it presented its theme of "Averting Destiny" in its conclusion. But I'm mostly ok with this, as I very much enjoy the original game and the way most of it is adapted here.

That said...

The changes Rebirth makes to the story largely range from pointless to borderline nonsensical. The me from back when I finished Remake believed that the changes that confused me in that game would be explained in the later entries but Rebirth has instead managed to tack on a bunch of its own odd unresolved plot threads while addressing basically none of the ones from the previous game in a satisfactory manner. I don't think this is the place to dive into these in great detail, so I've thrown together a bulleted list of stuff that kinda irked me. This does include some unresolved stuff from the previous game, but I tried to keep it minimal.

MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW

• The game opens with more of the multi-timeline/alternate dimension stuff that the last game ended on and somehow manages to not explain or address it in any real capacity during its runtime, leaving me more confused than when I began.
• What is arguably one of the most important scenes of the game is just plain confusing as hell because of the alternate world stuff. I'm glad the event itself and its ramifications are mostly intact but I'm not sure I understand how or why, with how it was presented.
• Tifa's experience with the Weapons in the reactor is mostly ignored after it happens despite how deeply important it seems to the plot initially. She attempts (poorly) to explain to some random folks about what she saw, but gives up very quickly and never mentions it again. Not even to her closest comrades. Why?? It felt like a lame way of getting the memory exploration bit from the first game recreated with none of the good reason for it occurring and no real payoff afterwards.
• Zach feels shoehorned into the game mainly for fanservice reasons while serving basically no purpose in the plot. I assume it won't be the last we see of him, but this was pretty disappointing. He's even on the damn cover of the game ffs.
• Biggs was similarly present only for fanservice it seems. He shows up, talks some with Zach, then just kinda dies. It makes the change of having him alive in the alternate world seem limp.
• Sephiroth literally assumes his "final" god-like form from the original game in the last fight in this one. How did this happen? When did he obtain this power? Off-screen, I guess, like with all his other insane abilities he seems to have. Yes, it's very cool, but it doesn't make sense and leaves me even more worried for the final confrontation in the third entry. They've already done way too much with him in these remake games, to the point where he feels more annoying than threatening when he appears. We've beaten him multiple times already and we're only halfway into the story. At best I can assume none of these fights have been real, as Sephiroth suggests himself.
• I don't understand why Cloud and co. allow Cait to travel with them when they seem fully aware of and outright acknowledge that he was built by Shinra and is likely a spy. In the original game his betrayal felt more significant because it came out of nowhere. In this game Cait simply doesn't have enough to offer the gang for them to realistically allow Shinra to spy on them freely.
• The added segment with the Gi is neat for worldbuilding but has no payoff in this game so ends up just killing the momentum of the portion it occupies.
• They really did Dyne a great disservice with the changes to his story and character here. He probably gets it worse than almost anyone else and it's a shame.
• I was unsurprised but still let down by the lack of a payoff for the odd ghost children bit in the Train Graveyard in Remake. It feels like the opportunity for this scene to mean anything has gone away with Aerith.

This list of course seems like a lot when written out but in the end I feel that what the game offers in terms of fantastic combat, a colorful world to explore, and fun characters to explore it with greatly outweighs my grievances with the messy plot details. I had a great time with this game and it's an easy recommendation to anyone who's interested.

Closing the book on this chapter of the FFVII remake saga, I feel quite satisfied and delighted with what Squeenix has done with the middle of the game. I know some are disappointed with the ending but I found it to be thoroughly appropriate, both given the thoughtful character development of Rebirth and the overall project to self-reflexively examine both the cultural position of FFVII and the overarching concept of capital R Remakes.

I think my major criticism is not the side quest and minigame abundance, of which there were many, it’s the degree to which minigames are woven into fairly necessary story sequences. I’d like more options to avoid minigames without missing out on additional story elements. It reminds me of Yakuza, and while I think Squeenix did a great job, I don’t think they were always as successful as games such as Like a Dragon. I do applaud the attempt at thoughtful variety and wackiness, however.

I’m putting it down now but I might return later to revisit the chapters on hard. I do wish there was a properly separate new game+ instead of chapter hopping, but it is what it is.

Now I wonder, what will our standalone DLC take shape as. Given we had Yuffie in INTERmission, maybe we’ll see Vincent in his own backstory episode.

As a massive fan of JRPGs and Final Fantasy in particular, I don't think I could have expected anything better. It's one of the biggest, most bombastic experiences I've ever had, though it's not without its flaws. I'll try to run down everything that comes to mind, with the negatives first.

The Bad

• There are certain moments that are really frustrating. There's a certain quest involving wrangling a Chocobo and inflating cactus was really annoying, and there's a solo section with Cait Sith throwing boxes that nearly drove me to madness.

• Aerith is a splend character that is beautifully drawn and voice acted. Fighting with her solo was not one of the game's strong suits.

• The pacing of the game, though that's mostly my fault. You could make the argument that the plot doesn't really show its teeth until near the end of the game. Some animations and sections are pretty slow.

• Chadley and Mai are sort of fun characters, but they NEVER shut up. Mai in particular is spouting off facts about monsters I'm fighting while I'm fighting and I never paid any attention to that. How could I? Apparently you can turn this dialogue off, so props to Square for that.

• The visual design of the Moogles. Nightmare fuel, terrible.

The Good

• Nearly everything else.

• Combat is terrific, probably my favorite action RPG system out there. Mixing and matching materia is insanely addictive. It would be nice to have customizable loadouts, but maybe in the third game. Blocking, dodging, attacking and going for synergy combo attacks was thrilling from beginning to end. I LOVE this combat system.

• The cast. Easily one of the best in gaming. They're visually diverse and you really feel like they care about each other and have realistic banter and conversations. I feel like I've known these characters all of my life, the voice acting is just incredible. As mildly annoying as Yuffie can be in cut-scenes, she was one of the most fun to fight with so I often had her in my party.

• The graphics. Stunning, though I'm sure playing on Performance Mode (I still wish that wasn't a thing) made some polygons or textures not look as good or whatever, but I'm not a graphics hound. To me, this is a stunning and beautiful world. Character and enemy design in particular were great.

• The music. What a stunning rendition of some of the best melodies in video game history. Nothing as good here as Collapsed Expressway, but the Corel Hike tune is awesome.

• Cid and Vincent. You don't get to play as them, but they're here and as badass as I remember them in the original.

• There's a great mix of humor and somber moments. I laughed quite a few times, and some emotional scenes hit really hard.

• Nostalgia. I'm a massive sucker for it and seeing Cosmo Canyon and other infamous locations took my breath away.

• Mini games - love Fort Condor, love Queensblood. I played SO much of it, I surprised myself.

• The Summons look amazing, loved fighting them, loved seeing them in person. Bahamut Arisen saved my ass more than a few times.

• Side quests in general. The rewards were worthy, they sometimes built the lore of the world, sometimes they provided amazing character backstories. Bravo!

• Cid humming the Final Fantasy tune.

• The end credits. Fantastic montage of the entire journey. More games should do this.

The Not Sure

• The ending is certainly divisive, but I think I really liked it. Will have to sit on it.

• Traversal. The map was often really good and clear, but sometimes trying to find a specific item on the map was cumbersome.

• The open world aspect could be seen as a Ubisoft-find-icons-on-map style gameplay, but honestly it didn't bother me at all. You can fast travel with ease almost all the time, so it never bothered me. Sometimes clambering up or down cliffs was tricky, but it never bothered me. Could be improved, I suppose.

• The Zach stuff. I couldn't ever be sure what was 100% going on, but I'm keen to learn more.

Overall it's fantastic, as long as you're ready to concede a few points. This is NOT a straight remake from the original and I'm ok with that. True to most JRPGs, I think they bit off more than they could chew and for all the realistic dialogue you hear, Sephiroth constantly spewing philoso-talk and exposition got a bit old. I wanted to tear my hair out more than a few times, but in my 89.5 hours on Normal Mode I knew I was playing something really special. Loved this game.

On an individual chapter-by-chapter level, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is an incredible game. On an individual cutscene level, it's the greatest game of all time. When taken all together, it doesn't make sense why it exists in the form it currently exists in.

There are so many things it attempts to do, but really the only thing it feels successful at is an experience about hanging out with a bunch of guys, adding more guys in, and continuing on a journey. Questions are raised over and over again, but never paid off throughout the game. Some elements from later sections of FF7 are taken and inserted into here in earlier positions, and while they're often cool and interesting, these exist as moments and aren't ever closed off. It's really a game about continuing and adding, and that's a harder thing to accept considering it will be 5 years before the resolution to this comes around.

Without getting into specific story events of what the ending entails, it felt like one of the biggest fumbles I have ever seen in my life. Dropped the ball, tripped over it and shit its pants. Not because it is rushed, in fact, the opposite. It's about 8 hours long of what feels like 90% complete bullshit, 5% raising more questions instead of answering any and 5% leaving characters and the next chapter of the story in strange and unsatisfying places.

Compared to the ending of FF7 Remake specifically, this felt significantly more like throwing around action figures in a Final Fantasy 7 Compilation way and not dealing with any of the emotional throughlines set up throughout the game. It is still sick as fuck visually and gameplay wise, but when the credits were rolling, I felt really deflated about where this left off.

I ended this close to 100% completion, excluding a bug which broke a side-quest and made it impossible to finish in the most-recent patch. Most of that side content felt like just that, content. The side-quests themselves feel like a 50/50 shot every time whether you get a fun experience or character development, or if it's just another really bad mini-game again. Some of them I enjoy, but when you add in Hard Modes for nearly every mini-game it just feels like the Tower of Filler gets stacked up so high it implodes and all becomes slush and rubble. It's often so hard to see what is worth doing and isn't worth doing, and the game will punish you at the end of the game for skipping side-content by having the paths loop over each-other and block you unless you completed everything else. It often feels like you're either going to mainline, or you're going to do all of it. And you really, really shouldn't do all of it.

The combat is pretty similar to FF7R1 with some key changes, blocking and parrying is a way bigger focus than just dodging, character kits have been expanded across the board, and most enemies are no longer about just elemental weakness and instead need to be scanned to reveal strategies to put them in vulnerable states. This is all pretty good on paper, and the large fights against bosses or unique enemies in this tend to be the most interesting, but the game also loves to throw really frustrating design elements into the battles that just don't make much sense. This can be 1-character only combat arenas, battles against enemies that zip around too fast to hit reliably and stun-lock you, really annoying added conditions to the combat that ask for more precision than the game's systems offer, and strange difficulty spikes. By the end of the game there were individual encounters where I liked the combat more than in the first game, but there were frequently arenas or battles where I liked it less as well. With the removal of weapon upgrades and a lot of choice in how you should build your character, it felt too Action-heavy rather than RPG-heavy for the 93 hour experience it took me to finish everything.

At the bottom of all of these incredibly messy and complicated feelings I have about the game the most important thing is I just loved every time I was watching it. I love these characters so much; I love this party. I love the changes they have made to everyone. Cait Sith is perfect. Cid is no longer a misogynist. Aerith has very deliberately been turned into the most likeable video game character of all time. There's no interactions between these characters I don't like. There's very little dialogue that doesn't work for me. It blends and meshes well nearly the whole way through (look, this ending is going to be an exception to a lot of this). Also, they just look amazing. The characters look amazing. In motion, in battle and in cutscenes their animations are so subtle and crafted it lets them deliver such strong emotional beats. No seriously, it cannot be over-stated enough. These might be the best-looking and directed cutscenes put in a game. They are all stunning and amazing and close to perfect.

The soundtrack is also ridiculous with some of the Most music I have ever heard in a game. It feels like there are unique tracks for so many tiny encounters, missions or situations, and they all are extremely good. If even I can notice your soundtrack and enjoy it, you're doing something right.

The rest of the game definitely does not look amazing. The combat doesn't feel nearly as good on Quality compared to Performance, and not only does Performance look like a blurry mess, but it also has a lot of slow-down and frame-drops in certain areas. Even besides the resolution and framerate though, most of the open worlds are lifeless with that unreal engine sheen over it all, making it look like a background set from the Volume. The lighting is really bad too, often making everything seem flat and hard to distinguish, with interiors and caves being the worst affected. The tradeoff for the cutscenes looking so good is that the rest of the game really does not impress.

Nothing really happens in this game, but if you're going to spend a lot of time doing nothing with anyone, I'm really glad these are the characters I'm doing it with. I'm still there Day One for Final Fantasy 7 Reunion, but I'll be a little bit less excited for it than I was this one.

Cleared it after a little over 70 hours. Unfortunately, I have to walk away from this one thinking it was merely okay. I just didn't have all that much fun at any point in my entire playthrough. I didn't care much for any of the myriad side-activities (excepting Queen's Blood) or open world shenanigans, I hated what they did with the story, and this time around for whatever reason I found myself getting super annoyed with the combat and the absurdly drawn out boss encounters. The art style and music are perfect though, I can't emphasize enough how much those teams nailed it. And the overall tone of the game really does tap into that golden era Square magic that has been missing for 20 or so years at this point.

But... but... I can't lie. I had very little fun playing this game. I ignored half of the game's systems and beat the final boss with relative ease. Its prestige JRPG ambitions did not impress me all that much, and in many ways as a work of interactive design it is a huge step backward from the original. FF7's scenario has been crushed into a thin paste of open-world connect-the-dots-between-cutscenes chores. Take for example Chocobo catching. In the original game this system was woven organically into its world map exploration and battle system. Here, you complete an absolutely garbage stealth mini-game which simply unlocks a new Chocobo for you to use. The initial reason you do this in the original game is to move fast enough on the world map to stop the Midgar Zolom from catching up to and destroying your party, but you COULD grind your way through if you really wanted to and ignore the Chocobos. This design approach where it encourages one way of overcoming obstacles but presents options is completely absent in Rebirth. Here, you MUST complete the crappy stealth mini-game and then --- guess what? -- the Midgar Zolom is a mandatory boss you have to fight anyway! Creative scenario design has been reduced to a series of simplistic hoops the player must jump through. And this happens over and over and over again through the portion of the game Rebirth covers.

I could go on, but I won't. There's no magic here for me. I forced myself to finish it, and I am not looking forward to part 3. But I am glad a lot of people are having such good experiences with this one, because I love FF7 very, very much and it might encourage Square to keep attempting to tap into that old-school tone that made their 90s output so charming. Here's hoping.

5/5

Played on PS5.

This is a complicated one. I posted an update on here praising this game a few weeks after it came out - and I stand by that update, this game is unbelievably good.

The characters are all excellent and likeable. Fantastic representations that lift the very same characters of the OG into the modern age. I especially loved Barett and Red. The locations of the original are interpreted fantastically, a small location like the haunted hotel is a full-blown masterclass in environmental design. This is extrapolated to all locations in the very large open-world. The graphics and design of the open-world from a presentation stand-point are excellent. Performance of the game is a bit so-so, I played mostly on high-frame rate and it was noticably blurry on a 4K screen, but you get used to it. The combat is so much better in 60FPS, speaking of...

The combat is stellar. I had a few issues with the first (namely confusion around how to tackle certain moves from a defensive standpoint) which are solved here through better mobility and some synergy skills (e.g. counterfire). The number of bosses to fight in this game is mind-boggling, and almost all of them were fun to engage with.

So far, not complicated. But then we get onto some other aspects.

The story. The parts of the story that are interpretations of the original (with some additional flair) are excellent. The Gold Saucer sequence, Barrett's Dyne sequence, Cosmo Canyon story beats - are all stellar and I honestly can't suggest any improvements. As with the first game, the new parts are mostly crap. A particularly egregious example is the section after you fall from Corel. While I have to admit that I have some passing interest in the way they are reinterpreting the main beats of the story including the ending, I would have preferred something that stayed true to the original. It's a great story and deserves a true triple A interpretation like this. The idea that the original was only impactful due to the twists of the time including that moment is not something I endorse.

Now to the huge amount of content in this game. It's a blessing and a curse. Stuff like the combat simulators and summon fights, the protorelic quest chain and minigames, the unique monsters, the various materia and buildcrafting, Queen's Blood - they are all excellent. But there is so much more - the towers, the world intel, the summon levels, the minigames that suck, the side quests that mostly suck - it becomes an undeniable chore. That is obviously if you decide to do everything available to you. I did the first 6 regions this way, then mainlined the story, then went back and did everything else (including Gilgamesh) - minus a few side-quests and the extreme combat simulator challenges.

There was a very long period in the middle of this year where I just could not be bothered to play this game. It's the reason it took me nearly six months to finish the game. It single-handedly put me off playing games for about three months of the year. I genuinely think 50% of the extra content could have been cut and this game would be more refined. I understand other people enjoyed every droplet this game had to offer, but my preference would be for something more streamlined and less overwhelming. Just my thoughts.

Having said all of that, this is a remarkable game. I genuinely didn't think Square had it in them for this quality of a game. With the sheer quantity and quality of what is on offer here, there is no way I could give it less than a 5/5, even though I think it imperfect.