izigame.me

If I could describe Final Fantasy VII Rebirth in one word, it would be: Frustrating.
This is a game I was patiently and excitedly anticipating since its PS5 release last year, and when I heard that it was gushingly adored, to the point that I constantly stumbled on fan posts raving about how wonderful the characters have been realized, both in terms of banter-chemistry and personality, I decided that I was going to do my best to avoid anything that would spoil the inevitable steam release for me. I had plenty of other games to enjoy and catch up on, so this was an easy wait, and even easier to avoid spoilers for. Part of the reason I didn’t want spoilers, was because I was under the blind impression that Remake’s ending opened the flood gate for the possibility of the characters being free to go on a new, unexpected journey.
The initial impressions were that my expectations were met. It starts with mystery involving Zack, we get the famous flashback, enjoy a newly-realized Kalm, and then we enter the beautiful, densely-detailed world map of the grasslands for the first time. And I have to give credit where credit is due: I was genuinely enjoying that first hour of roaming around the grasslands. Fun true story: I actually explored half the map before Chadley gave me the bad news about the rest of the game, and that initial feeling of seeing so much detail go into the world was captivating.
Then Chadley gave me the bad news.
One: He and Mai exist in this game.
Two: He and she have more voiced lines than the entire cast combined (Thankfully they can be muted if you are using a Dual Sense controller).
Three: The rest of the game is now going to be Ubislop, and if you’re playing on Dynamic difficulty like I foolishly was, you’re going to feel the temptation to do them all in order to acquire the edge you need.
What’s Ubislop? It’s the spam of Ubisoft-like POIs (Points of Interest) all over the region maps, and there are dozens of these, per region. Grasslands, I initially endured because I was just starved to see the little nuggets of interactions they offered between our main cast. But after reaching Junon, and then Corel, especially, I was feeling like Sisyphus every time a new region filled with icons. If I’m going to give advice for future people reading this who are considering the game but refuse to put up with this nonsense, I’ll give a safety-tip: Play on easy mode, and skip all Ubislop, and then you’ll never have to endure the misery of the ubislop, and the game might still challenge you without all the excess upgrades and equipment. I’m sure the try-hards will state that you can still skip all side-quest content on Dynamic, but I don’t care. I can’t go back in time and reverse my experience to appease them.
If the Ubislop wasn’t bad enough to ruin my playthrough, then the strained, quadoupling-length of every main-story section became a mind-numbing test of my evaporating patience. If memory serves me correct, I had around 30 hours into Rebirth by the time I reached Costa Del Sol. That is literally how long it took for me to complete all of the original Final Fantasy VII w/ the Echo-S mod (Great mod, by the way, you should play it) from beginning to end. Consider this: The journey from Flashback to Costa Del Sol takes around one hour in the original game; two if it’s your first time. Everything in Rebirth is stretched. Scenes from the original that would take 5 minutes end up taking anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours (especially if it involves a dungeon).
But surely the gameplay can at least do something to distract from the tedium? Let’s talk general combat. It’s fine. Fun, even, for the first twenty hours, when you are new and slowly taking in all the intricacies of its added depth from Remake. But the moment all the unfamiliarity becomes familiar, it stops being a challenge, and it becomes what it is: A single-player MMO (which is an oxymoron in itself since all modern MMOs are practically single-player these days), complete with mind-numbing combat-rotations. Once you build up party-combos, fights end up becoming so trivial and repetitive that you’ll find excuses to try and avoid them wherever you can. I’ll give a dog-bone: It’s far less boring than 16, since, you can always shake up your party members whenever you need a break from one trio, but it ultimately became tiresome, especially when factoring that your goal is always the same: Pressure, then stagger, then win. I’d say that’s all there is to talk about gameplay, but then…
Enter: The Mini-games. So a friend told me that the mini-games would drive me nuts, to which I foolishly said “Well, I’m used to mini-games from the Yakuza games, and they tend to be a fun way to break up things, so I’ll welcome them.” To put it simply: The mini-games never go away. Rebirth tricks you into thinking that they’ll only come up every now and then, but I believe there are more than 30 of them, and with few exceptions, I found most of them to be flat-out terrible and time-wasting. They’re especially infuriating in that they tend to grant boons that you’ll trick yourself into believing you need by getting the max score, and while a lot of these can be easily done in one or two tries, some can drag if they’re not your cup of tea.
I think the worst part about Rebirth is that: The gushing adoration I mentioned at the beginning of my review wasn’t the result of fans misplacing their feelings. The characters are genuinely great, and since I’m a fan of the original, I really did feel that a lot of them were done magnificently. These characters feel like best friends by the end of the journey, which is the ultimate goal of any good JRPG. I just wish the game didn’t side-step off a cliff when it came to everything else I complained about. It reminds me of Gacha games, without the monetization, where that genre does everything it can to get you to grind for those waifus you want. I’d argue it’s even worse for me, because part of the reason I never cared about Gacha games is that I find most of those games have very shallow characters, so I don’t see the point of putting in the time to earn them. But in Rebirth’s case, these are characters I know and love, and the more I want to see of them, the more the game wants me to endure its padding.
Last detail: I mentioned early on that I was under the impression that Remake’s ending would shift the narrative of Rebirth in new directions. This is mostly a lie. Now before you state that Rebirth is different from the original, let me stop and just say: It isn’t, because the overall structure of the plot is still the same. I was hoping that the plot would completely shift into a new story, but that would have required a lot more effort than modern Square Enix were open to undertaking.
If you’re looking for a game that lasts for 100+ hours and you don’t care about the quality zig-zagging with jarring whiplash, you may enjoy this game more than me. I’m not going to tell anyone who enjoys Rebirth that they’re insane for enduring the madness. Quite frankly: I’m envious that they have the patience and tolerance to enjoy all that. What I will say is that JRPGs, to me, are at their best when they laser-focus on characters, world-building, and plot. I want to enjoy those elements of Rebirth, but the game couldn’t just let me enjoy that in peace without bombarding me. So I can’t, in good faith, recommend it unless you can tolerate the glut.
What grinds my gears is that when its high moments inevitably peak, they are some of the most emotionally resonating moments I’ve had in this franchise since Final Fantasy 9 more than 20 years ago. There are phenomenally acted performances, but the entire experience itself feels like you are desperately panning for those gold nuggets amongst so much dense fields of sand. I want to recommend this game for those moments, alone, but I can’t do it.