RPG Review: Final Fantasy VII ~Rebirth~

	Cloud is about to have the ultimate yaoi battle…inside his head.
	::extremely one-winged angel voice:: YAOI VIBES

⚠️ This Post Contains Spoilers for FF7 Rebirth ⚠️

Since I didn’t want to get spoiled I decided to preorder and play the game as soon as it came out. Turns out, nobody had spoiled me or warned me about the MASSIVE AMOUNT OF MINI GAMES I was about to encounter.

FFVII Rebirth is the most bloated game I’ve played in a long time, hell maybe ever. These FFVII remake games so far have taken segments that were roughly 5-10 hours long in the original game and blown those out into full length AAA games. FFVII Remake was about 30-40 hours for us to get pretty high completion on, but now Rebirth took us 75 hours AND we completely gave up on sidequests and exploring by chapter 9. For a while we were completing all of the Ubisoft open world checklist shit and all the sidequests, and then getting at least minimum necessary score to complete the minigames. But then Gongaga (THERE ARE SEVEN UBISOFT OPEN WORLD REGIONS!!!!!!!!!!) broke us with the combination of terrible exploration and terrible minigames. And even with going into story-only mode with 5 chapters to go it was still 75 hours long!!!!!!!!

System

FF7 Remake had a few mini games, and I expected there to be mini games at the Gold Saucer but I did not expect every encounter, dungeon and exploration to just throw mini games at you. There were so many mini games that they even created an original soundtrack for a lot of them!! The chocobo races for example had like 3 different songs, and each area’s chocobo had its own theme song!! If anything it felt like they put 90% of their effort into creating a mini game for every conceivable thing. And when something wasn’t a “mini game” it would still be something dumb like a quest in Gongaga where you had to heard chickens by trying to “lure” them with a stupid feeder. I attempted 1 chicken and quit the quest immediately because, like many mini games in this game, it was poorly designed and just didn’t work without making yourself go insane.

A good little bit of foreshadowing of our experience was in the very beginning tutorial area of the game. We tried to use an elevator but the game gave us an error that we needed to ventilate the area first. The initial thought was like “hmm maybe there’s a machine room somewhere that we came through earlier with some HVAC equipment or something?” since we were in the mindset of non-AAA games before realizing “wait remember, this is the tutorial in a AAA game for filthy casuals, you probably just click a button next to where we’re standing.” And sure enough, it was basically that. I say “basically” though because of course it was a dumb silly mechanic (in this case, plugging in and then using a vacuum.)

But it’s also kind of weird because along with saying “did anyone ever even play this crap before it shipped?” there’s also moments with those where they clearly did an extra dash of care and polish. Stuff like coming up with a little jingle for a random sidequest (BOW WOW WOW BOW WOW WOW) alongside then say, the joystick sensitivity being totally out of whack during it. Or like they’ll design a whole dungeon around climbing up rock faces (with yellow paint, ofc lol) but never stop to think “you know it’s incredibly annoying that it takes like 5 seconds for the game to acknowledge that you pressed up on the joystick in order to climb to the next handhold.” The controls in them frequently are incredibly janky to the point that it feels like “did anyone even playtest this”. My favorite example here is a rhythm game where you do situps by pressing the shoulder triggers in time, where nobody ever thought about how L2/R2 take more pressure to press than L1/R1 so because of this the rhythm is completely off.

The only mini games I could “tolerate” were easy things like finding the segways at the beach, escorting NPCs (especially baby nukos), the Snaps photo mode, the Loveless cinematic battle. I tolerated the Moogle game at first because it was really cute but as you got to further maps they added more barriers and a timer and it became actually rage inducing that I forced Kanade to complete the entire thing for me. The same thing happened with the piano game: Fun at first, then gets way too convoluted to play on a controller.

Out of the 20 or so “full” minigames (like where you play knockoff Gwent or knockoff Rocket League or knockoff Fall Guys or knockoff Punch Out), I’d say that it’s only Queen’s Blood was tolerable. Then the vast majority of them are aggravating mostly because they control very poorly. The piano for example would’ve been a lot more fun if it was more like a typical rhythm game using face/shoulder buttons rather than how you have to use the joysticks. Then finally there’s the utter dregs. The worst ones were Glide de Chocobo and Fort Condor. Glide de Chocobo controls horribly. We honestly could never even get a handle on how exactly you’re even expected to move and would constantly overshoot or undershoot everything without ever understanding why. Fort Condor was mainly frustrating because we played it before they added and easy mode, and in the base mode the game gives you an extremely tight time limit to beat each level. Where it gets incredibly frustrating is that because the time limit is so short we would constantly have situations where we’ve mopped up all the enemy units and are destroying their base unopposed, but simply can’t do enough DPS fast enough to beat the timer. This is exacerbated by again, more jank where things like placing a catapult a few pixels off means that it now can’t hit anything and you’ve wasted a special unit that you can’t replace and probably need to restart the whole level.

The other problem is that the more mini games and mini-game mechanics the game threw at me, the more I would constantly forget the story or what is actually going on. Every time we came to a new map, I was so busy trying to unlock the chocobo there, unlock all the towers, waymarks, battles, protorelics that by the time I was ready to move on to the next area, I had completely forgotten where we were plot wise. Everything then came to a crashing halt when we reached Gongaga, and the map there became a convoluted mushroom mess where you had to jump on mushrooms with a chocobo, but you had NO IDEA where they would take you. So you had to basically jump around different mushrooms and hope eventually one of them gets you over the massive walls that are in the area.

While there are a bunch of minigames that really do take a long time (there’s one Tifa sidequest where you need to win like a dozen chocobo races, each of which take 3-5 minutes each to complete, and that’s not taking into account loading screens and the like), the minigames even feel endless when they’re timed and you can clearly see that this only took like 90 seconds to complete. And that’s not even getting into how there’s also the “mini” minigames that are just a few seconds long because the game isn’t doing anything more than forcing you to press F to pay respects. It’s like the fact that the game made you do something so trivial makes it feel even more annoying that it really was in the grand scheme of things.

This brings me to the next point that irritated me about this game is the game actively discouraged exploration. Basically the game is open world, and you think oh gee let me explore and check out all the different areas. However you would get to an area and there would be a lock or something that prevented you from going further. The reason is you had to explore “in order” and certain areas of the map would not unlock unless you proceeded with the main story. By the time they unlocked, I had stopped caring anyway and ultimately I stopped caring to explore because who cares, not like I’ll be able to go anywhere anyway. Each map was also heavily based around the chocobo mechanic. For example the water fart chocobo map Nibelheim, was specifically made in away where you could not do any of the zone exploration without that chocobo because everything was on top of a cliff that the only way you could get on top of is with that chocobo mechanic. The same applied to the Gongaga mushrooms and the gliding in Cosmo Canyon etc. Basically the only map that encouraged exploring freely was probably the first map and it’s honestly sad that they basically forced you to play the game how they wanted you to play it. This constraint really killed the fun for me and paired with then being forced to play annoying AF mini games to complete areas, after Corel Tower I just gave up completely. The only map I completed after that one was Nibelheim because since Kanade got the chocobo for me (which was annoying as shit and I would never have gotten it myself) completing the area was super easy.

The exploration combined being forced rather than organic with getting progressively more unintuitive as the game goes on. The forced part is that you might see something interesting in the distance like a lighthouse, but when you try to go to it there could be locked gates blocking it off until you either did sufficient Ubisoft tower unlocks in order for the game to allow you to interact with it or advanced the MSQ (or in the worst examples, the game simply turns you around and says “you cannot proceed”). The part that made us swear off exploring was the jungle area of Gongaga where the map is basically useless because it doesn’t give you any kind of idea how to traverse the area because of cliffs, tunnels, ladders, trampoline mushrooms, etc. that you need to use. Like for instance it would look like “oh follow this trail towards this next objective” but nope, turns out that the objective is in an underground cave that you get to in a completely different way. In comparison the subsequent zone of Cosmo Canyon also required you to figure out how to get to the different locations, but you could at least see landmarks like ramps and landing pads and have a pretty good guess of how to traverse the area, unlike the mushrooms which you had no idea if they were catapulting you upward or downward.

This is also where THE YELLOW PAINT DISCOURSE came in. Long story short, 1337 g4m3rz get mad at how games frequently use yellow paint to signal to players what kind of walls are climbable and which ones are not. They mostly get mad at this over a combination of “muh immersion” (because of how out of place it can look when a remote mountain has yellow paint slathered on it) and rage at bads/casuals “needing” it to know what to do rather than figuring it out. FFVII Rebirth uses yellow paint to signal walls you can climb, but the real core issue here is that they “need” to use this because the level design never feels organic or cohesive. They need to use yellow paint to show which walls you can climb up because they’ve taught the player that Cloud can’t even step over a waist-high fence, so why would you ever think that he can sometimes randomly climb up a sheer cliff face? And again, it all comes back to how the “exploring” in this game is really just following quest markers when and where the game tells you to rather than well, actually exploring. It’s also frustrating because it completely misses one of the other fun elements of open world exploration which is coming back to a place once you get some new skills or tools. There’s a part where you get some grappling hooks. As expected the only times you get to use these are in a few proscribed areas immediately after receiving them, and can never use them again. All those times when you see a tower but the ladder is broken? Nope, can use the grappling hook to climb up it, gotta do This Region’s Mechanic instead! Nothing about it makes you feel accomplished or clever, just bored or frustrated.

I think the only truly fun map/area for me was Costa Del Sol and while the Johnny quest was pretty annoying with the Tonberry King, everything else was pretty fun especially riding the segway and running over planters. That said, Costa was not without its share of annoyance, such as dog soccer mini game which once again, I refused to do. Honestly everyone should just give a standing ovation to Kanade for playing through like 80% of the mini games/mini game mechanics in this game because I legit would have just quit lmao. 😂 Those mini games were just unbearable and many of them were NOT optional. Like if you didn’t get enough points at Costa for example, you would not have enough currency to buy a swimsuit for Aerith and Tifa and therefore miss out on bond levels for the beach scene there.

Anyway I’ve gone off on a huge tangent but the Tl;DR is I HATE THE MINI GAMES AND THERE ARE WAY TOO MANY OF THEM AND MANY OF THEM ARE NOT OPTIONAL AND YOU WILL MISS OUT ON IMPORTANT SCENES/STORY IF YOU DO NOT DO THEM. As far as the story goes, because everything was buried by mini games, all I remember is a constant mental yaoi battle between Cloud and Sephiroth and then me furiously making sure I get every single Tifa quest (one of which was HIDDEN behind a Yuffie quest [and which wouldn’t even really have been an issue if we weren’t so checked out mentally over the endless minigames and filler]) in order to get her kiss scene at the Gold Saucer.

The minigames being so prevalent and so bad made us also kind of forget about everything else that you’d think of when you think about the game’s system. Combat is serviceable. They’ve added a few new wrinkles to the FFVII Remake basis but otherwise mostly the same. I do have a complaint that it was very confusing at first that they added something called “Synergy Skills” and something called “Synergy Abilities” that sound almost identical but are totally different and don’t interact with each other at all. My main complaint with the combat is that I get how they’re trying to kinda hybridize ATB combat with action combat but it creates a really weird ebb and flow where it’s “fast” when you’re spamming auto-attacks and jumping between characters, but then once you build up your stacks of ATB/synergy/LB then combat “stops” as you then pause the game and go through each of those characters to spend all those stacks.

Character builds are nothing out of the ordinary. I think with a little more polish and QOL I would have had no issues with it, but the lack of any kind of presets for the materia or character skills makes it an annoying chore every time the game mixes up your party and you need to redo everything again. We almost got locked out during the final boss battle because of a part where you’re required to do elemental damage and the characters we were given only had access to fire and lightning at that moment so they couldn’t do anything during the phases when you needed to do ice or wind damage, for example. We had plenty of elemental materia, just not on that exact team at that exact time.

Story

And now for ending spoilers/thoughts. The ending was vague. Like ok we know Aerith dies but similar to what happened with Nier, Square Enix is all about the different timelines thing now so FF7 Rebirth/Remake is now its own timeline where you see different “possibilities” created and erased like Zack and Aerith being alive but then dead at the same time in the “canon” time line. It’s like Schrodinger’s Final Fantasy here! Honestly I don’t care if Aerith and Zack are both dead as long as they are dead together in the life stream. I wish they didn’t have to kill Aerith but I’m secretly hoping that the timelines will eventually converge and maybe Aerith and Zack will be alive by the conclusion of the series because after all making it be the same as the original at this point feels stupid since why even add the timeline/feeler plot in the first place if you aren’t gonna do something with it. One other memorable part of the story I wanted to touch upon was the fight with Dyne and Barrett and the reveal about Marlene’s parents and her relationship with Barrett. I always wondered what the deal was with them and it was nice to at least see some actual closure for something in this game.

As for the story, there’s things I like but one giant caveat that I dislike. The giant dislike is that I can’t stand multiverse setups. Partly because everything these days is a multiverse, and partly because the reason that everything is a multiverse is mainly so companies do whatever they want with the story, characters, setting, etc. without any kind of cohesive vision. I am generally fine with how the expanded the story. I like using a term like “fleshed out” or “expanded” here rather than where I’d complain using a term like “bloating” about things like the minigames. Just like with FFVII Remake, the larger focus allows the game to have way more emphasis on the different character interactions or to show the player rather than hoping that they can get sufficiently invested purely through their own imaginations. And again like with Remake, the main padding problems in terms of the story were mainly dungeons that overstayed their welcome. In that case it was the multiple sewer levels, here it was in places like the Gongaga reactor which probably would’ve been fine once but made me roll my eyes when they made me do it a second time with a different party. It also didn’t help that again, there’s so much filler added in that sometimes we’d go a couple days before continuing the MSQ and straight up forgetting why we were even here in the first place.

Characters

Not much to say about characters but obviously Yuffie and Cait Sith were the new commers. Both of them were pretty annoying to me but Yuffie eventually at least got slightly more tolerable, meanwhile I could never really think Cait Sith as cute. He sounded way too much like an old man trying to sound cute in some cat’s body and it was really weird. Tifa and Aerith stayed about the same though I have to give major props to Tifa for putting up with so much bullshit from Cloud this game. Every time he went into his yaoi trance with Sephirot, she had to literally snap him out of it. ( ‘д‘⊂彡☆))Д´) ﾊﾟｰﾝ By the end of the game I think she was tired of his bs as much as I was and it ended on a really negative note. Like it feels like my Cloti ship was sailing but then it hit a rock and just kinda sat there. It didn’t sink, but it wasn’t going anywhere either and the game was last minute trying to be like “look here’s some Clerith as a parting gift guys!!” Since I’m team Zerith, the entire thing just felt so forced and unnatural to me I honestly am not sure what they were trying to do with having her suddenly turn into Casper the Friendly Ghost. One ??? I had was about Fujiwara Keiji and Reno. As you know, Fujiwara Keiji passed away right before Remake came out so they replaced Reno with a random girl in this game during the Turks scenes. However at the end, Reno came back and had some voice dialogue and I’m confused as to how? It didn’t sound like it was pre-recorded from another game? Did they use AI to generate his voice??? I heard they were going to change his voice actor in the next game so I’m curious how that will pan out….

So overall I have to say I’m generally disappointed. The story just being almost forgettable except a few key moments buried by an overwhelming amount of mini games was such a let down. I can only hope they don’t pull this BS again in the next game but instead of waiting to find out in 4-5 years, Kanade and I bought FF7 OG on Steam and we’ll be playing that next to see the remainder of the story!

Currently is the second highest rated Final Fantasy game. It has only positive reviews. Not even a single mixed review! The closest thing to a debate over how good this game is is whether it’s a 10/10 GOTY or just a 10/10. It makes me wonder like, is this really what people want these days? Is it that people actively love when a game has a million different Things To Do in it, regardless of how well executed those Things are, what purpose those Things serve with regards to the experience that the game is trying to convey, how satisfying those Things are to do, and so on? Meanwhile it’s quite easy to find fans posting on places like Reddit about how annoyed they are with this aspect of the game, how bloated it is, how none of the pieces fit together in a satisfying way, how the game’s priorities are completely misplaced. I keep a running ranking of all the Final Fantasy games we’ve played and it’s in the bottom half to me!

And now I leave you with our Cloud x Tifa highlights from this game during our stream: