Review: Embrace A Full, New World In FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH

Remakes, revivals, revisitations, re-dos, rehashes, rebirths and every version of re-somthing flood our market and content we consume. Why think of something new when nostalgia normally earns as much money (or more) and is usually easier to create because people don’t have to spend as much time world building and creating characters/stories? If Square Enix just took the old Final Fantasy VII, gave it these amazing graphics and streamlined the game a bit, it would be a massive hit. However, they changed up the gameplay while keeping the strategy, altered the story while still being faithful to the characters and material, and it ended up being one of the best things they made in a long, long time. I reviewed Remake four years ago and I’m happy to say that Rebirth has gloriously continued the journey into the unknown with Cloud and his team in all their high definition beauty.

Let’s talk about the story, being probably the most important part of this and the three games as a whole. This will be totally spoiler free, but I will say that several times I had my jaw dropped or I was yelling at the screen, for good and bad events in the story. The pacing and introductions to the other characters are handled wonderfully and I had a hard time putting the game down after each day I picked it back up. I always wanted to know what was going to happen next. The voice work is great in the main cast and villain, the only let downs were in the occasional NPC. The cutscenes were gripping and kept me on the edge of my seat, even in the quiet and emotional moments. I wish I could go into more depth about the story and why it feels so exhilarating, but just trust me that you’ll want to avoid spoilers as much as possible and be ready for a very open and new experience.

The open experience in the story bleeds into the incredibly massive open world. My goodness there is a lot to do. There are a lot of entertaining side quests and impactful rewards aside from that are separate from the storyline. I felt like at every moment of me following the campaign, I was showered with opportunities to explore and grow my team and their builds. There is a great balance and enough of a tease to do other things in the world that players that want to take their time in the game will love the exploration while others that want to just play the story won’t be bombarded with random other things. I usually hate open world games, but Final Fantasy VII Rebirth not only got me excited to explore, but has got me the motivation to try other open world games. 

Now, the game isn’t totally open all the time. I would say about 20-40% of the time you are locked into areas because of the story or mission happening at the moment, which makes sense…but also felt a bit too limiting. If I want to race chocobos, I want to race them whenever I want! This brings me to another small gripe, controlling other characters. Most of the time, the player will control Cloud as they explore the world, but players eventually get to roam around for a mission or two as other characters, using their abilities in the open world. This is awesome and a dream come true for some fans, but this time controlling other characters is locked to those missions. I wish, wish, WISH that we could switch between them all the time. This could’ve allowed the developers to put various hidden treasures and enemies behind different terrain and traversal that is used by other characters, like unlocking new abilities in a metroidvania that encourage exploration in past areas. But alas, I can’t complain too much, it is still fun to play with what we have in the game. Along with being locked into certain characters for certain times, players are also forced to complete a wide variety of mini-games and middling tasks time which felt more like a hang up on my progress than another new fun thing to do, but this only happened a handful of times. It makes sense to do this a couple of times to show players all of the offerings of the game, but these stretches of games and forced missions became a bit tedious at times. Not enough to be annoying, but enough to slow down the pacing of the game overall.

Let’s circle back to the minigames themselves though. A lot of them can be pretty fun, and there are almost enough of them to fill a Mario Party game (at least it seems like it). However, I wish that there were only a few of them that were a bit more fleshed out instead of having so many that you kind of forget them as soon as you finish them. It isn’t a major complaint, but some of them are really terribly forgettable or even somewhat annoying to play. But things like the in-game card game, the fighting game, and chocobo racing are nearly good enough to be their own stand alone games. I had to tell myself several times to skip my card battles and stop building my deck or doing races to continue the story to finish this review.

The next big thing to talk about is combat. As we’ve seen with trailers, the game has the same core combat as Remake, but with a number of additions. Synergy attacks, new materia, and a light crafting system all allow players to approach fights in different ways, build unique team compositions, and focus on certain strengths of each character. All of these things plus the excellent combat that it started with led me to never get tired of combat. And it also never became overwhelming or easy because of all these options, which I’ve seen before in other games that stuff too many special moves and things into combat. All in all, between twenty minute boss battles that kept me at critical health almost the whole time to slicing through a group of Cactuar in less than a minute, I was always well engaged and entertained.

I could go on and on about how much fun this game is (as I have already) but I’ll keep it brief and poignant. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is an amazing game. I am excited to dive deeper into the open world and am pretty sad that we’ll have to wait at least a few years for the end of this crazy story. It shakes things up enough to feel fresh but respectful enough to show love for the characters and fandom. I wish that things were a bit more focused in the mini-game to story pacing and balance, but this will easily be one of the best RPGs of the year.