I absolutely loved Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade. I was never a fan of the original game, heck I have more interest in FF8, despite it being a less fun game to play. But Remake, and the Episode INTERmission? So freaking good! I was excited about Rebirth and couldn’t wait to play it. Yet, as I was playing it I couldn’t wait for it to be finally over… It isn’t a bad game, but if the final part of this remake trilogy follows the same gameplay formula, I’m not buying it. I can have my time wasted for free.
To set the stage, I need to talk a bit about Remake again. While it was a much longer game than it ever needed to be, expanding a 5 hour (at best) segment of the original into over 30 hours, a lot of the expanded time felt deserved. The original game had extremely simple storytelling and many characters were very primitive, either for the duration of the opening hours or even throughout the whole game. And Remake (plus DLC) greatly expanded on that, making characters a lot more likeable and interesting, expanding on the world and getting you emotionally invested a lot more than the original game ever did.
On top of that, it had a very novel approach to mixing hack and slash mechanics with the classic Active-Time Battle system, where each character felt very different and you were constantly pushed to learn how to utilize them and their weapons in the best possible way. Weapons themselves felt like unique tools, each of them having some unique elements that could become useful at later stages of the game, instead of being straight improvements. And the fact that no enemies ever respawned, meant that every fight felt consequential. In many ways, Remake drew ideas from Parasite Eve 1 and 2, in how it built a new take on the “cinematic RPG” (somewhat ironic, given that the original influenced those in the first place).
Enter Rebirth, with its strong story-driven opening that feels like a direct continuation on the ideas of Remake. Combat still feels good, story is well told, events are expanded in just the right ways – feels exactly what you’d want to see from a sequel. And I’ll go ahead and say that the ending chapters (and a few other sequences in the game) have that same feeling of being incredibly well constructed moments, that work wonderfully both in terms of the story and in terms of gameplay.
However, vast majority of your time in Rebirth is spent on the most mind-numbingly stupid and by the numbers open world crap. I mean it – picture in your head the most uninspired Ubisoft formula take on an open world and you’ll know how Rebirth plays. Including climbing the towers to get more icons on your map. Enemies now respawn to fit the change, and that, in turn, makes the combat far less fun – it’s too involved for repeatable disposable mobs that will be back a few minutes later. Questing and “icons on the map” content is not fun and is often tied to some “mini-games” that are hard to even call mini-games, rather than just somewhat involved but unfun interactions. Chadley, that was so likeable in Remake, is now an insufferable voice that constantly interrupts your exploration with obnoxious non-stop talking…
This section of the game is also more expanded in comparison to the original, but this expansion often feels… inconsequential. Not because it doesn’t update or change the story – there are still differences and new elements to the plot that were not present in the original game and rely on the fact that some of the characters are aware of this being a remake. No, mostly because while they add “plot”, said plot isn’t actually interesting. It’s just “more”. And sometimes “different”. But almost never “better”. And the real extension in terms of time you will be spending in the game will happen because of the open world. I’ve long been a proponent for the return of the “overworld maps” with a simplified representation of the world, instead of the constant attempts to turn everything into an open world. And while it would’ve made the game far better paced, it wouldn’t have fixed the fact that the world still feels extremely fake despite the amounts of lore it dumps on the player.
You are, of course, also still constantly bombarded with mostly poorly made mini-games. They’ve made moogles real in this world and they look like the original design for movie Sonic, if not more horrifying. The game often looks terrible, because Unreal Engine 4 was never good at open worlds, especially big open flat ones with lots of natural flora and lighting. Also the game’s take on “eye adaptation” effect, when playing in SDR, is horrible, but you get to see it a lot when exploring. You don’t get to see much more character exploration over what you get to see in the original game, which feels like a real step backwards in terms of character growth in comparison with the Remake. And of course, once again the ending is full of pointlessly mysterious elements that are supposed to hook you until the next game releases, an issue that, as I understand, plagued all Kingdom Hearts titles since their inception.
I don’t know who would enjoy Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, if I’m honest. You can no longer go into it without playing at least Crisis Core, but preferably the entire original game, unlike Remake. It isn’t a tightly scripted and well paced cinematic action RPG like Remake. Neither is it a road trip type of open world like Final Fantasy XV. Nor is it a relatively interesting take on the open world, where world changes in meaningful ways like in Final Fantasy XVI. It doesn’t make the events from the original game more interesting in a significant way. Nor is it very interesting on its own. I dunno – I guess if you love to pay for time spent in the game, ignoring the quality of said time, this will certainly get you several dozen hours? I didn’t enjoy my time with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, I stopped caring about side quests and other things close to the end, will never revisit this game again. And, frankly, don’t particularly care about whatever this remake trilogy is going to do in the end.