Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and how I learned to just play games for yourself
There will be spoilers for both Rebirth and the original Final Fantasy VII in this review. If you are a remake-only player, you have been warned.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth was a game I long had my eye on. I have a ton of love for both the original and Final Fantasy VII Remake, but figured I'd hold out for a Switch 2 port for the sake of having such a massive game portably. We got it, and so I jumped in excited and nervous. I was curious about how I'd feel about the game given the chatter about it online; the bloat, how faithful it is to the original, the censorship/softening of the tone, and especially the ending... yet none of those complaints landed with me.
What a bloated mess! I didn't feel this way at all, though I understand why it's a common complaint. Rebirth is a lot of video game. I clocked in at ~130 hours after rolling the credits, and it throws a ton at you in those hours. There's lots to do in its open world: side quests, mini-games, combat challenges both in the open world and via Chadley, etc. It's an exercise in pure excess that harkens back to Final Fantasy's SNES and PS1 roots and very much in spirit of the original Final Fantasy VII.
The combat challenges were a fun way to flex your muscles and put Materia builds together. They range from quick challenges you can bang out in a few minutes, to puzzles where you have to, say, beat x enemy before y enemy explodes. Fun time, and a way to show off the game's stellar combat.
I loved the mini-games and how they broke the pacing up... except for 3D Brawlers. >!Fuck you Sephiroth.!< I found the attacks to be pretty unreadable. I could never be an actual boxer or an MLB player. Subtle movements are not my strong suit. The Cosmo Canyon proto relic mini-game was a bit of a miss for me as well. I liked the idea of having Final Fantasy XII's Gambit system return, but the mini-game was just too complicated on a meta level and there was too much to learn for what largely amounted to just playing rock paper scissors and placing some little guys down. It's simple enough to brute force, so it doesn't really feel like you need to engage with it. Plenty has been said about Queen's Blood, so all I'll say is... the hype is definitely earned. It's so much fun, and the QB puzzles throughout the game are an unsung hero of the mini-games. I enjoyed them just as much, if not moreso, than the actual Queen's Blood matches.
Your love for the mini-games will largely come down to what you value in a game or in an RPG. Some appreciate them as stuff that freshens the game up, breaks things up a bit, and gives you more to do. Others feel they get in the way of the game's story and combat. I expected myself to fall into the latter, but ended up being in the former camp. There's a nice variety of things to do in this game that you just don't see from most outside of mini-game collections/compilations like UFO 50 or 51 Clubhouse Games. I've said it already, but it almost harkens back to the PS1 days of Final Fantasy, where the excess was just as much a part of the series' identity as the anime melodrama and ATB battle systems were.
I enjoyed the open world, too. Yes, it's checklisty. Yes, Chadley can be annoying. But it's a checklist done right. I actually really enjoyed navigating each of the areas - especially Gongaga - and each area didn't have too much content so you could clear them reasonably quickly. Any excuse to engage with Rebirth's combat is good in my book, even if traversing the open world was a bit clunky. It's not going to sweep you off your feet like Breath of the Wild or Red Dead Redemption 2, but as far as checklists go it's a damn good one. Not hitting the highs and constant dopamine rush of Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed, but not a slog like, say, modern Assassin's Creed or Ghost of Tsushima is.
What, no changes? I'm gonna be honest... I found myself wondering if I even played the same game as other people. All I heard was about how outside of the ending, nothing is different with Rebirth's plot VS the original, and how disappointing that was coming off of Remake's ending and the promises it made. I feel like people really glossed over some major story changes just because they weren't accompanied by plot ghosts or because the broad strokes are largely the same.
>!Cloud starts remembering Zack in Nibelheim, for one. Why did I hear nobody talk about this? He starts to get a faint recollection of Zack in Gongaga, and then flat-out remembers Zack's name during the Nibelheim revisit. That's a massive change from the original, and a major lynchpin in Sephiroth breaking Cloud at the Northern Crater. Yeah a lot of the details are still wrong and pretty hazy, but they moved that up way earlier.!<
In general, I feel like Rebirth's plot changes are more detail-oriented ones that haven't had a chance to play out yet, but will have a major domino effect come time for Revelation. It can come off as them not really being faithful, but when you've played the original there's a lot of little things that are different in Rebirth. Which brings me to...
They ruined the ending! I... don't feel that way at all, and frankly I found the complaints about the impact getting muddied or things not making sense to be vastly overblown. >!Aerith's death still hit me like a truck. I was crazy emotional. The stuff afterwards and the things they fooled around with like Tifa seeing both dead Aerith and the "other" Aerith were actually super interesting and got me excited for the future. It's a bit confusing in the moment but once you get that scene of Cloud and Sephiroth talking with the three worlds in the background and Sephiroth basically spells everything out for you, I went "Ah, I get it."!<
As far as Square Enix's Patented Bullshit goes, I found this one pretty easy to wrap my head around. In general, I actually really liked the ending. I liked it far, far more than I thought I would. It lays some very interesting groundwork for how things will play out in Revelation while still preserving the emotional impact that >!Aerith's death!< should bring. They're gonna break Cloud...
It's so goofy and anime now! Shit's getting as long as Rebirth is now, but basically... you win some and you lose some here. Yeah some parts like Dyne and Barrett's part are a bit lightened up, but some parts are darkened up, too. Rebirth leans a lot into Cloud, his arc, how things are affecting him, etc. They really play it up here and push as far as a T-rating will let them. It actually caught me a bit off guard. All I heard about Rebirth's tone was about how the game is so much lighter than the original, so to have scenes like >!Cloud's outburst at the Gongaga reactor and his slaughter of the Shinra soldiers in the Temple of the Ancients!< where they also went harder than the original too came out of left field for me.
It's a game of contrast and extremes, which was just as much part of the original's identity as it is the remake trilogy's. There's a lot of goofy stuff, and there's a lot of dark stuff, too. Some lighter than the original, some darker. Most of all, it still feels like Final Fantasy VII. Not the edgy, grimdark version you have in your head of the game you played as a kid, but of the actual Final Fantasy VII that you can boot up and play right now.
In all this, I found that sometimes you really do just have to play stuff for yourself and form your own opinions. Sometimes you'll agree with people, sometimes you won't. Sometimes you'll see where people are coming from, but not feel the same way. (Like I do with Rebirth's mini-games.) It's hardly a riveting statement to make - "No shit," you'll say - but in an age where discourse is everywhere, I feel it's pretty easy to internalize others' thoughts and opinions as your own. It's important to just try shit out. You never know what you'll care about and what you won't. You might just surprise yourself!