Review: Embrace a complete new world in FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH

Remakes, revivals, reimaginings, remakes, rehashes, rebirths and every version of something flood our market and the content we consume. Why think of something new when nostalgia normally makes as much money (or more) and is usually easier to create because people don’t have to spend as much time on world building and character/story creation? If Square Enix took the old Final Fantasy VII, gave it these amazing graphics, and simplified the game a little, it would be a huge success. However, they changed the gameplay while keeping the strategy, altered the story while staying true to the characters and the material, and it ended up being one of the best things they’ve made in a long, long time. I rewatched Remake four years ago and I’m happy to say that Rebirth gloriously continued the journey into the unknown with Cloud and his team in all their high-definition beauty.

Let’s talk about the story, which is 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 gasped or screamed at the screen, at the good and bad events of the story. The pacing and introductions of the other characters are handled wonderfully, and I had a hard time putting the game down after every day I picked it up. I always wanted to know what would happen next. The voice work is fantastic in the main cast and villain, the only disappointments were in the occasional NPCs. The videos were gripping and kept me on the edge of my seat, even in the quiet, emotional moments. I wish I could go into more depth about the story and why it’s so hilarious, but trust me: you’ll want to avoid spoilers as much as possible and be ready for a very open and new experience.

The open-ended experience in the story blends with an incredibly massive open world. My God, there’s a lot to do. There are plenty of fun side quests and impactful rewards beyond those separate from the story. I felt like every moment I followed the campaign, I was filled with opportunities to explore and grow my team and their builds. There’s great balance and enough cues to do other things in the world that players who want to take their time in the game will love the exploration while others who just want to play through the story won’t be bombarded with other random stuff. I usually hate open world games, but Final Fantasy VII Rebirth not only got me excited about exploration, but also motivated me to try other open world games.

Now, the game isn’t always wide open. I’d say about 20-40% of the time you’re stuck in certain areas due to the story or mission taking place at the time, which makes sense… but also feels a little too limiting. If I want to race chocobos, I want to race them whenever I want! This brings me to another small complaint, about controlling the other characters. Most of the time, the player will control Cloud as he explores the world, but eventually players will be able to wander through a mission or two as other characters, using their open-world abilities. It’s great and a dream come true for some fans, but this time control of other characters is tied to those missions. I wish, I wish, I WISH we could switch between them all the time. This could have allowed the developers to place various hidden treasures and enemies behind different terrain and traversal used by other characters, such as unlocking new abilities in a metroidvania that encourage exploration in past areas. But alas, I can’t complain too much, it’s still fun to play with what we have in the game. In addition to being locked into certain characters for certain periods, players are also forced to complete a wide variety of mediocre minigames and tasks that felt more like a block to my progress than another fun new thing to do, but that just happened a handful of times. It makes sense to do this a couple of times to show players all the game offers, but these stretches of gameplay and forced missions sometimes get a little boring. Not enough to be annoying, but enough to slow down the pace of the game overall.

But let’s get back to the minigames themselves. Many of them can be quite fun, and there are almost enough of them to fill a Mario Party game (at least it seems like it). However, I wish there were just a few that were a little more substantial instead of having so many that you forget about them as soon as you finish them. It’s not a big deal, but some of them are really terribly forgettable or even a little annoying to play. But things like the in-game card game, fighting game, and chocobo racing are almost good enough to be games in their own right. I had to tell myself several times to skip the card battles and stop building my deck or racing to continue the story to finish this review.

The next big thing to talk about is the combat. As we saw in the trailers, the game features the same combat system as the Remake, but with a number of additions. Synergistic attacks, new materia, and a light crafting system allow players to approach combat in different ways, build unique team compositions, and focus on certain strengths of each character. All of these things, plus the excellent combat it started with, led to me never getting tired of the combat. And it never got overwhelming or easy because of all these options, which I’ve seen before in other games that cram too many special moves and things into the combat. All in all, between twenty minutes of boss battles that kept me in critical condition for almost the entire time and cutting through a group of Cactuars in less than a minute, I was always well engaged and entertained.

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