Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is the second part of the Final Fantasy VII Remake. Although given how Remake ended with its big reveal, anything goes for this sequel. It starts after the Intermission DLC of Remake, and so the party finds themselves outside Midgar and makes up their mind to chase Sephiroth. That is their only objective, and it leads them from area to area, going with the flow. Unfortunately, it’s not a strong story, and while faithful to the original, the pacing feels agonizingly slow and little feels like it meaningfully adds to the story.
Rebirth reaches the part of the original game where you get access to the world map, and its implementation here is recreating it into six zones. The game soon opens up with the first zone, and it is extremely impressive… at first glance. While the game has big environments, it carries over an annoying element from Remake. That is, there are often sections where you are forced to slow walk, shimmy through ledges and climbing. These are pointless activities, such as climbing where literally the only input is pointing the analogue stick to the direction you want to go in. These add nothing to the game except to painfully slow down the pacing, which is jarring and breaks the immersion (even if it is supposed to make it more “immersive”). It was bad in Remake and it is made worse here, and much more inexcusable given that the PS5’s SSD should now be fast enough to not require these types of loading masking tricks.
Disrespecting the player’s time is a constant theme of the game. In the linear story sections, there are stupid gimmicks such as pulling a slow object to solve the “puzzle”, if it can even be called that. There are huge amounts of gimmicks and minigames, which are inane things such as turning a valve five times just to trigger the next cutscene. The open world is filled with cookie cutter objectives that are the same in each zone. This game feels like a Ubisoft open world game, and that’s not a good thing. After the first or second zone, the activities are too repetitive as your progress is effectively lost in the next zone. Having a checklist of things to do that isn’t meaningful at all to the game is poor design. Even great graphics cannot save that.
Bloat is the constant theme of Rebirth. Side quests are the usual fetch and hunting quests. Go from point A to talk to someone, then go to point B. It’s boring and unimaginative. It tries to use these to buff some the backstories of the characters, but it doesn’t present it in an interesting way. The bloat continues into the story where there are so many filler segments, slow walking during cutscenes and boring cutscenes. The story is slow and meanders through its events and indulges in itself too much. The constant forced minigames in its story segments are tedious and annoying. There is a weird overly campy / chirpy tone to the characters that doesn’t quite work and is at odds with what it supposedly its own serious story to tell. There is a constant fixation on Sephiroth. Yes, he is the big bad and an iconic villain. However, there is such a thing as overexposure when he makes an appearance so frequently throughout the game and shoved down your throat at every moment. For every cutscene mentioning Sephiroth and there will be a derailment of the story.
For combat, it builds upon the system of Remake. Thus, it is a hybrid of real time and turn based combat. You cannot fully play it as either, so it can be tricky to pick up its nuances. There is the standard attack, block and dodge (which doesn’t provide invincibility frames…). Standard attacks will mostly do chip damage, the main goal is to do enough damage and strike the enemy’s weakness to build up the pressure and stagger gauge. Once staggered, this is when you can do heavier damage and defeat the enemy. Attacking will increase your ATB gauge, which you expend to use special abilities on, which are usually the moves that will deal actual damage, strike weaknesses or have other positive effects.
Thus, the whole combat system revolves a lot around the ATB gauge, which means that it prioritizes aggressive plays. Even using items will require the ATB gauge, so you can get into a lot of trouble if you find your party in low health and need to attack to build up enough ATB to use a recovery item. The new addition in Rebirth is the Synergy moves. There are two ones, the first of which doesn’t use ATB, so that you can use it at any time. The second does use the ATB gauge and has very useful effects such as increasing the limit break level or splitting the ATB gauge into more segments.
Each character plays differently and you can control any of the numerous party members you have. This is both good and bad, but over the course of the story, the game will dictate the composition of your party. Sometimes it makes sense, other times it’s just for the game to continually waste your time. It truly feels that the game forces you to play it in a very narrow and specific way, which can suck a lot of fun out of it. The solo battles are the worst. Rebirth has a lot of overlaying systems on top though, there are separate leveling systems for the characters, weapons and party abilities, as well as a crafting system. All these systems together can be very overwhelming and confusing, especially when they were first introduced.
Like the whole game, the final dungeon drags on and on and on. It combines everything wrong with the game, such as splitting up the party and painstakingly following both at every moment even though you won’t care. It has constant slow walking, boring exposition dumps, solo sections, pointless “puzzles” where you are pulling and pushing objects and cutscenes that play 30% too slowly (you know something is wrong when you can use the in-game function of speeding cutscenes up to 1.5x speed and it doesn’t feel too unnatural).
The poor design continues onto the final boss, which just like the rest of the game is bloated and severely outstays its welcome. It is cheap and filled with many attacks that are pretty much instant kill attacks. It continues to wrestle the control away from the player as without any warning at all from before you enter the battle, that you are not allowed to pick your own party, it’s chosen by the game for you. There is even a breaking climbing section built into the battle, where you are climbing up the boss in an agonizingly slow fashion. Nothing better than to break up the pacing even more like that.
This might be all forgiven if at least the story was good enough, but it wasn’t even good. For all the teasing of defying fate etc from Remake, it then ends up being quite faithful to the original game for most of Rebirth, it goes for a lazy direction in its ending. It’s just disappointing. The developers stretched each story piece for too long so that it is disjointed, and you lose interest. It all feels pointless as a result. The developers have no clue what they want the game to be and to have, so they are stuck in this half-step where they cannot commit in one direction or the other. It’s a perfect description of the game as a whole, it tries to be everything and is mediocre at everything. They are too faithful to the original story, but then changes it enough to be a convoluted piece of crap, alienating all the players.
Anyway, after the story, which takes around 50 hours to complete if you beeline for only the story missions and do a few open world stuff, it opens up Chapter Select. You can go back to any chapter to finish off the stuff that you wanted to do, but seriously, why would you want to? Everything is busywork and feels like chores. Getting 100% is one of the most painfully boring things to do. The game’s pretty to look at but that’s it.
Overall, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is a disappointment. It had so much potential, and it consistently teases what could have been. Instead, we get a generic overstuffed Ubisoft open world filled with pointless trash to do. The open worlds are tacked on just because it had to have an open world, and it isn’t integrated well with the story and the rest of the game. The story itself is stretched, and gameplay filled with rubbish minigames that are forced upon the player. The game constantly disrespects the player’s time, and everything takes longer than it should. The graphics are great, and the combat system can be overwhelming but at least it is solid. However, this is a massively bloated game, and it’s one where someone really needed to have reined in the developers and directions to streamline the game by at least 50%.
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