Oh man, where do I even begin with this game? I'll preface by saying that Final Fantasy VII Remake is one of my favorite games in the series. It was a title that understood how to create a humanist experience that genuinely makes you care about its world and inhabitants with excellent narrative, character writing, and world-building through its side quests.

It was also a tight and focused experience that culminated in an ending so staggeringly ambitious that I still think about it often.

So, it's no surprise that I was looking forward to the follow-up, especially since it has most of the same cooks behind the sauce of Remake.

However, after finally finishing Rebirth after what seems like an eternity, I'm left confused and ambivalent.

The big red flag for me was when, during an interview, one of the game's directors highlighted the Horizon as an inspiration for the game's approach to open-world design.

Man, they weren't lying.

Rebirth begins with a linear, story-focused segment that lasts a few hours before thrusting you into one of the most insufferably prescriptive open-worlds I've ever played in a video game.

You spend around 15-20 hours doing the most fucking pea-brained busywork imaginable for Chadley, who has to berate and interrupt your progression at every possible moment. It's built upon the most mind-numbing tasks imaginable such as "activate tower," "kill a group of enemies," and "interact with a McGuffin and play a minigame where you either play Simon Says for morons or time a button press."

The world is absolutely bursting with these menial activities, and they take a fucking Mossberg to the game's narrative pacing. I shit you not: there was a good 15-hour block of this game's early hours where not a single piece of narrative occurred.

Maybe this would have been easier to stomach if the characters had interacted when navigating the open-world, but they aren't even there outside of an occasional comment. This issue is especially true for characters that are outside your active party. I legitimately forgot some of them existed even though they added the "backline" into the game's combat system, where non-active characters still stand at the edge of a combat encounter doing what I assume to be chip damage.

When I finally completed my Chadley Chores, I progressed to one of the game's more linear segments where some goddamn plot finally happened and was reminded of why I was still playing this in the first place. In these segments, characters feel alive with interactions heightened by curated moments, a complete 180 from the dozen or so hours prior.

However, it wasn't too long before I was shoved into another open-world area filled with the most boring fucking slop imaginable. I know the original Final Fantasy VII had a decent chunk of minigames, but Rebirth takes this to an unimaginable extreme.

It feels like there is a new minigame around every corner, and these things range in quality from pretty fun to complete dogshit. And look, I can appreciate a shitty minigame here and there if there is some rhyme or reason to its existence. I liked playing frisbee with the dog in Gravity Rush 2. I may as well be a shitty minigame connoisseur, for fuck's sake.

I think the biggest issue is that there is just too fucking much. Full stop. Too much side content. Too many fucking minigames. This game is just the most padded fucking experience I have ever had, and most of the content fucking sucks ass.

I usually try to keep a flow of thought in my writing, but I don't know where to put this, so it's going here. Let me tell you about this motherfucker Chadley. I've never hated a character in a video game as much as I do Chadley. Not only is he an intolerable, passive-aggressive, and holier-than-thou little Young Sheldon ripoff, but his mere existence is a manifestation of all my problems with the game. He's going to pop up on your stupid ass little cellphone, stop you in your tracks, and mansplain the most basic shit ever to you like you've never played a fucking video game before.

I honestly think I would rather individually pluck each one of my ass hairs out with tweezers than have to listen to Chadley flap his fucking gums at me. Sometimes, I think the developers are aware of how bad he is. For instance, during one of the game's better moments, the Queens Blade tournament, Chadley becomes one of the later opponents. After taking the fattest fucking dump on him—I'm talking like shutting him out and dropping 120+ on him and giving me an overwhelming feeling of catharsis—I spoke to a couple of other people about it. They all managed to crush him similarly, which makes me think the balancing is tilted heavily in your favor for the Chadley battle, which kind of rules.

If you have enough brain rot to still be reading my semi-coherent rambling about this game, you're probably asking yourself, "Man, why the hell is this dipshit still playing a game he clearly hates?"

That's because interspersed throughout all of this dogshit are genuine moments of excellence. Everyone is going to mention how good the Bow Wow sidequest—where you escort a dog accompanied by an insanely catchy song while Barret lets his emotional walls down to vent about how worried he is about Marlene's future and his role as her father—is and they should because it's fantastic.

These are things that Remake had consistently and in spades, and it's a testament to how great this cast of characters is and how great the writing can be when the bloat doesn't get in its way.

By the time I had completed all of the open-world monotony—like 100 hours into the game, lol—I could finally enjoy something close to my experience with Remake. I could approach sidequests that were still good despite rarely reaching the highs of the previous game without worrying about the mundane busy work.

But even then, this game just can't fucking help itself. After hours of Protorelic quests that teased Gilgamesh, ranging in quality from excellent to alright, I thought I was finally about to confront the goofy wandering swordsman. Lol, fat chance; enjoy four boss fights of insane difficulty that require you to grind levels because you are too weak. Get fucked nerd.

I won't say much about the combat because it's as excellent as Remake's. However, this time, there is more focus on encounters as puzzles with specific solutions, which I enjoy but don't necessarily prefer. But it's still an often frantic and satisfying mix of ATB and real-time combat that rewards strategic party composition and setups. I ended up settling on Cloud, Tifa, and Cait Sith as my main party because they could max out the stagger modifier and crit chance, resulting in jolting amounts of damage.

The last two chapters of the game did solidify the reason I persisted through this bipolar experience. Once you reach the game's point of no return, you're treated to about four to five hours of pure joy, and the game ends on an incredibly high note that brings out the best in its cast and writing.

There’s plenty of fantastic stuff in this game, you just have to climb a mountain of shit to get to it.

For the first time in my life, I genuinely don't know how I feel about a game. I beat this last week, and I've been thinking about it with mixed emotions since then. It's one of the most maddeningly polarizing pieces of media I've ever experienced, and I can't tell you if it's bad or good.

I can’t even give this thing a score because I literally do not know how to quantify my opinion of this game.

I usually do some pretty heavy editing to my in-depth assessments of games that I've played, cutting out plenty of sections that don't fit, but I'm just going to say fuck it and post this just like Square Enix did when they released this shit.

Have some fucking self-control for the next game. Either way, I’m only playing that shit if you let me crucify Chadley.

Also, if you made it this far, check yourself into a psyche ward because you're just as insane as I am for finishing this game.

I knew this was a good game when I drew a mustache on that one family’s portrait in the farmhouse, and in response, my friend erased it. This action created a tug of war, which resulted in me adding and him erasing the mustache repeatedly throughout the course of the level.

That was until finally, I trapped him in the middle of a co-op platforming puzzle and made him watch as I slowly walked back to the portrait to draw the mustache on before returning to finish the co-op puzzle, causing the level to end and emerging from the mustache war victorious as he wallowed in a pool of agonizing defeat.

I also got to beat his ass at connect four and fucking kill him at the end of the game.