Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is kind of weird. It’s so good and yet so bad. It’s easily better than Remake, it clears that bar handily, but that game was also a mess. Rebirth is still a mess, it might even be messier, and its got some serious issues, but when it shines it really lights up the room.

Let’s begin with the basics, compared with FF7Remake the combat is iterated and improved upon, but it isn’t radically different. It still feels mash-y, there are way too many flying enemies, attacks track way too often, and spells are particularly bad offenders, and the lock on system may as well qualify as an enemy with how often it will decide that you meant to target something other than the enemy you’ve been focussing. God help you if you end up in a battle with numerous fast enemies, it’ll really let you down then. All that whinging, and yet I’d still say that when it clicks the combat system is good. There are nuisances, of course, but there is so much enemy variety that it works better more often than it doesn’t. There are a lot of cool boss battles, like Scarlet, the Demon Wall, Gi Nattak, among others, as well as some bad ones.

When the gimmicks in the combat system get particularly annoying is with everyone’s favourite war criminals, the Turks. Rude, Elena, Tseng, and Reno are no fun to fight in any of their various combinations at any point in the game. Their boss, Rufus, is also deeply irritating. Between shielding and counter mechanics to short stagger windows, they are a gang of anti-fun lows on the adventure I’d rather never experience again. The Red Dragon, while not related to Shinra, is also total trash.

Outside of the combat system the big new addition is the open world which is a bit of a mixed bag. Its visually stunning, every area has a unique feel, and the music is fantastic as it evokes the vibes and atmosphere of each region. New battle themes, new world themes, these go hand in hand with making the open a world a great experience. The drawback is that Square Enix didn’t seem to cook up anything unique to do in such a large and multi-faceted world. I can’t fathom how so much work can go into making something that looks so good only to drop a handful of towers around for the player to climb to reveal activities. There’re a few combat trials, which are fun but not exactly inspired, as well as a watered-down version of FFIXs Chocobo Hot Cold, it’s just a shame that the world is stuffed full of so much busy work. Also, Chadley, there is entirely too much Chadley when you explore.

Another mixed bag is the mini games. There are good ones, there’s bad ones, it’s so broad there’s no way to lose! The Gold Saucer rules, especially G-Bike’s return and Chocobo racing. Other good minigames include: the Junon Parade, Jump Frog, and Run Wild. There are also bad minigames like Queens blood and Fort Condor.

Woah, hold up, did I just say that Queens blood sucks? Yes, I did, and I meant it. Mostly, I’m not a card game guy and I do not care to build decks or anything like that. I cannot be arsed, I played a few times and mostly decided it’s not for me and it’s pretty much the reason I won’t pursue the Plat. I see the hype, but I just don’t care, card games are boring. While we’re on negatives here, I’ve seen people consider the Chocobo stealth sections as minigames and boy do those blow. That’s easily one of lowest lows in the entire game, I can’t believe this mediocre, slow, plodding, waste of time made the final cut. I did enjoy the tournament on the cruise ship, however, as I dreaded to be forced to play only to discover that you can forfeit immediately and have random NPCs around the ship comment on how you’re a quitter. That was legitimately funny.

There are other little snags that Rebirth gets caught on that are detrimental to the experience but aren’t worth being overly focused on. It’s a shame that we live in a world where game developers still rely on slow moving “push a box” activities, or slowly walking behind NPCs for exposition, or slowly walking to buffer a load. There’s a lot of slow movement. Also, quickly, the people who got upset at rock walls having yellow paint on them were mad at the wrong problem, the existence of climbing is so goddamn bad. Cloud loved to get stuck mid climb and just hang there, refusing to move, the game just couldn’t handle climbing. It’s so bad.

Now that the mechanics are out of the way lets dig into the meat and potatoes of the review. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is a game that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. After the events of the first game the gang leaves Midgar and starts a new adventure to hunt down Sephiroth. Well and good, pretty much par for the original, nothing exciting there. There’s lots of good, new, character moments and more world building and new conflicts to raise the stakes but the plot pretty much follows the old familiar track of the original. This is fine, it really makes characters like Yuffie and Cait Sith shine since they’re not major party members in the original. It also serves to elevate emotional beats like Barret’s return to Corel and his relationship with Dyne. These are good things. Deeper characterization of the cast is necessary since the original is thin in terms of writing and world building. Rebirth does a lot to help fill in the gaps and really make the Planet feel like something more than a map that little boxy early 3D guys used to run on.

My eyebrows first raised with the introduction of Zack, however, revealing the deaths of the other party members and Cloud and Aerith in catatonic states. Something was fishy here. It would return to the main adventure but every so often you’re treated to Zack and this alternate timeline, where things went down differently. I prepared for this to get messy. My preparations didn’t go unwarranted.

There are little warning signs, the Zack stuff, the way the Midgard Serpent is dealt with was another alarm bell. Sephiroth is entirely too present in this game. The remakes both suffer for Sephiroth abundance. There is a very difficult line for them to tread here, and I understand that it’s tricky. In the original game the Midgard Serpent is menacing, deadly, it’s beatable but only if you know some advanced strats for dealing with it. In Rebirth you simply defeat it the first time you run into it. I was hoping that it’d be something like the original, something to avoid or dodge, maybe to return at the end of the game to face as an extra boss or something. No, instead you have a boss fight, and you watch Sephiroth kill it. This is a bad narrative choice.

In the original you avoid this nasty monster you can’t beat by running away on a Chocobo. You reach the other side of the swamp, and another serpent is there, impaled on a tree, and the menace of Sephiroth is felt as environmental story telling. Changing it so Sephiroth just reveals himself and does it on screen kind of cheapens the narrative impact of the original’s reveal. This is a problem that recurs throughout the story.
At a point in the plot Tifa falls into the Lifestream where she witnesses Sephiroth for some reason. Cloud is constantly seeing him. He’s everywhere. There must have been a great deal at the Sephiroth store cause Square Enix can’t stop revealing him all the damn time.

You see, part of what makes Sephiroth such an excellent villain in FF7 is that he’s not around much. There’re a few times he pops up and drops off a Jenova to fight you but until you get to the big Aerith moment and then the final battle, he’s pretty much just a menacing force in the background. A looming threat whose name being uttered is enough to make you feel his presence. It’s not that he’s invisible for the whole plot but he’s not around NEARLY as much as in Rebirth.

So, look, I must give them some credit. It’s been years since Remake and it’ll be years before the next game hits, so if they’re blowing their Sephiroth load a little too frequently it’s because these games are releasing as 3 separate parts and not as a whole. They have to give the people what they want, and the people demand Sephiroth! So, fair play. There is, however, one thing that I cannot understand and that’s Aerith’s death scene.

After finishing Remake, and the connotations of the party “defying and battling fate itself” to change the story or whatever, I had wondered about this moment. There are few moments in gaming as big as Aerith’s death. It’s an iconic plot element and something that is so critical to the success and staying power of the original game. There’s no way you could tell FF7s story in a meaningful way without that sacrifice, right?

Well, I suppose they decided that’s right. For all the bluster about defying fate and making a new path for the story they stuck to the original thread, Aerith bites it, Masamune does its job. Lovely. There’s just one thing. They fucking botched it. I don’t know who made the decision to take one of the most iconic moments in the entire Final Fantasy series and make that the playground for some interdimensional bullshit, but they really dropped the ball. I sat, baffled, as Cloud successfully saved Aerith only for a different reality to assert itself and have her die anyhow, the scenes became a messy blur, it was a convoluted mess.

The following boss battles rule. I became engrossed in several fights with Jenova, Sephiroth, and a different version of Sephiroth, before fighting Sephiroth. I know I just complained that there’s too much Sephiroth in this game but in terms of final boss battles this is the right time to start throwing him into the mix. Once I started to watch the ending cutscenes and rolled credits however it all started to sink in.

Aerith’s death is a sloppy mess, it’s poorly directed, it loses all its impact, the amount of fighting that follows it cheapens the emotional impact and, more importantly, there is a massively important element missing. I don’t know how other Final fantasy fans feel about it, but for me there are 2 major images that became iconic. Aerith getting stabbed, which Rebirth mucks up with bad editing and its weird and honestly stupid decision to make this key and iconic scene the playground for their alternate reality bullshit, and Cloud walking her body into the water and letting her go. This tender moment does not exist in Rebirth. This is shocking to me. This is the emotional crux of the scene. Sephiroth’s violence takes the spotlight but the tender scene that follows is what gives it its impact. I couldn’t believe they completely fucked this up. It is unforgivable.

I just don’t get it. They made a big show about fighting a metaphysical embodiment of fate, they made a big show of these alternate timelines, they ended up following the formula anyway, but they threw in so much nonsense that instead of creating a worthwhile recreation of an iconic moment they just muddied it up. It’s like those painting restorations you see where some nun tries to fix up a masterpiece painting of Jesus and smudging it up because she doesn’t know what she’s doing.

All that, and Rebirth is still a good game. It has a lot of high highs and low lows, honestly the plot outside of the ending is solid, the fighting is good when it clicks, there’s a lot of fun minigames. It’s a game that’ll give you a headache one moment and then give you a spectacle or an activity you love the next. The worst offense is that some of the narrative pitfalls seem so obvious, how they managed to fumble the finale is beyond comprehension. That and they changed Red’s voice, that was fucking dumb and they should fire the guy to suggested it.