Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is confidently enormous and ambitious, a crazy leap from Remake, and shows a clear love for its source material pouring out of nearly every aspect.

I think the gameplay has seen the most improvement here, and I have to imagine going back to remake is gonna be difficult after this. It’s so much faster and more responsive, and gives you an impressive amount of options to play with. The loop of ATB into synergy attacks into better and better limits is absolutely excellent, and the increased tools to deal with distanced and flying enemies are highly appreciated. I still don’t quite understand how “Dynamic” difficulty works, aside from what I am left to assume from some strangely-placed difficulty spikes, but when it all clicks together it feels fantastic. I can’t wait to see what they do with this already excellent system next.

The story is quite good as well, it more directly follows the events of FF7 proper than its predecessor and continues to embellish and expand on those events quite well (perhaps better, even) with a clear understanding of why certain things worked. Its divergences are much more sectioned off which I think helps the game at large, give or take a couple weird placements of certain events, and I found said divergences to be much more interesting on their own merit. If I had to single out anything, I think the beginning is a bit rough as the game throws you straight into the action with next to zero effort to ease the player back into the universe, but that was my only real point of friction with it and I actually liked the ending of this one a bit more.

One of the most impressive things about it is how deeply they seem to have taken the criticisms of the first game’s side content, because almost everything here feels fun, substantial, and worth doing. Hell, in general I find it impressive that Remake’s formula worked so well in an open world format. Sure, you can rag on it for an “Ubisoft Open World” as has become the go-to (and to be fair, I think you could cut a couple lesser minigames and a good chunk of the small “World Intel” tasks and the game wouldn’t be much different for it), but most of it is content worth seeing at best and something you can probably do in 2 minutes and/or easily ignore while you’re traversing to the next objective anyway at worst. At times it can be a bit too much, I had to take a bit of a break around the middle because there the game is just A LOT, but much of the time it works, it’s smooth, and most importantly it’s good!

I don’t tend to drone on about visuals a whole lot, but this is the first game in awhile that has wowed me. There are scuffed textures here and there sure, but the game is extremely well-realized and a pleasure to look at, with a super indulgent and excellent soundtrack to match. It’s hard to describe, but some of these areas are a shockingly perfect translation of the graphics of the era into a modern style that somehow manages not to lose any of the original’s feel. However I do have to mention the graphics modes; there is clearly something really wrong with the performance mode here and hopefully it gets fixed eventually. Conversely, this is the first time I’ve used a resolution mode and it’s been consistent enough that I stuck with it, and I’m really glad I did. Also god have I missed big expensive CG cutscenes, we need to bring that back into vogue!

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth may have its issues, but rarely does a game come along that makes me feel like I’m a child on Christmas morning like this one did, and it’s hard to overstate the importance of that.