Let me get a rating out of the way first.
ahem
There is a good game somewhere here in this giant steaming pile of shit that is this FF7R trilogy, but I just don't care enough anymore to find it/10.

Edit: Okay, that's a bit harsh. While I do agree with the general sentiment of that statement for a rating, I still want to make clear that I had fun with the game for a majority of the time; it was the ending that really took me completely out of the game.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth expands a lot on what I already liked about the first entry, but at the same time doubles down on the things I hated about the first entry while also showing a complete lack of understanding of basic game design at times. I have a lot to say for the 132 HOURS i spent grinding away at this game, mostly negative. But I do want to say that where there are positives those positives shine bright.

Let's start with the positives, then.
1) I think the main focus of this Remake project has been to bring about the characters of the world and turn the dial so hard it breaks. It really goes to show that this game made me do the impossible; actually liking Yuffie and Cait Sith. They all have their own quirks and goofs about them, and they feel very real and often relatable for moving pixels on a screen. The only exception to this is Cid as he feels a bit more civilised for seemingly no reason, but I feel like they're saving him more for the third part so I'm not all that mad about it.

2) I already thought the combat system in Remake was the best combat system Square Enix has ever put out, but they somehow managed to outdo that. The synergy system feels like a very natural addition to the combat system, and it feels perfectly integrated as well. We FINALLY have a form of aerial combat for all characters too. I remember in chapter 3 of Remake, there was a side quest where Cloud and Tifa were fighting Drakes in the abandoned warehouse outside Sector 7, and it was such a slog to kill them with the very limited magic and lack of abilities at that early point in the game, but now everything feels 50 million times smoother in combat.

3) Having a bit of a musical background, I am a SUCKER for music direction. I believe firmly that music in a game brings so much more emotional weight to even the most forgettable scenes. One can and will associate music to core memories. The Remake project took probably my favorite soundtrack in all of gaming and broke the dial again while trying to turn it up. What's even crazier is hearing songs from Remake be remixed in Rebirth and still being amazing, such as being in the desert area outside of Kalm towards Midgar. They brought back the dynamic music changes too from changing from the overworld to combat, and somehow managed to make every track a banger. I can't wait for the music for this game to come to DSPs (or maybe I should start using my SoundCloud account again, I don't know).

4) The side quests in Remake were nothing burgers meant solely to pad out the game, but at least in Rebirth they're nothing burgers with a side of ketchup. I guess that's a positive? I'm partly kidding here. In terms of purely the content of them, the side quests for the most part are still nothing burgers in this game, but the main standout to them now are the fact that now all side quests except for the last one are tied to a specific party member. Not only does each side quest give you a little insight as to how each character has or will have interacted with the world. I guess it's moreso of a strength of the strong character writing of the game rather than the side quests themselves, but I think it speaks volumes that I was actively trying to seek out doing all the side quests in each region.

5) QUEEN'S BLOOD!!!! Sure, by the later stages of the game I wanted to pull my hair out strand by strand due to how difficult it was getting, but that could probably be attributed to me trying to brute force the same deck into everything. Still, I did manage to beat everyone in the in game world at it in due time, and I can honestly say this probably tops Triple Triad from Final Fantasy VIII. Square Enix, it would be a literal money printer if you decided to make this a real card game.

6) I was critical of Remake's absolute obliteration of Sephiroth's characterization. He was littered every 30 minutes of the game past chapter 1. In Rebirth, this is the part of the game where Sephiroth starts to make more of an appearance so I guess I was okay with the fact that he appears a lot in this game. Still, I can appreciate that they managed to dial down all the cryptic messaging for once and actually use Sephiroth in scenarios that actually make sense, even if he never was meant to be in a scene in the first place. For example, I liked when a hallucination of Sephiroth was able to instill the idea that the Tifa we'd been playing as this entire time was a fake in Cloud's mind in the Inn when she asks him to talk with her in private. If he had instead just showed up and blabbered about some Reunion shit I probably would have just refunded the game then and there since it was that early on.

And that concludes all of the nice things I have to say about this game. Not a lot, sure, but when this game has its moments it's usually due to one of these factors.

Now I'm gonna rant like crazy.
1) This is a minor nitpick if anything, but I'm not a huge fan of the Telltale style romance system in this game. It ruins any sense of surprise as to who you end up going on a date with. In Remake and in the original game, this stat was entirely hidden from you and you wouldn't be able to tell who you would go out with. Now with just the click of a button you can see who you're most into it with, which is only very slightly jarring but still something that ticked me off.

2) Another group of minor nitpicks here, It feels kind of weird to me that every major town in this game has major hordes of happy go lucky NPCs running around everywhere. Even Cosmo Canyon, a place that's supposed to be a sacred place for planetologists to come together and study under Bugenhagen, has fallen victim to the tourism industry. I wouldn't have as much of a problem with this if they didn't make it so you can't enter any of the houses in the towns (the exceptions being Gongaga and Nibelheim, which makes me wonder that if they got it right towards the end why they couldn't do it in the beginning). But that's just me nitpicking environments that are ultimately just pixels on a screen.

3) Probably the biggest thing I was excited for about Rebirth was the open world they'd make, especially with how much the devs were hyping it up as something to immerse yourself in. Sure enough, it's a VAST improvement over the likes of something like FFXV or FFXVI. If there was anything from this "hate" list I would move up to the "like" list, it would be this. But alas there are several major problems I have with the open world. Probably my biggest issue with this is that I believe in open world games, exploration exists beyond communication towers, quest markers on a map, and a giant navigation bar on the top of the UI telling you where to go. It sucks that in 2024 we're getting 2014 Ubislop levels of open world design. This isn't exploration; this is crossing off a checklist. What makes this checklist feeling worse is that most of the activities in the world map involve you just going to a place in bumfuck nowhere to hit QTEs for shitcoins so that Chadley can constantly call your phone and say the most annoying things ever. God, I want to rip out all of Chadley's ass hairs individually, if he even has any. Anyway, each activity you do in the world creates a new location for you to fast travel to, as if the 8 Chocobo Stops and the handful of Cache Locations in any given region weren't enough for that. Finally, I know a lot of people online would get up in arms over this, but I'm not a huge fan of slathering yellow paint on climbable objects in games and/or having protruding ledges telling you where to climb, which Rebirth is guilty of both of those.

4) Minigames. Oh, minigames. At first, I thought it was okay that there were over 100 minigames in the game since they're all mostly optional and if you want you can just skip them. I say mostly here. Maybe it's my fault that the completionist in me wanted to do every single one of them, but I think it's a problem that the game relegates certain story sections to specifically minigames. Costa del Sol did NOT need to be filled to the brim with them, even if it is a resort. I'm at Costa del Sol to catch some tans and meet up with Professor Hojo, not shoot targets with a gun. I'm at the beach, not a carnival. It got to the point that when I got to the Gold Saucer, the area that was for the most contained of all the mini games in the original game and is marketed as that in the promotion for this game, I couldn't really care because at some point it felt like the entire world was the Gold Saucer. What's even crazy is that there are entire mini games just relegated to a single side quest, like the mushroom picking one in Gongaga. This game is henceforth called "Final Fantasy VII ReCarnival".

5) Ever since the ending of Remake and the foreshadowing it created that things were going to be different from here on out, you would think that they would go all out with such a theme. And I'm not entirely against the idea of them doing something different on top of something that already existed; I think that shit's cool if anything, even if I preferred if they didn't in this particular case. Rather, I'm more critical of how they go about changing things and how they went about telling the player that they were changing things. I didn't think Remake needed Chapter 18 to be what it was and also think it was horribly executed, but I got what I paid for and went with it. What it did set up, however, was the idea that the sky is the limit with how they go about tweaking things, to the point where possibly the most talked about scene in gaming history is now considered a spoiler.

For the first half of Rebirth, the changes to the game's story are very minimal, some of which I find as good changes others not so much. For example, I think the change of making Yuffie the victim of drowning in Under Junon instead of Priscilla given that Yuffie is now a mandatory character is great. Other changes like making Cloud the captain of the troops in the Inauguration Parade rub me the wrong way but aren't something to lose sleep over. Finally there are other changes like showing Sephiroth appear on the scene and kill the Midgardsormr in front of the party that I just can't really defend and would prefer if they kept it the way it was in the original.

The second half of the game, however, is when the changes they make really start to come in, and this is where a lot of my being okay with changes ends. It almost kind of seemed like "subtlety" is a banned word at Square Enix offices. If the devs knew that they were adapting a scene fans had already liked, it's like they had the notion to just add as much noise as possible to that scene. For example, I am not a fan of the way the Barret and Dyne scene was handled. What sequence of events would you rather have?
A) Get greeted by dead bodies on the floor with bullet wounds in them, get sent to prison, leave the prison, catch up with Barret, find out the truth that Barret didn't do it and it was in fact Dyne, watch Dyne commit suicide, and then do a Chocobo race to win your freedom.
Or, B) Have Barret see a gun-armed man in the distance, have the rest of the party get greeted by dead bodies on the floor with bullet wounds in them, get told you have 24 hours to find the real culprit, get into the prison, do a bunch of minigames to get to the Chocobo race, leave the prison by winning the Chocobo race, find Barret and Dyne, learn that Dyne is a mutant freak who can attach metal to his arm out of thin air, have Shinra troops ambush Dyne and kill him, and finally have a Palmer boss fight that was so out of place given that they had cut Rocket Town I felt like punching a hole through my monitor? (By the way, I'm okay with them cutting Rocket Town in this game so long as they can justify it in Part 3).

Do you see my point? There's just a lot of times in the story, moreso in the second part, where the writers in their hubris just add a whole lot of nothing to an already popular scene that didn't need anything extra at all, especially the ending for this game, which I'll touch on next.

6) Here's the doozy. FUCK. THIS. ENDING! I had so many theories as to what they could do with this game, but this ending was NOT one of them. They singlehandedly ruined the ONE scene that was integral to Final Fantasy VII. If you wanted a world where Aerith dies like I did, you got it. If you're a crazed character shipper who wanted a world where Aerith lives, you got it. Unfortunately, this ending has put me in a position of feeling absolutely nothing; I'm now in a world where I don't care anymore. This ending pisses me off entirely for 3 reasons.

A) I usually hate plots that revolve around multiverses, because it becomes very easy to just replace characters, removing any sort of stakes from the narrative equation. If John Doe from universe A dies, no one's stopping the crew in universe A from bringing back John Doe from universe B who has the exact same personality and characteristics and acting as if nothing happened. So far, with the writing that's already been put in stone, it seems we already have something of the sort. I was already apprehensive of the fact that in Remake they somehow managed to bring Zack back to life knowing that it was in an alternate timeline, but until now it was relegated to just that; an alternate timeline that I couldn't care in the slightest about. Now they've officially opened the door to bringing Zack into the main world, and it's seemingly already happened. What's stopping the writers from just bringing Aerith back from another world, since the Aerith we've seen from another world was just more of the same we've had the entire game? Oh wait, they did bring Aerith back for the final boss fight. And Aerith does show up right there at the final frame before the credits roll (granted, I think this is more of Cloud hallucinating her into the frame, but only time will tell). They can't have their social media star die on us! No, no, no! What makes it even worse is that the black and white materias are officially stated to be from other worlds, meaning the writers can and will add complete random shit from out of their asses and just say "oh it's from another world".

B) Aerith's death is supposed to be the one scene from the game that shows the finality of life. It's fickle. You don't know when and how it's going to end and how it'll affect everyone around you. Even despite how sad it feels, you still have to carry on with the lost's legacy in tow. The original game exemplifies this perfectly; you reach the Forgotten Capital (which, by the way, I'm also SUPER pissed they didn't make it a proper city and instead relegated to making the Temple of the Ancients the city and the actual Capital into just a narrow hallway. I would have really loved to hear a final rendition of You Can Hear The Cries Of The Planet in essence of what we got with the Seven Second Till The End bit at the end of Remake), see Aerith praying there, only for her to get impaled and then immediately fighting Jenova, burying her body in the water, and then moving along towards the Northern Crater. Now, with Rebirth, remember how I said "subtlety" is a banned word at Square Enix offices? In the Forgotten Capital, you get to see Cloud disarm Sephiroth before killing her, only for it to just instantly cut to showing Sephiroth having impaled her because "world jumps" or whatever multiversal bullshit that instantly takes out any emotion from the scene, a 3 phase Jenova fight which is fine I guess but it begs the question of if they're really staying true to the original if it isn't catching the same emotional beats, and then like 50 gajillion phases of a Sephiroth boss fight where you fight alongside Zack and Aerith, who should be LONG DEAD by this point, but some multiversal chicanery dictates them to be in the scene. It's all some real fucking bullshit I could not care for anymore. What makes it even worse is that we don't see the water burial anymore, instead it's just implied that it happened but we can't truly say goodbye to Aerith just yet, no no no! NOT the Square Enix social media star!

C) Whatever they're cooking for the sequence in Mideel where Cloud falls into the Lifestream and regains his memory, they've gotta have to pack at least 3 different Lifestreams to get that man's memory up and running again. This man's brain is COOKED. The worst part is it doesn't need to be this way at all. There was a power in knowing seeing Cloud and Tifa come to terms about what happened in Nibelheim. Now Cloud has to come to terms with the fact that Aerith is dead, some shit revolving around Zack since apparently now he knows who Zack is since that was just randomly revealed in the return to Nibelheim, AND his true identity. The ending creates a GIANT mess inside Cloud's brain, and it all could have been avoided if they didn't add all this noise to a very popular scene. There's a charm in subtlety, and these writers just seemingly forgot that.

Conclusion
Overall, there are higher highs and MUCH lower lows than the first game in this Remake series. This leaves me with a much more sour taste in my mouth than the first game did, however, to the point where I don't see myself actually buying the third part until I read up on all the spoilers and listen to/watch fan reactions. Though, that just might be me writing this still angry that I had to sit through that ending not even a mere few hours ago. This is probably the first time I've genuinely felt hollowness and somewhat of an ambivalence over a game, even if I did find myself enjoying a lot of what it had to offer. I'm sorry, Remake project, but you've officially lost the plot.