I don’t know if this is the best version of Final Fantasy VII, but it certainly is the most!

Where Remake strove to create a focused and authentic sense of place with its reimagining of Midgar, Rebirth feels like it’s shooting to recreate a different part of what defines a PSX era Final Fantasy - this has the original game’s tonal mania, a billion exhaustively realised minigames of varying quality, and a bunch of busy mechanics with intended and unintended interactions capable of breaking the whole game wide open.

Rebirth builds upon and improves all the things I liked about Remake, while also introducing a glut of new wrinkles and mechanics that turn a relatively streamlined action RPG into a Xenoblade enjoyer’s delight - with all the baggage that brings with it. The sidequests are so much better than they were in the previous game,but the open world activities are mostly pretty bad! The overworld is otherwise really compelling in its own right, and didn’t need a bunch of extraneous shit added to it to justify its existence - the Ubisoft style towers that mark all points of interest are particularly egregious when every activity in the open world already has a visual cue that guides you to it. If they’d taken out maybe half of the open world content and made an effort to make the stuff that remained feel a bit more unique from region to region, they could have had something pretty special - but the checklist of activities across the map doesn’t really interact with any of the stuff in the game that’s actually good. I still found myself doing heaps of Chadley’s bullshit despite thinking most of it sucked, because I do really enjoy the act of just hanging out in this setting and spending time with the core cast of characters - which proves that the structure of the quests is at least tolerable, or that with enough charisma I can be tricked into engaging with pretty much any old slop.

The actual beats of Rebirth’s plot are just as tenuously strung together as this stretch of the original game - with often very little reason given for the characters to be travelling from one place to the next - but the way the the cast are brought to life is so loving and detailed that you find yourself excusing every leap they make to get to where the story demands. Rebirth understands that we’re here because we love these guys, and every moment that’s in service of putting these characters through the wringer or bringing them closer together is like magic. There are maybe too many buds towards the end of the game for them to juggle elegantly with the same grace as the playable cast, but this is at its core a game about hanging out with people you already like, and it succeeds way more often than it stumbles.

The last few hours of the game are completely deranged - the landing is loud, messy, and both deliberately and unintentionally struggles for cohesion. The story feels the absence of its own conclusion more keenly than its predecessor, and I’m left wondering once again as the credits roll if any of the new metatextual plot elements are additive, or only serve to muddy the strong emotional beats of the source material.

At multiple times during my playthrough i yelled “fuck yes!” and at others I groaned “this sucks!” which is about as Final Fantasy VII as you could ask for!

Bow wow wow