In keeping with the free-flowing, improvisational spirit of Final Fantasy VII, a series of semi-connected thoughts:
- Lots of people are hung up on the minigames for one reason or another, and they are worthy of discussion, though not about whether they belong here (of course they do) or if they're any good (most aren't), but how their purpose has shifted between the original and this iteration. In 1997, they were tonal interludes meant to show off what a strange, crazy planet we're fighting to protect, bursting with unexpected things to see and do. In 2024, they're blown up in length and number to serve as narrative delivery devices, neatly structured to grant further dimension to one or more of your party members while also conveniently padding out the playtime of your $70 luxury consumer purchase.
More than that, even, they're ways of delaying the inevitable. Rebirth isn't really a game about a doomed planet, but a doomed woman, and everyone with the faintest knowledge of FF7 is aware of this. No matter how many sprawling overworld maps or Gold Saucer diversions or matches of Queen's Blood you throw yourself into, you're still on a beeline toward tragedy. Consider Cloud and Aerith's last "date" and how they never get exactly what they want - the candy, the tchotchke, the photo. Our choices in this world, like any other video game world, are merely a dilation of time, a hopeless attempt to forestall the medium's great historical trauma, gamer 9/11.
This is all theoretically interesting, but also has the unfortunate effect of imbricating the story's emotional slam dunk with the grim maximalist demands of the AAA market. You get what you came for... after 100 hours of wildly quality-variable content, of course. Even the Fated Event itself is compromised by a ludicrous boss rush, your characters all barking out their combat sound bites as if nothing has happened, multiversal fanservice rearing its ugly head for no discernible reason. (I ask this with no malice in my heart: why do people care about Zack enough to justify how much screentime he gets here?) In many ways this is a very simple game, but in the one moment that truly called for simplicity, all of the dubious worldline hijinks Nomura planted in the first game got in the way.
- I did find myself moved by one scene toward the end where the game briefly puts you in the shoes of a sad, scared little girl. The original FF7 made remarkable use of modifying your control scheme to convey shifts in your characters' emotional states; in Rebirth they generally overdo or mishandle it, much like everything else, but it worked well here.
- The combat is generally quite enjoyable. It's comforting to know that SE can get an action RPG right after FF16. Even with one installment worth of practice, though, some characters still feel better thought-out than others. Aerith sucks and Barret is truly just sad - what if you wanted to play Bayonetta using nothing but the guns? I have a few other complaints, like how ancillary and easily interrupted magic is, your characters' irritating lack of poise, and some hitbox tracking that would make Miyazaki blush, but they are ultimately pretty minor.
- Morph and Steal are so useless, what gives?
- Guarding feels terrible. No feedback.
- I liked the (PROTORELIC QUEST SPOILERS) fight a lot. It demands careful and attentive play but also gives you lots of options.
- The music is good, of course, although what other possible outcome could there be when you throw an exhausted supergroup of Japanese composers at one of the most beloved OSTs of all time? Unfortunately, the music is also a key factor in one of the game's great failures: it is almost perpetually unable to modulate its atmosphere. This shit is LOUD, all the time. There are no opportunities whatsoever to just be in a moment and collect your thoughts or size up your environment. I knew I was in for disappointment early on when Cloud and Sephiroth rolled into Nibelheim for their ill-fated flashback mission and I heard the sorrowful strains of Anxious Heart... followed by 15 different NPCs barking at me... followed by me stepping on a stool and dragging it noisily along with my character model for 100 feet. The din is constant from start to finish, and if you don't agree, Chadley would like to have a word or fifty thousand with you.
- This is a more personal gripe, but I feel that this trilogy's total inability to establish a horror tone is one of its great betrayals of its predecessor. The writing was on the wall with the Shinra Building in Remake; while that whole dungeon was badly handled in general, there was no attempt whatsoever at conveying any unease or fear. This is likely a result of Sephiroth being overexposed from the jump in Remake so there's no mystery, no terrible legend lurking around the corner. The horror in the original worked partly because Sephiroth was so brutal in a way that the franchise had never grappled with, but also because the world was more recognizably our own and easier to project yourself on than that of any other Final Fantasy: urban, modern, diseased, desperate, doomed. The Midgar Zolom incident makes you feel small and mortal, and the Shinra Mansion like you're a mere human enmeshed in something hostile and supernatural, but in this game those two setpieces are so fucking stupid that they're not even worth talking about.
- I know that everyone is nutting over the dumb dog song but for me the standout is One, Two, SABO!, which plays, as far as I can tell, during exactly one optional combat. Aggressively joyous and exuberant to the point of menace... love it! Fucking Cactuars!
- In a perfect world, both this game and FF16 falling short of SE's sales expectations would tell the company that the AAA open-world model is just not an effective container for video game storytelling, or at least the type that Final Fantasy made its name on so many years ago. It is my unreasonable hope that they will course correct for Part 3 and bring us back to a more focused experience, but as ever, the gamers demand more. Who are the devs to deny them the constant creep toward bigger and better?
- I really enjoyed Remake, but after this installment the project has lost its shine for me. No more remakes!
- One exception: if SE had any sort of cojones left, they would follow up this time dilation game with a remake of time kompression game FF8, omitting/streamlining all of the side content and churning out the most decadent 10-hour banger of all time, though they don't and they won't.
- Lots of people are hung up on the minigames for one reason or another, and they are worthy of discussion, though not about whether they belong here (of course they do) or if they're any good (most aren't), but how their purpose has shifted between the original and this iteration. In 1997, they were tonal interludes meant to show off what a strange, crazy planet we're fighting to protect, bursting with unexpected things to see and do. In 2024, they're blown up in length and number to serve as narrative delivery devices, neatly structured to grant further dimension to one or more of your party members while also conveniently padding out the playtime of your $70 luxury consumer purchase.
More than that, even, they're ways of delaying the inevitable. Rebirth isn't really a game about a doomed planet, but a doomed woman, and everyone with the faintest knowledge of FF7 is aware of this. No matter how many sprawling overworld maps or Gold Saucer diversions or matches of Queen's Blood you throw yourself into, you're still on a beeline toward tragedy. Consider Cloud and Aerith's last "date" and how they never get exactly what they want - the candy, the tchotchke, the photo. Our choices in this world, like any other video game world, are merely a dilation of time, a hopeless attempt to forestall the medium's great historical trauma, gamer 9/11.
This is all theoretically interesting, but also has the unfortunate effect of imbricating the story's emotional slam dunk with the grim maximalist demands of the AAA market. You get what you came for... after 100 hours of wildly quality-variable content, of course. Even the Fated Event itself is compromised by a ludicrous boss rush, your characters all barking out their combat sound bites as if nothing has happened, multiversal fanservice rearing its ugly head for no discernible reason. (I ask this with no malice in my heart: why do people care about Zack enough to justify how much screentime he gets here?) In many ways this is a very simple game, but in the one moment that truly called for simplicity, all of the dubious worldline hijinks Nomura planted in the first game got in the way.
- I did find myself moved by one scene toward the end where the game briefly puts you in the shoes of a sad, scared little girl. The original FF7 made remarkable use of modifying your control scheme to convey shifts in your characters' emotional states; in Rebirth they generally overdo or mishandle it, much like everything else, but it worked well here.
- The combat is generally quite enjoyable. It's comforting to know that SE can get an action RPG right after FF16. Even with one installment worth of practice, though, some characters still feel better thought-out than others. Aerith sucks and Barret is truly just sad - what if you wanted to play Bayonetta using nothing but the guns? I have a few other complaints, like how ancillary and easily interrupted magic is, your characters' irritating lack of poise, and some hitbox tracking that would make Miyazaki blush, but they are ultimately pretty minor.
- Morph and Steal are so useless, what gives?
- Guarding feels terrible. No feedback.
- I liked the (PROTORELIC QUEST SPOILERS) fight a lot. It demands careful and attentive play but also gives you lots of options.
- The music is good, of course, although what other possible outcome could there be when you throw an exhausted supergroup of Japanese composers at one of the most beloved OSTs of all time? Unfortunately, the music is also a key factor in one of the game's great failures: it is almost perpetually unable to modulate its atmosphere. This shit is LOUD, all the time. There are no opportunities whatsoever to just be in a moment and collect your thoughts or size up your environment. I knew I was in for disappointment early on when Cloud and Sephiroth rolled into Nibelheim for their ill-fated flashback mission and I heard the sorrowful strains of Anxious Heart... followed by 15 different NPCs barking at me... followed by me stepping on a stool and dragging it noisily along with my character model for 100 feet. The din is constant from start to finish, and if you don't agree, Chadley would like to have a word or fifty thousand with you.
- This is a more personal gripe, but I feel that this trilogy's total inability to establish a horror tone is one of its great betrayals of its predecessor. The writing was on the wall with the Shinra Building in Remake; while that whole dungeon was badly handled in general, there was no attempt whatsoever at conveying any unease or fear. This is likely a result of Sephiroth being overexposed from the jump in Remake so there's no mystery, no terrible legend lurking around the corner. The horror in the original worked partly because Sephiroth was so brutal in a way that the franchise had never grappled with, but also because the world was more recognizably our own and easier to project yourself on than that of any other Final Fantasy: urban, modern, diseased, desperate, doomed. The Midgar Zolom incident makes you feel small and mortal, and the Shinra Mansion like you're a mere human enmeshed in something hostile and supernatural, but in this game those two setpieces are so fucking stupid that they're not even worth talking about.
- I know that everyone is nutting over the dumb dog song but for me the standout is One, Two, SABO!, which plays, as far as I can tell, during exactly one optional combat. Aggressively joyous and exuberant to the point of menace... love it! Fucking Cactuars!
- In a perfect world, both this game and FF16 falling short of SE's sales expectations would tell the company that the AAA open-world model is just not an effective container for video game storytelling, or at least the type that Final Fantasy made its name on so many years ago. It is my unreasonable hope that they will course correct for Part 3 and bring us back to a more focused experience, but as ever, the gamers demand more. Who are the devs to deny them the constant creep toward bigger and better?
- I really enjoyed Remake, but after this installment the project has lost its shine for me. No more remakes!
- One exception: if SE had any sort of cojones left, they would follow up this time dilation game with a remake of time kompression game FF8, omitting/streamlining all of the side content and churning out the most decadent 10-hour banger of all time, though they don't and they won't.
6 Comments
@surprisejunkie I can understand getting frustrated with several of the longer minigames in this (even though there aren't any consequences for failing them like let me run back this Queen's Blood match for the tenth time), but what is the point of hating the ones in the original? They're like 2 minutes each at absolute most. I guess you can have an ideological opposition to minigames in general but FF7 at least justifies their presence.
Chocobo breeding, though... I will not be participating, it is beyond man's nature to play God, etc.
Chocobo breeding, though... I will not be participating, it is beyond man's nature to play God, etc.
@epiglottis oh yea 100%, as you noted they are generally not good, and i think plenty of words/tears have been shed over their quality and/or SE’s desire to aggrandise them, so i guess i am mainly astounded at the number of voices questioning their mere existence despite this kind of tonal whiplash being so integral to the original final fantasy seven experience.
I was just thinking about a potential FF8 remake and I came to the same conclusion about abbreviating FF8 being the only sensible way to improve it, which of course would never happen in a million years and consequentially any remake they'd come up with would be doomed to fail.
As for Zack, basically what it comes down to is that he's a very amicable and selfless character in a world perpetuated by angst. The clear issue with including Zack is that some people like Zack but a great majority of them couldn't care less about Crisis Core as a whole, and there is no way to include Zack that would not throw aside the entire purpose of Crisis Core, to say nothing of the original FF7's use of the character. A team with effective creative leads would have noticed they could not have both cakes and do one or the other: either restrict Zack to his original function or completely discard his original, largely auxiliary purpose. But of course they went with some nonsensical compromised version of both.
As for Zack, basically what it comes down to is that he's a very amicable and selfless character in a world perpetuated by angst. The clear issue with including Zack is that some people like Zack but a great majority of them couldn't care less about Crisis Core as a whole, and there is no way to include Zack that would not throw aside the entire purpose of Crisis Core, to say nothing of the original FF7's use of the character. A team with effective creative leads would have noticed they could not have both cakes and do one or the other: either restrict Zack to his original function or completely discard his original, largely auxiliary purpose. But of course they went with some nonsensical compromised version of both.
This is a great review. While I did enjoy the game as a whole, I will admit that you bring up a lot of points that I agree with. And those points are the reason why the original FFVII remains my favourite all-time game. The more straightforward nature of its storytelling definitely works in its advantage when it comes to delivering the emotional bombshells. Not that Rebirth doesn't have its own tear-jerking moments, but all that multiverse bobbins sure does undermine the drama in the last chapter.
@Parma I figured Crisis Core fandom had something to do with it, but I've never played it, and at this point I doubt I ever will.
@Acquiescence Thank you! I don't mean to dismiss the worldline stuff totally out of pocket - they still have one more game to make good on it, right? - but SE should have had the good sense just to let a meaningful moment be.
@Acquiescence Thank you! I don't mean to dismiss the worldline stuff totally out of pocket - they still have one more game to make good on it, right? - but SE should have had the good sense just to let a meaningful moment be.
surprisejunkie
25 days ago