After sitting on this game for over a month now, my opinion on this game has only lessened as I ruminate over and over about the 60+ hours I spent with the game.
Of those 60-ish hours, I would say around 10-15 of those hours were moments where narrative was actually occurring, and it was fucking good. When plot was happening, when it was channelling the game it's meant to be a retelling of, the game is fantastic. Cutscene direction is really strong, voice acting is great and it has some of the best lip-sync i've seen in a Japanese developed title.
It's the other 40-50 hours where the game fumbles, and where my mind wanders to the most when thinking about this game. Starting off the game, I quite enjoyed the first area, it was nicely designed and it looked great and it had good environment diversity. I felt compelled to complete everything in the area's activity checklist. However, the more areas that were introduced - the more burned I became completing the same mindless activities, and the areas became more and more tedious to traverse. I was fully ready to stop doing the open world activities by the time I was hit with the 1-2 Punch of Gongaga and Cosmo Canyon. Two areas that had the most tedious and annoying traversal mechanics and really made getting around the map feel like a chore. When I had got to the final area I completely mainlined, feeling further emboldened by the game vomiting 15 more side quests on you.
In terms of the side activities, I do find the reception to them to be fascinating. It's very clear the game is apeing the design of other open-world titles, but it's not like it's doing this content any better. As much as the gaming public lambasts "radio tower" map clearing activities, or "lazy Ubisoft-esque" side content, this game is doing all of that? So why is it not a problem here? It's never actually been a problem, but that's a tale for another day.
What the side-content does the best is give the party more areas to shine, for every quest theres 1 party member that is actively invested in the completion of your side quest objective. It gives you a snippet of their character, a much welcomed addition. While there are moments within the side content that I found enjoyable (Queen's Blood is fantastic), I found that alot of the minigames and stuff to not be as high of a quality as I'd hoped. Alot of the minigames felt like maybe 4 people in the studio worked on them, theres not like an equal level of development time and care between them all, so alot just come off as randomly thrown together so that they can hit some kind of internal metric of having X amount of minigames. I couldn't help but think of Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth when playing through the minigames. RGG are the masters of minigames in my opinion, and 90% of the time those minigames are there for you to be distracted with. You're able to go off on your own and on your own volition interact with the minigames. But in Rebirth, minigames are shoved down your throat left right and center to mask the fact that there isn't really a lot happening in this section of Final Fantasy 7's narrative. I fully believe that a lot of the minigames should not be integrated within the story, even for areas where it's intentionally lax and they want you to "have fun". That was a problem I actually had with Infinite Wealth, it constantly dragged you away from the story in order to interact with the big minigames it had implemented. They should have all been relegated to the Golden Saucer.
Now, the narrative. When there was actually stuff happening I was pogging and soying. The first couple hours were great, and then there were sparce moments here and there where I had fun and then the game ended. The ending left ALOT to be desired, and I was ultimately left with more questions than answers - which was quite disappointing as I had bought the game to get those answers. I wanted to see what they were laying the groundwork for in Remake, and I still have yet to see where they are going. There are flashes where the game is showing it's hand, but it's presented so ambiguously it just made me frustrated. The final chapter of the game had it's ups and downs, and then I was presented with yet another boss fight against Sephiroth and then it was done.
I don't know what they are going to do with the third game. They can't get away with "nothing happening" in the final act clearly, so I wonder if they're going to focus on the inclusion of inane minigames that completely destroy the pacing of the narrative. I'm at the point where I believe that's probably whats going to happen. I really hope the final game knocks it out of the park, but like are we really going to end on the 5th fight with Sephiroth with One Winged Angel playing for the 14th time? I don't mind games where the primary focus is just vibing out and hanging around the characters, I just don't feel like that was marketed appropriately. Had I known this game was going to be a bit more primarily slice-of-life I would've set my expectations as such - but I understand that adapting this section of the original game was going to be a bit difficult.
Random points I never really mentioned:
- Combat is good, love it
- Pre-rendered scenes are gorgeous
- Queen's Blood is amazing
- Golden Saucer and Costa Del Sol are fucking beautiful, GS in particular I really loved just being in
- Party member AI is fucking stupid, I don't like the overreliance on Materia in order to get them to do certain actions.
- AP economy is wayyyyy too small, I finished the game and still had HP Up materia I got at the beginning of the game that still hadn't levelled up to the max
- Folio menu was ass
- Potions became useless within the first hour of play. What the fuck? I can't believe that, genuinely, probably the weirdest thing in the game. I became outleveled for a base potion within the first HOUR OF THE GAME.
- Random shit not being implemented, like why can't my chocobo jump? Would get annoyed being on a cliff and having to run allll the way down a hill path instead of just being able to jump and glide so they can have area-specific chocobo gimicks
Thats all, rant over. Very polarizing game for me.
Of those 60-ish hours, I would say around 10-15 of those hours were moments where narrative was actually occurring, and it was fucking good. When plot was happening, when it was channelling the game it's meant to be a retelling of, the game is fantastic. Cutscene direction is really strong, voice acting is great and it has some of the best lip-sync i've seen in a Japanese developed title.
It's the other 40-50 hours where the game fumbles, and where my mind wanders to the most when thinking about this game. Starting off the game, I quite enjoyed the first area, it was nicely designed and it looked great and it had good environment diversity. I felt compelled to complete everything in the area's activity checklist. However, the more areas that were introduced - the more burned I became completing the same mindless activities, and the areas became more and more tedious to traverse. I was fully ready to stop doing the open world activities by the time I was hit with the 1-2 Punch of Gongaga and Cosmo Canyon. Two areas that had the most tedious and annoying traversal mechanics and really made getting around the map feel like a chore. When I had got to the final area I completely mainlined, feeling further emboldened by the game vomiting 15 more side quests on you.
In terms of the side activities, I do find the reception to them to be fascinating. It's very clear the game is apeing the design of other open-world titles, but it's not like it's doing this content any better. As much as the gaming public lambasts "radio tower" map clearing activities, or "lazy Ubisoft-esque" side content, this game is doing all of that? So why is it not a problem here? It's never actually been a problem, but that's a tale for another day.
What the side-content does the best is give the party more areas to shine, for every quest theres 1 party member that is actively invested in the completion of your side quest objective. It gives you a snippet of their character, a much welcomed addition. While there are moments within the side content that I found enjoyable (Queen's Blood is fantastic), I found that alot of the minigames and stuff to not be as high of a quality as I'd hoped. Alot of the minigames felt like maybe 4 people in the studio worked on them, theres not like an equal level of development time and care between them all, so alot just come off as randomly thrown together so that they can hit some kind of internal metric of having X amount of minigames. I couldn't help but think of Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth when playing through the minigames. RGG are the masters of minigames in my opinion, and 90% of the time those minigames are there for you to be distracted with. You're able to go off on your own and on your own volition interact with the minigames. But in Rebirth, minigames are shoved down your throat left right and center to mask the fact that there isn't really a lot happening in this section of Final Fantasy 7's narrative. I fully believe that a lot of the minigames should not be integrated within the story, even for areas where it's intentionally lax and they want you to "have fun". That was a problem I actually had with Infinite Wealth, it constantly dragged you away from the story in order to interact with the big minigames it had implemented. They should have all been relegated to the Golden Saucer.
Now, the narrative. When there was actually stuff happening I was pogging and soying. The first couple hours were great, and then there were sparce moments here and there where I had fun and then the game ended. The ending left ALOT to be desired, and I was ultimately left with more questions than answers - which was quite disappointing as I had bought the game to get those answers. I wanted to see what they were laying the groundwork for in Remake, and I still have yet to see where they are going. There are flashes where the game is showing it's hand, but it's presented so ambiguously it just made me frustrated. The final chapter of the game had it's ups and downs, and then I was presented with yet another boss fight against Sephiroth and then it was done.
I don't know what they are going to do with the third game. They can't get away with "nothing happening" in the final act clearly, so I wonder if they're going to focus on the inclusion of inane minigames that completely destroy the pacing of the narrative. I'm at the point where I believe that's probably whats going to happen. I really hope the final game knocks it out of the park, but like are we really going to end on the 5th fight with Sephiroth with One Winged Angel playing for the 14th time? I don't mind games where the primary focus is just vibing out and hanging around the characters, I just don't feel like that was marketed appropriately. Had I known this game was going to be a bit more primarily slice-of-life I would've set my expectations as such - but I understand that adapting this section of the original game was going to be a bit difficult.
Random points I never really mentioned:
- Combat is good, love it
- Pre-rendered scenes are gorgeous
- Queen's Blood is amazing
- Golden Saucer and Costa Del Sol are fucking beautiful, GS in particular I really loved just being in
- Party member AI is fucking stupid, I don't like the overreliance on Materia in order to get them to do certain actions.
- AP economy is wayyyyy too small, I finished the game and still had HP Up materia I got at the beginning of the game that still hadn't levelled up to the max
- Folio menu was ass
- Potions became useless within the first hour of play. What the fuck? I can't believe that, genuinely, probably the weirdest thing in the game. I became outleveled for a base potion within the first HOUR OF THE GAME.
- Random shit not being implemented, like why can't my chocobo jump? Would get annoyed being on a cliff and having to run allll the way down a hill path instead of just being able to jump and glide so they can have area-specific chocobo gimicks
Thats all, rant over. Very polarizing game for me.