I guess I’ll start off this review by saying that I am not Final Fantasy VII’s biggest shooter. I’ve played the original and the remake and it’s a pretty good story, but it’s not my favorite Final Fantasy. I don’t really have any outward complaints about the narrative because of this, except for what’s directly presented to us. If they were to remake X or IX and do whatever they wanted with them in the same vein as this trilogy, I’m sure I could understand a lot of fan’s frustration, but for the most part I’ll be talking about the core gameplay. I’m gonna be trying this new thing where I talk about spoilers in hyperlinks instead of cramming them in the bottom of the review and describing them in vague terms, so don’t worry about getting your eyes tainted to something you don’t want to see. For the most part, it sits in a weird place in my head because I liked a lot of what they did but also despised a lot as well. As soon as I opened the menu and saw crafting I was extremely hesitant. It’s really funny to me that this game had so much discourse about yellow paint breaking people’s immersion, but no one seems to care about the pouches of crafting materials just laid all over the place for no reason. I would describe this game as a complete descent into madness personally.
I’ll start with the combat because it was my main gripe with Remake, and I want to get the positives out before I get into salt territory with the negatives. I’m much more of a turn-based connoisseur and getting used to the action gameplay was like getting shoved into arctic waters. I always felt like the dodges on the characters weren’t effective and the ATB gauge build up would drop a sledgehammer on my balls every time I’d get caught with it empty and unable to heal during a 45 minute boss fight. It sucked ass in that game, and it wouldn’t benefit from the fact that most chapters are just endless roadblocks of bosses that fly and cancel out your actions with cinematic cutscenes. Some of this is still present in Rebirth, but they managed to both fix the momentum of the characters in combat and delete half the health on most of the enemies. It was like leagues different and done way better here. Most of the character’s dodges were changed and were actually able to dodge attacks. Cloud was given this ranged laser attack that allowed him to build ATB from a distance which made him so much better to play as, especially because he’s the only party member that can’t be switched out. I found both Red and Tifa to be extremely overpowered due to their critical chances. If you give them ATB boosting items, they turn into automatic weapons that barely need to reload. It was just a much better experience overall. Instead of rolling my eyes at the giant mech boss, I was actually enjoying myself for once. I do still think Aerith is atrocious to play as though. She has better Ward abilities, but she’s still cannon fodder. Everytime she was forced to do a battle by herself, it was like Guantanomo torture.
The addition of the other party members hanging out on the side was neat, but I honestly can’t tell if they were actually helping or if they were just there for moral support. I definitely saw Barret pressure some enemies from afar when the stars aligned, but it seemed like Red and Cait Sith would just stare menacingly off to the side. It was still like, the perfect small change that you didn’t really know you needed though. There’s never any questioning what they were up to while your core 3 get to kill everything, because well… they’re right there! What I would love to see in the next game is the ability to potentially swap characters out on the fly, similar to Final Fantasy X. If the characters are there anyways, it shouldn’t be hard to implement. It would just be so nice if you ran into a flying enemy and could swap your melee attackers out for Yuffie/Barret mid-battle, instead of having to do it before battle after a reload. Since you’ll have the full party for that game, I feel like it’s going to be a must-have feature and I hope they don’t continue these full chapters of split parties just for the sake of forcing you to play as someone else for 3 monotonous hours. It helps that enemies are much easier to stagger in this game, meaning that they’re also much easier to kill overall. The combat is just a huge step up and it was actually fun in this game.
Just like in Remake though, there are a lot of highs and lows in this game. The highs are monumentally fantastic, while the lows are like slamming your face into concrete. If you thought that Remake had a serious issue with padding out its ass, then I’m so sorry to say this, but it’s made so much worse in this game. The issue is still extremely prevalent, it’s just that it’s relegated more into the side content than it is in the main story this time. Rebirth does benefit from taking place across multiple locations, and they are beautiful, but the chapters are still bloated beyond all Hell by chores masked as mini-games and mini-challenges. And here’s the thing, I don’t want to hear anyone in the comments raising a finger and going, “well, it’s all optional and you’re very dumb!! Why did you do it if you didn’t enjoy it? ☝️🤓” Is it though…? Is it truly optional content if your party’s EXP, SP, and relationship with them are tied to the side quests and intel? You can say all day that the shit doesn’t have to be done, but it doesn’t eliminate the fact that your main level progression comes from playing the same QTE puzzle 6 times per area and turning on shitty ass Tears of the Kingdom towers so that Chadley can constantly bitch in your ear about shit you do not care about. I’m genuinely wondering if people actually liked doing these? Not just, “I didn’t mind it.” Nope, did you genuinely enjoy doing this repetitive crap? Don’t hesitate to raise your hands. Even if you did, just because the shit is “optional” it does not mean it’s not in the game, and I’m here to talk about what I don’t like in the game, bucko. Like 75% of the playtime of this game is just as much bloated trash as the Trash Island that’s swimming in the ocean right now.
The mini-games ranged from very fun to complete horseshit. People are like, “man I wish Final Fantasy had mini-games again, what happened to them??!!” What, you mean these torture devices? I’ve never been a fan of most Final Fantasy mini-games. They’re at their best when they’re short and confined to one area. If they’re forced to be played, they should at least wrap into the story in the same way that Blitzball does. And I KNOW!! Final Fantasy VII was like mini-game central, there’s some sort of mini-game from giving CPR, snowboarding, to changing your damn clothes. I got it, but in Rebirth there are more than just the recreations of the original mini-games. There is a mini-game for doing the most mundane shit in this game and it’s overbearingly god awful. The beginning of the game was so overwhelming; you’re tossed into this gigantic landscape and get 37 tutorials thrown at you at once. How to run around, how to do combat, how to get a chocobo, how to ride a chocobo, how to tie your shoes, how to sit through Chadley’s dialogue without killing yourself, how to use SP, etcetera ad nauseam, until finally it just leaves you alone. There’s got to be a better way of introducing players to open-world games because the first 6 hours of each one always feels like sitting through job orientation everytime. Now toss in 24 mini-games per square inch of each area and you have my Joker origin story. I think it was in Chapter 9 when I was doing a side-quest for Aerith and it turned out to be another mini-game where you have to use the controller bumpers to rip mushrooms out of the ground, the inner coil of my being keeping me sane just burst like the engine belt inside of a car. From then on, I was hanging on a ledge by my last remaining fingers. I did eventually fall off the ledge, but it’ll be brought up in spoiler talk due to it being extremely late-game.
To be honest, not all of them were terrible. The Costa del Sol events, while extended way beyond its original counterpart, were easier to swallow because they were meant to be a fun respite to the major plot. The Gold Saucer events obviously were fine, it’s like the one part of the game where you’re supposed to fuck around. Queen’s Blood was genuinely interesting and the Junon marching was really fun when the game finally let you fucking get on with it. However, Fort Condor can drink my piss, especially because they changed the rules of the game for the sole reason of probably annoying me. Chocobo Racing can die in a ditch off the highway. That punching mini-game was needlessly complicated for no reason at all. The Cactuar mini-game might as well have ripped my face off instead. These are just the ones that annoyed me the most, the 50 other ones were either less annoying or just forgettable. It’s nice that the soundtrack is amped up to its extreme, with this being what seems like a 500 song discography, but that only slightly mitigates how annoying the games are to play. (I would drop that one dog song here, but everyone else beat me to the punch a month ago.) The PS5 has some dogshit bumpers too, like I can’t be the only one who thinks this? They hurt to use for someone like me with wrist pain, and there’s a lot of mini-games that require you to mash them. They’re too busy trying to ooh and aaahh you with motion controls and sensory features that they forgot how shit it is to mash bumpers that are literally fighting back. It’s nice that you can turn that off, but they put it in by default as the intended way of playing it. It’s just so egregious and doesn’t help with the pacing issues that most people had in Remake, in fact it’s made somewhat worse.
ring ring “Hey, it’s Chadley here!! I’m going to remind you that this game was $70 and therefore your complaint is rendered discarded. Just don’t do the content, forehead. It’s that easy."
Chadley, I will not hesitate to split you in half. I keep seeing this flimsy argument thrown around every time someone complains about this game. They get swarmed by people dropping the $70 comment like it’s the ultimate backhand. That it’s okay for the game to be overflowing with boring slop because it justifies it being $10 more than it would have been 5 years ago. It’s so cool that you like watching paint dry, but I don’t. There are games worth $30 and 5 hours long that were much more pleasant and much more memorable experiences than this. Baldur’s Gate 3 discourse has rotted all of your brains thinking that every game has to be 200 hours long to be worth it, when in reality if that game had been cut 50 hours it still would have been great because it was fun and had meaningful content. All the boring chore work in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth bothers me because it does nothing but waste your time and take you away from the character writing, which is the good shit. I will never forget how this game forces you to do a shitty on-rails gun mini-game 5 seconds after Barret has one of the most heart-wrenching cutscenes in the entire game. You might as well have played a laugh track over it. It’s not enough that you talk to the characters and maybe sometimes go on an outing with them, nope, you have to do a 6 chain side quest of killing monsters and playing mini-games, or looking for locations from a photograph, or crafting an object for the local idiot. There’s literally one Yuffie quest where a character you don’t remember from the Intermission DLC basically says “Hi” to you, then you run around the entire map looking for a monster for 30 minutes just for him to leave and have nothing else to add. It was worth it to get brownie points for Yuffie and unlock better dialogue for her that actually rules, but did they really have to make you work that hard for it? I guarantee no one will remember these quests in like 6 months.
It just blows honestly, because they put so much care into fleshing these characters out to the extreme. Their friendships are more prevalent and actually matter in this game. The comedy is funny when it hits and there’s sprinkles of silly moments that work well in making Cloud less of a hardass and more of a softie as the game progresses. I have never given a shit about shipping in this game, and it doesn’t matter here because they finally give those fans what they want if they work for it, so just about everyone is happy. Aerith and Tifa are actually friends and not weird competition, it’s so refreshing. And no matter how you feel about the narrative changes, the plot of FF7 is still just as fascinating as it ever was so the game is fantastic when you’re actually going through the main events. This has got to be one of the most rag-tag cast of characters in the whole series, maybe right next to IX’s gaggle of weirdos, and I genuinely care about what happens to them so of course I want to unlock all of their special dialogues. It’s just so unfortunate that it’s all bogged down by the most monotonous content ever. The writing prevents the game from being less ass than it could be, but it also could be so much better at the same time.
This link is everything I have to say about spoiler territory. Click at your own discretion.
Some other random things I felt: I’m glad that they introduced a fast travel mechanic because it's the one thing that doesn't waste your time. It’s not just a fast-travel at chocobo stops, but just about any location you discover has the ability to teleport to it. Without that, it would suck. The landscapes are amazing and so beautiful, but it came at the cost of mobility. Everytime my chocobo clipped onto a rock or refused to leap off of a small cliff, part of my soul cracked. It just made travel a pain in the ass sometimes, especially in the rocky, ruin like areas. Every action from getting out of the dune buggy and sitting on benches would feel excruciating because Cloud would always pause for a second before and after doing it, just breaking up the flow of the mobility for no real reason. I really hope they fix this in the next game because it was just another thing in it that started off kind of annoying, but then grew to extreme displeasure as the game went on. Selena is by far the best chocobo though.
The game over screen is worded atrociously. The multiple options to reload are confusing and I learned the hard way that reloading a checkpoint instead of a battle was a deathly mistake. These needed to either not exist or be rephrased differently. Why on God’s green Earth would I ever want to go back 3 hours on reload? It’s also really awful that you can’t adjust game settings mid-combat. More like ASScessible if you ask me. There’s no real reason for this, especially when some fights are right after cutscenes because the reload brings you right back to the fight, not before it. It made a certain Chapter 12 fight so fucking annoying to do because the NPCs wouldn’t shut the hell up the whole time. Jesus Christ. Imagine someone needed to adjust color blind filters or some other visible- oh wait, there aren’t any accessibility features at all, except for the scary yellow paint everyone pooped their pants about.
I really did want to like more of this game but it seemed as the longer it went on, the more psychotic I felt. I have found out how much of a pushover I truly am because of this game at the detriment of my own sanity. Critiquing this game seems to be an act of war in some parts, like having criticism for it is somehow removing the mask that I'm actually a gluttonous consumer that doesn't appreciate the art of games, which is nonsense. This toilet is art and I'd piss on that too. I'm glad that people found things to love in this game, and while it is beautiful, it is much more boring than anything else. There’s so much that I liked and yet so much that I hated, so I can only hope that the final game fixes a lot of the issues I have. I’m not going to hold my breath though because that’s exactly what I said in my review for Remake. This story never needed three 60+ hour games to tell itself and it’s getting more clear as time goes on. If the combat stays the same or changes for the better again, then I’m willing to see it through to the end. I'm already 2 games deep and I want to see where the story is going, but I imagine this game without the combat fixes and shudder at the possibility of its existence. We'll see in another 4 or so years.
I’ll start with the combat because it was my main gripe with Remake, and I want to get the positives out before I get into salt territory with the negatives. I’m much more of a turn-based connoisseur and getting used to the action gameplay was like getting shoved into arctic waters. I always felt like the dodges on the characters weren’t effective and the ATB gauge build up would drop a sledgehammer on my balls every time I’d get caught with it empty and unable to heal during a 45 minute boss fight. It sucked ass in that game, and it wouldn’t benefit from the fact that most chapters are just endless roadblocks of bosses that fly and cancel out your actions with cinematic cutscenes. Some of this is still present in Rebirth, but they managed to both fix the momentum of the characters in combat and delete half the health on most of the enemies. It was like leagues different and done way better here. Most of the character’s dodges were changed and were actually able to dodge attacks. Cloud was given this ranged laser attack that allowed him to build ATB from a distance which made him so much better to play as, especially because he’s the only party member that can’t be switched out. I found both Red and Tifa to be extremely overpowered due to their critical chances. If you give them ATB boosting items, they turn into automatic weapons that barely need to reload. It was just a much better experience overall. Instead of rolling my eyes at the giant mech boss, I was actually enjoying myself for once. I do still think Aerith is atrocious to play as though. She has better Ward abilities, but she’s still cannon fodder. Everytime she was forced to do a battle by herself, it was like Guantanomo torture.
The addition of the other party members hanging out on the side was neat, but I honestly can’t tell if they were actually helping or if they were just there for moral support. I definitely saw Barret pressure some enemies from afar when the stars aligned, but it seemed like Red and Cait Sith would just stare menacingly off to the side. It was still like, the perfect small change that you didn’t really know you needed though. There’s never any questioning what they were up to while your core 3 get to kill everything, because well… they’re right there! What I would love to see in the next game is the ability to potentially swap characters out on the fly, similar to Final Fantasy X. If the characters are there anyways, it shouldn’t be hard to implement. It would just be so nice if you ran into a flying enemy and could swap your melee attackers out for Yuffie/Barret mid-battle, instead of having to do it before battle after a reload. Since you’ll have the full party for that game, I feel like it’s going to be a must-have feature and I hope they don’t continue these full chapters of split parties just for the sake of forcing you to play as someone else for 3 monotonous hours. It helps that enemies are much easier to stagger in this game, meaning that they’re also much easier to kill overall. The combat is just a huge step up and it was actually fun in this game.
Just like in Remake though, there are a lot of highs and lows in this game. The highs are monumentally fantastic, while the lows are like slamming your face into concrete. If you thought that Remake had a serious issue with padding out its ass, then I’m so sorry to say this, but it’s made so much worse in this game. The issue is still extremely prevalent, it’s just that it’s relegated more into the side content than it is in the main story this time. Rebirth does benefit from taking place across multiple locations, and they are beautiful, but the chapters are still bloated beyond all Hell by chores masked as mini-games and mini-challenges. And here’s the thing, I don’t want to hear anyone in the comments raising a finger and going, “well, it’s all optional and you’re very dumb!! Why did you do it if you didn’t enjoy it? ☝️🤓” Is it though…? Is it truly optional content if your party’s EXP, SP, and relationship with them are tied to the side quests and intel? You can say all day that the shit doesn’t have to be done, but it doesn’t eliminate the fact that your main level progression comes from playing the same QTE puzzle 6 times per area and turning on shitty ass Tears of the Kingdom towers so that Chadley can constantly bitch in your ear about shit you do not care about. I’m genuinely wondering if people actually liked doing these? Not just, “I didn’t mind it.” Nope, did you genuinely enjoy doing this repetitive crap? Don’t hesitate to raise your hands. Even if you did, just because the shit is “optional” it does not mean it’s not in the game, and I’m here to talk about what I don’t like in the game, bucko. Like 75% of the playtime of this game is just as much bloated trash as the Trash Island that’s swimming in the ocean right now.
The mini-games ranged from very fun to complete horseshit. People are like, “man I wish Final Fantasy had mini-games again, what happened to them??!!” What, you mean these torture devices? I’ve never been a fan of most Final Fantasy mini-games. They’re at their best when they’re short and confined to one area. If they’re forced to be played, they should at least wrap into the story in the same way that Blitzball does. And I KNOW!! Final Fantasy VII was like mini-game central, there’s some sort of mini-game from giving CPR, snowboarding, to changing your damn clothes. I got it, but in Rebirth there are more than just the recreations of the original mini-games. There is a mini-game for doing the most mundane shit in this game and it’s overbearingly god awful. The beginning of the game was so overwhelming; you’re tossed into this gigantic landscape and get 37 tutorials thrown at you at once. How to run around, how to do combat, how to get a chocobo, how to ride a chocobo, how to tie your shoes, how to sit through Chadley’s dialogue without killing yourself, how to use SP, etcetera ad nauseam, until finally it just leaves you alone. There’s got to be a better way of introducing players to open-world games because the first 6 hours of each one always feels like sitting through job orientation everytime. Now toss in 24 mini-games per square inch of each area and you have my Joker origin story. I think it was in Chapter 9 when I was doing a side-quest for Aerith and it turned out to be another mini-game where you have to use the controller bumpers to rip mushrooms out of the ground, the inner coil of my being keeping me sane just burst like the engine belt inside of a car. From then on, I was hanging on a ledge by my last remaining fingers. I did eventually fall off the ledge, but it’ll be brought up in spoiler talk due to it being extremely late-game.
To be honest, not all of them were terrible. The Costa del Sol events, while extended way beyond its original counterpart, were easier to swallow because they were meant to be a fun respite to the major plot. The Gold Saucer events obviously were fine, it’s like the one part of the game where you’re supposed to fuck around. Queen’s Blood was genuinely interesting and the Junon marching was really fun when the game finally let you fucking get on with it. However, Fort Condor can drink my piss, especially because they changed the rules of the game for the sole reason of probably annoying me. Chocobo Racing can die in a ditch off the highway. That punching mini-game was needlessly complicated for no reason at all. The Cactuar mini-game might as well have ripped my face off instead. These are just the ones that annoyed me the most, the 50 other ones were either less annoying or just forgettable. It’s nice that the soundtrack is amped up to its extreme, with this being what seems like a 500 song discography, but that only slightly mitigates how annoying the games are to play. (I would drop that one dog song here, but everyone else beat me to the punch a month ago.) The PS5 has some dogshit bumpers too, like I can’t be the only one who thinks this? They hurt to use for someone like me with wrist pain, and there’s a lot of mini-games that require you to mash them. They’re too busy trying to ooh and aaahh you with motion controls and sensory features that they forgot how shit it is to mash bumpers that are literally fighting back. It’s nice that you can turn that off, but they put it in by default as the intended way of playing it. It’s just so egregious and doesn’t help with the pacing issues that most people had in Remake, in fact it’s made somewhat worse.
ring ring “Hey, it’s Chadley here!! I’m going to remind you that this game was $70 and therefore your complaint is rendered discarded. Just don’t do the content, forehead. It’s that easy."
Chadley, I will not hesitate to split you in half. I keep seeing this flimsy argument thrown around every time someone complains about this game. They get swarmed by people dropping the $70 comment like it’s the ultimate backhand. That it’s okay for the game to be overflowing with boring slop because it justifies it being $10 more than it would have been 5 years ago. It’s so cool that you like watching paint dry, but I don’t. There are games worth $30 and 5 hours long that were much more pleasant and much more memorable experiences than this. Baldur’s Gate 3 discourse has rotted all of your brains thinking that every game has to be 200 hours long to be worth it, when in reality if that game had been cut 50 hours it still would have been great because it was fun and had meaningful content. All the boring chore work in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth bothers me because it does nothing but waste your time and take you away from the character writing, which is the good shit. I will never forget how this game forces you to do a shitty on-rails gun mini-game 5 seconds after Barret has one of the most heart-wrenching cutscenes in the entire game. You might as well have played a laugh track over it. It’s not enough that you talk to the characters and maybe sometimes go on an outing with them, nope, you have to do a 6 chain side quest of killing monsters and playing mini-games, or looking for locations from a photograph, or crafting an object for the local idiot. There’s literally one Yuffie quest where a character you don’t remember from the Intermission DLC basically says “Hi” to you, then you run around the entire map looking for a monster for 30 minutes just for him to leave and have nothing else to add. It was worth it to get brownie points for Yuffie and unlock better dialogue for her that actually rules, but did they really have to make you work that hard for it? I guarantee no one will remember these quests in like 6 months.
It just blows honestly, because they put so much care into fleshing these characters out to the extreme. Their friendships are more prevalent and actually matter in this game. The comedy is funny when it hits and there’s sprinkles of silly moments that work well in making Cloud less of a hardass and more of a softie as the game progresses. I have never given a shit about shipping in this game, and it doesn’t matter here because they finally give those fans what they want if they work for it, so just about everyone is happy. Aerith and Tifa are actually friends and not weird competition, it’s so refreshing. And no matter how you feel about the narrative changes, the plot of FF7 is still just as fascinating as it ever was so the game is fantastic when you’re actually going through the main events. This has got to be one of the most rag-tag cast of characters in the whole series, maybe right next to IX’s gaggle of weirdos, and I genuinely care about what happens to them so of course I want to unlock all of their special dialogues. It’s just so unfortunate that it’s all bogged down by the most monotonous content ever. The writing prevents the game from being less ass than it could be, but it also could be so much better at the same time.
This link is everything I have to say about spoiler territory. Click at your own discretion.
Some other random things I felt: I’m glad that they introduced a fast travel mechanic because it's the one thing that doesn't waste your time. It’s not just a fast-travel at chocobo stops, but just about any location you discover has the ability to teleport to it. Without that, it would suck. The landscapes are amazing and so beautiful, but it came at the cost of mobility. Everytime my chocobo clipped onto a rock or refused to leap off of a small cliff, part of my soul cracked. It just made travel a pain in the ass sometimes, especially in the rocky, ruin like areas. Every action from getting out of the dune buggy and sitting on benches would feel excruciating because Cloud would always pause for a second before and after doing it, just breaking up the flow of the mobility for no real reason. I really hope they fix this in the next game because it was just another thing in it that started off kind of annoying, but then grew to extreme displeasure as the game went on. Selena is by far the best chocobo though.
The game over screen is worded atrociously. The multiple options to reload are confusing and I learned the hard way that reloading a checkpoint instead of a battle was a deathly mistake. These needed to either not exist or be rephrased differently. Why on God’s green Earth would I ever want to go back 3 hours on reload? It’s also really awful that you can’t adjust game settings mid-combat. More like ASScessible if you ask me. There’s no real reason for this, especially when some fights are right after cutscenes because the reload brings you right back to the fight, not before it. It made a certain Chapter 12 fight so fucking annoying to do because the NPCs wouldn’t shut the hell up the whole time. Jesus Christ. Imagine someone needed to adjust color blind filters or some other visible- oh wait, there aren’t any accessibility features at all, except for the scary yellow paint everyone pooped their pants about.
I really did want to like more of this game but it seemed as the longer it went on, the more psychotic I felt. I have found out how much of a pushover I truly am because of this game at the detriment of my own sanity. Critiquing this game seems to be an act of war in some parts, like having criticism for it is somehow removing the mask that I'm actually a gluttonous consumer that doesn't appreciate the art of games, which is nonsense. This toilet is art and I'd piss on that too. I'm glad that people found things to love in this game, and while it is beautiful, it is much more boring than anything else. There’s so much that I liked and yet so much that I hated, so I can only hope that the final game fixes a lot of the issues I have. I’m not going to hold my breath though because that’s exactly what I said in my review for Remake. This story never needed three 60+ hour games to tell itself and it’s getting more clear as time goes on. If the combat stays the same or changes for the better again, then I’m willing to see it through to the end. I'm already 2 games deep and I want to see where the story is going, but I imagine this game without the combat fixes and shudder at the possibility of its existence. We'll see in another 4 or so years.
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feeshie
24 days ago