This was my most anticipated game of all time and somehow my expectations were exceeded.

This game has basically everything. Almost anything that was in this part of the story of Final Fantasy VII or in Rebirth is back.
Almost every minigame, almost every character (seriously, even Shinra Middle Manager is back), the awesome combat, the beautiful music, the shitty sound mixing, and so much more is back.
But there is so much more.

Anything I was expecting to happen was immediately shattered within the opening minutes of the game. I had heard of the “Zack is in a different world” theory before, so that wasn’t what surprised me. What surprised me was that what was happening on screen was directly contradicting one of the last cutscenes in the Yuffie DLC, the one where Zack goes into church hoping to meet Aerith but only finding some people being sad. Suddenly it wasn’t Zack being in a different world, it was at least two Zacks being in at least two different worlds.
The section doesn’t last long. None of the Zack sections last long, but they all lasted long enough to get me interested in what was going on and desperately needing to find out more.

The rest of chapter one also blew me away, not because it did anything particularly interesting but just because of how well it was executed. The walk to the reactor was a bit too long for my taste (a theme going forward) but the rest was so good. Cloud is so Zack in everything, the way he talks, the way he’s animated, just excellent. Playing as Sephiroth was fun. Playing as Cloud is still fun and the addition of his ranged attacks after a dodge make him feel so much more dynamic. Don’t get why everyone’s complaining about that scene where some people have guns pointed at Sephiroth and they don’t shoot while they get killed one by one, I thought that was fine. Like, between being afraid of Sephiroth and just base hesitance to kill people I think it’s perfectly reasonable that they didn’t even try to kill him. Besides, if they had tried and failed to kill him it would have been a massively different tone that I don’t think would have fit. I also really liked how not only we got a scene of Tifa doubting Cloud’s story, but also Cloud doubting how Tifa could still be alive.

Chapter 2 introduces so. Much. New.
Broden is a nice side character and getting to meet a future Sephiroth clone before he becomes one really fits well with the rest of the game focusing more on the clones as people and victims of Shinra.
Queen’s blood is super fun until it isn’t. I had a blast playing it for most of the game, the various NPCs you play against are fun, and the underlying plot starts out pretty intriguing. My enjoyment of the game dropped massively after they introduced replacement cards though. It felt like the game was no longer about area control but just about having the best card/sickest combo. Don’t get me wrong it was still fun, just not as fun as initially. I also felt like the resolution to the Shadowblood Queen story fell a bit flat.
The folio system is a nice replacement for the weapon upgrade system. I actually cared about what I was unlocking this time. There was still boring shit like “+3% elemental damage” or “+200 hp” but there were some interesting abilities that I was actually excited to get, and not just the synergy abilities (which are a great addition btw) and the level 3 limit breaks (which is a great was to handle higher level limit breaks btw, much better than what Remake was doing).
The party relationship system is… fine? Not a big fan of putting numbers on relationships in video games in general but this is largely inoffensive. It sucks a bit that you might have to skip out on some side quests depending on what date you want to go for.
Tifa and Barret are still as fun to play as they were in Remake but weren’t really improved much either. Aerith on the other hand is somehow even better than in Remake. Ward shift makes her so much more dynamic to play and some of her new abilities like Radiant Ward feel so good to use. Red XIII seems fun to play but he is admittedly the character I played as the least.
There is so much new materia! A lot of it is really fun, I’m an especially big fan of the one that combines two spells at once. My pro gamer tip is combining that one with Elemental materia in your armour to gain immunity to two elements at once. I also love that they brought back HP <-> MP even though it’s arguably even more useless now.
The crafting is surprisingly tolerable. I’m not a fan of crafting, ever, but if you’re just picking things up as you see them while walking around you should be able to craft most things.
The open world is fun! I’m generally not a fan of open world games but I actually went for 100% world intel completion. Not sure if it was just more fun than in other games or if I wanted all the new materia or if I just liked Chadley. Chadley’s great by the way and I need everyone to stop hating on him 4 years ago so they never have him hate on M.A.I as a reflection of the audience’s reaction to him.
The enemies are for the most part pretty fun, save for a few annoying ones here or there. I really like how they implemented some of the weirder designs from the original game. However, when I assessed an orc for the first time and read them being called beastmen I was pretty disappointed. I need Square Enix to hire me specifically for the job of slapping any writer who ever writes the word beastmen in another Final Fantasy game. It’s so fucking racist, stop it please!
The side quests are way better this time. Just being allowed to pace them out yourself, letting you choose when you want to do them as opposed to saying “it’s sidequest time, do all of them now or make them impossible to complete unless you go back with chapter select later”. They’re also way better written. Focusing each side quest on one party member was a great choice to get some space for additional character writing. The side quest where you escort a dog and Barret talks about parenting is my favourite. Some side quests are too long and repetitive though, especially the ones where you follow some creature and it runs away from you twice and there’s combat each time.
The protorelic world intel/sidequest amalgamation thingy is a bit of a mixed bag. I liked the Gongaga and the Nibelheim one and am always up for Gilgamesh shenanigans so that was great too but man. The rest of them kinda all sucked. I ranted about how much I hate Beck’s Badasses before, they somehow managed to ruin Fort Condor, which I really liked in Intermission, the whole Cactuar thingie took way too long and was kinda boring (and Kid G’s design is kinda weird) and while it was nice to get another look at the Intermission Avalanche crew in Cosmo Canyon, the minigame there was too easy to be interesting (though I haven’t done the hard mode yet so I might change my opinion on this).
I love Chocobos and everything around them in this game is awesome. Yes, the catching minigames are annoying as fuck but that only makes me appreciate them more.
And as I’ve mentioned before, the combat is awesome, synergy skills and limit levels fit right in, I only wish the game would let you swap party members mid-combat, maybe for one ATB. Insert reference to my FFVI review here.
Oh also since I don’t wanna mention it every time, I enjoy pretty much all of the side characters, they’re neat. Except for Beck’s Badasses of course.

The Midgardsormr fight is interesting. I’ve seen some people say that they don’t like it, because having this super powerful monster that you can only run away from, only for Sephiroth to kill it effortlessly was great at setting him up as being super powerful but the issue with that is that we already fought and won against Sephiroth at the end of Remake, so I think using it as an opportunity to showcase the connection between Cloud and Sephiroth instead is a great idea.

I really like the Crow’s Nest conceptually. Resistance against Shinra takes many forms, and if you’re living in a city where its environmental destruction is less obvious, but its fascist empire is somehow even more obvious, then running away to an anarchist commune instead of blowing up a reactor makes sense as a form of resistance. Too bad it doesn’t really get much time to shine.

I really liked Yuffie in Intermission and she continues being great here. She has great chemistry with the party, and I especially like her as a more radical counter to Aerith’s and Tifa’s more lib tendencies. Making her a mandatory party member is awesome because now every scene is written with her in mind. I’m not sure if I’m a big fan of introducing her so long before she actually joins the party, but her scene on the beach was cool and I loved using the darts minigame mechanics from Rebirth for an assassination.

The entire upper Junon section is so fun. I love how they turned this one kinda bad minigame from the original into a huge thing and while I’m not super into them woobifying the Shinra army I did enjoy getting them together and watching their silly walk and fighting alongside them later. I also really like what they did with Rufus, he was kind of a nothing character in the OG, but he is pretty interesting here. Making Glenn Lodbrok, a character from the gacha, a somewhat major character sure is a choice but I don’t mind it too much. Roche was a delight as always.

My reaction to them turning the journey to Costa del Sol into a whole chapter was “of course”. It’s a fun chapter, I loved the QB tournament arc, but it did make me feel like they might be going a bit too far with how disgustingly evil they are making Hojo. Also idk where else to mention this but the Wall Market trio is back (though we only see two of them for most of the game) and they’re still in this really weird spot where they’re supposed to be likable characters and they generally are but also are technically involved in human trafficking and it just never gets addressed. It feels even worse here than in Remake, now that “Don Corneo does human trafficking” is basically entirely absent from the game.
I’m gonna stop mentioning it every single time that a chapter was fun and enjoyable from now on lol, it’s starting to feel repetitive just keep in mind that this game is fun as fuck to play.

Climbing Mount Corel was way too long. I get wanting to have a mandatory Yuffie section early on so people who didn’t play Intermission can get familiar with her but man there must have been a way to do that without the longest dungeon yet that barely has any interesting character interactions or cool set pieces.
Also introducing the Weapons this early is interesting, looking forward to seeing what they’ll do with this.

The Gold Saucer felt a bit weird to me. I guess it was already kind of like this in the original, I just didn’t pay much attention to it then, but it’s so heavily focused on arcade games. Don’t get me wrong, I love arcades, which they were still a thing here, but surely they have arcades in Midgar too? Then what are all the people coming all the way to a different continent for?
Removing the Chocobo betting is probably for the best, I don’t know if there was some kind of change in the general attitude towards horse betting in Japan, but it is gambling and probably shouldn’t be in the game (and maybe shouldn’t be legal in Japan).

After the Gold Saucer, we enter Correl Prison. What a mixed bag! It was already a mixed bag in the original but it’s a different kind of mixed bag this time. Frankly I’m not sure how I feel about it? They didn’t like utterly ruin it, I’m not even sure it’s worse, it’s just so weirdly paced. Not to mention that the worldbuilding changes they made make no sense.
Unrelated but I had a bit of a glitch where Esther basically pinned Cloud between the wall and the Chocobo racing simulator and I was unable to leave and after that I had to look up if there were any Cloud/Esther fics on ao3 and there was only one and it was mostly Cloud/Joe with “Cloud/Ester if you squint a little” to quote directly from the tags which kind of surprised me, she was pretty flirty towards him in this game, even beyond the accidental Kabedon.

After whatever that was, we are finally officially joined by Cait Sith! And I fucking hate how his name is pronounced. I hate it so much. I’ve been ranting about this to anyone who would listen since it was first announced back in October. Why would you choose to be wrong on purpose like this? I’m sure at least some of the voice actors would naturally pronounce it correctly so they had to be told to be wrong by the voice director. And please don’t come at me with the “Oh but they misrepresent things from other cultures all the time” excuse, in my opinion there is a pretty fundamental difference between taking the name from another culture and applying it to a different creature and taking a name from another culture and pronouncing it wrong on purpose, especially if that language is endangered. Also, as far as I’m aware this only applies to the English dub, the Japanese dub obviously pronounces it the only way you possibly could read ケット・シー and I haven’t checked the German and French dubs, if someone reading this has, please let me know.
Pronunciation aside, I love Cait Sith in this game so much. I already enjoyed him in the original game which is fairly rare from what I understand but he is just so much more delightful in this game. He looks great, is excellently animated, I love how he talks, I love how he handles in combat, wish his limit breaks were more interesting though, both mechanically and visually.

Gongaga. The place that had as many gravestones as building in the OG is now an entire open world zone. Because of course it is, this is the everything game.
So, the whispers are back, but they no longer represent fan expectations that everything will play out the same way as it did in the OG. What do they represent this time then? I have no clue! I’ve been thinking about it for a while now but haven’t come to a satisfying conclusion yet and I haven’t really talked about it with anyone else. They honestly don’t do much and I’m not entirely sure why they needed to be brought back but I guess we’ll see in part 3.
The section where Tifa is inside a Weapon and travels through the lifestream is so fucking cool. It doesn’t really amount to much narratively, but it is visually very impressive. I wish everyone’s reaction to Cloud almost murdering Tifa wasn’t “Well I hope he gets his shit together and doesn’t do this again”. I get it for Tifa but why are none of the other people more concerned about this?
Exploring Gongaga is a pain. The challenge of every single protorelic step was mostly “how do I even get there”. Bad time all around.
Cissnei is also back, I guess. Yay she didn’t die? Idk I never got too attached to her during Crisis Core because I thought she’d die for sure, and she doesn’t do enough here for me to get attached to her now.

Speaking of a zone that is a pain to explore, next up is Cosmo Canyon. But before that, we meet Cid. I like him this time! He doesn’t have much of a presence in the story yet, but from what we’ve seen so far he seems pretty interesting. Interested to see how he develops in game 3.
The Nanaki reveal is so well done! Max Mittelman is an awesome voice actor. I wish they had also adjusted his name in menus after this point, feels a bit weird to still see him called Red XIII.
I liked how the people of Cosmo Canyon were portrayed. I already mentioned how a different perspective on Shinra has led the people of Junon to lead a different kind of resistance against them, and this theme carries on here. The people of Cosmo Canyon are so removed from any actual harm that Shinra is causing that any active form of resistance seems ridiculous to them. It’s a lot easier to believe that the planet will fix itself if you’re not living in the slums and your dad wasn’t shot during the war.
The dungeon part of Cosmo Canyon mostly sucked. It worked well at delivering the narrative it wanted to deliver but man why was it so long. It already felt a bit too long when I reached the end of the Nanaki and Barret section and then there was an additional section with the Gi and the Black Materia. At least there was a very short Zack section to break things up a bit but this entire section could have been half as long. If the Gi had at least been interesting to fight this might not have been so bad but no, all of them are the same loop of Cure -> attack until staggered -> kill.
I do like the introduction of the Black Materia as something created by the Gi. I don’t think the question of “why does the Black Materia exist” was one that necessarily needed an answer, but I think this is a way more interesting way for the party to learn about its existence.
I want to give a special shoutout to the photo side quest, it was really cute, and getting the option to take a photo of Aerith made me so happy. I love her so much.

The next stop is Nibelheim and after the last two places being awful to traverse, this one was actually really fun! Almost a bit of a shame that it’s so much smaller than all the other open world zones. Nibelheim’s summon fight of Odin is so bad. All of the other summon fights are so fun but Odin sucks so bad. He’s not even that hard, you just have to spam status effects on him, but I just did not enjoy that fight at all. The refight on Gilgamesh Island is really tough though, and I think the game designers agree that he’s a bit too much there which is why he sometimes just leaves during that fight.
I’m not sure how I feel about Nibelheim being a “treatment centre” for Mako poisoning. I always assumed that the reason there were so many Sephiroth clones in Nibelheim was because they turned all of the people who died during the incident into clones. It makes the whole place a lot less creepy and ominous.
The part where you play as Cloud, Tifa, and Yuffie climbing Mt. Nibel is great. There are many great Yuffie moments, especially when she realizes that Wutai has started the war without her, and Cloud remembering Zack’s existence but remembering him wrong (presumably?) is a fascinating development that I can’t wait to see more of in part 3.
The part where you play as Cait Sith, Aerith, and Barret was funny and silly! People are probably going to hate on it, but I enjoyed it.
Vincent is pretty neat, Matt Mercer does a great job voicing him and I like his design, he doesn’t really do much yet but it’s not like he did much in the OG at any point really.
There is no scene where Sephiroth throws a Materia at Cloud and then flies away. This is the worst game of all time. 0/10.
I’ve mentioned already that Rebirth puts more focus on the Sephiroth clones as people and victims of Shinra and Nibelheim turns this to 11. Not only are there a bunch of them here and one of them even plays Queen’s Blood with you, the protorelic quest here also focuses on them and there is the double punch of Roche and Broden turning into one. With Broden this was kind of obvious but still kind of hurt to actually see but Roche! Silly motorcycle guy with homoerotic fights! I was looking forward to fighting him some more and now he’s like this! Fuck you, Hojo! Seeing one of the silly elements of this game like Roche cross over into a more serious element like this was a pretty heavy gut punch to be honest and I love that the game does things like this. It would have been very simple to keep the serious and the silly stuff more or less separate, but this is way better.
Also, Nibelheim has one last side quest I want to shout out and it is the cat one. Having actually read Traces of Two Pasts it was a delight to see Fluffy in-game and have her and Tifa reunite.

After Nibelheim, the endgame starts. Exploring the ocean with the Tiny Bronco is fun, I wish there was a bit more to do there.
The Gold Saucer date is so fucking amazing. It is a bit weird that apparently Loveless is a VR experience, makes the Gold Saucer even weirder as a thing, and seeing Jessie there was equal parts sad and weird. But that aside, oh my god. I love Aerith so much and listening to No Promises to Keep hurts. Easily the best part of the entire game.
After that there is a lot of very silly combat that I enjoyed a lot, though the Rufus fight was less fun than the Remake one, but also the Remake Rufus fight was my favourite fight of that whole game so that was a pretty high bar.
Once that’s dealt with, the final parts of the Protorelic quest finally unlock. There’s some more misery with Kid G but then you finally get to meet Gilgamesh properly! I haven’t actually finished that fight yet, but it has been a blast so far. Though I have to say it’s a bit annoying that you can’t use Cait Sith for it.
But back to the main story, it is time for the temple of the ancients! And it sucks! Holy shit it is so long! I already complained about a lot of dungeon’s length but they’re all nothing compared to this. It’s so long I couldn’t even really appreciate some genuinely cool moments like the trials. But once that’s over, the game can finally really ramp up.
I’m not entirely sure what to say on the multiworld segment. I think I still need more time to process it, rewatch and replay it, organize my thoughts more, all that stuff. But overall, I really enjoyed it!
Then we skip right to the forgotten capital, and I think skipping the journey there was a great choice. Any amount of traveling or, gods forbid, that silly archaeological digging minigame, would have really ruined the pacing.

In the runup to this game’s release, there were a lot of people really hoping that Aerith would still die. A lot of people were hoping Aerith would survive. Personally, I was just hoping they’d do something interesting with it. Looks like I’m the only one who got what she wanted.
The fight against Jenova is great. Always a big fan of letting me use as many party members as possible. Also, always a big fan of using limit breaks narratively, and everyone but Cloud starting the fight with full limit breaks is fantastic. Everyone is highly emotional about Aerith’s death, except for Cloud who has seen both versions happening and is in denial/unsure if she’s dead. And the phase 1 music mixing J.E.N.O.V.A with Aerith’s theme is awesome.
I was honestly expecting the game to end after Jenova. But obviously they couldn’t let me go without another Sephiroth fight. Another banger fight that lets me use everyone, and this time I really mean everyone. Not only does Aerith help for the final part, I even get to play as Zack! Couldn’t really form an opinion on his gameplay in that short of a fight but there’s supposed to be some combat simulator stuff with him (which I assume unlocks after I beat Gilgamesh?) so maybe I’ll get to try him out some more there. But yeah, fucking perfect final boss, my only minor complaint is that they just brought back one-winged angel rebirth as his boss theme instead of one-upping it again, but that’s fine. Also, he has an attack called Remake and that is so silly I love it so much.


Wow. I ended up writing over 4000 words about this and most of it is just gushing about how much I love this game. I’m honestly just amazed at every single step of the Remake project that they keep pulling it off. Excited to see how it will all end but honestly, even if they completely screw it up somehow, it will have been so worth it already.