3.5/5 ★ – DeluxeSamuel's review of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

'Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth' is definitely a good game, arguably a fantastic game to some, but there were a lot of issues I had with it that stopped me enjoying it 100%. Firstly I wanna reiterate my history with 'Final Fantasy' to give a general idea of my knowledge, experience and preconceptions coming in to 'Rebirth'. I am a relative newcomer to 'Final Fantasy' and have played exactly 2 games before this in the franchise. The first is 'Final Fantasy 7 Remake - Intergrade' which I loved. I thought it had really great combat, interesting yet relatively uncomplicated progression, solid world-building and fantastic characters, topped off with a great runtime meant that it also never overstayed it's welcome. Although I knew it was different to the original 'Final Fantasy 7', it made me understand why it was so popular and I had that "ahh I get it" moment. It wasn't without elements I didn't like, but I was mostly able to look past it's relatively small number of shortcomings to find a game I still really enjoy. The 2nd game was 'Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 Reunion'. It was a fun follow up game, even if I didn't enjoy it as much as 'Remake'. It's canonicity is still a bit muddy to me, it's side content becomes a slog towards the end and it lacks the energy and charisma of Remake's main cast, but it's still a solid game. I thought the fleshed out backstory of 'Zack' and his fellow soldiers was an interesting story and it's relevance to the main storyline felt important. I don't think it felt like a disappointment. I knew I enjoyed 'Remake' more, but as I knew it was essentially just a PSP port that was meant to tide us over until 'Rebirth', I was quite content to play and enjoy it until 'Rebirth' was released. So that's it. I didn't play the original 'Final Fantasy 7', I only knew minor story details from it and the new games were essentially my expectation baseline for how I imagined the next game would be. In a lot of ways I got exactly what I wanted from 'Rebirth'. It's biggest strength over 'Remake' and 'Crisis Core' is it's graphics. That's maybe a shallow thing to start with but it's undeniable. It keeps the artstyle of 'Remake', keeping the consistency, but you tell this game is just visually impressive. Characters are more detailed, the vistas are beautiful and all those small neat graphical upgrades just make this game gorgeous to look at. The story is also pretty great. I think preferred 'Remake' ever so slightly, as it had a far better approach to it's pacing. The "road trip" / travelling nature of this game lent itself well to seeing various characters and locals, but was hell on the story's flow. Obviously you could barrel through the main story and probably enjoy it's pacing more, but slowing down to experience each area felt like the intention the game wants you to go on. I was a little mixed on some aspects of the game's story though. 'Barrett' gets a beautiful story arc in this game that is really emotionally moving. It's probably my favourite part of the game's story. 'Cait Sith' is also a solid newcomer bringing charm and whimsy to the story. His arc is enjoyable despite it's ups and downs. 'Vincent Valentine' and 'Cid' are also new here but their lack of story and playability means that they don't stack up to the main cast just yet. I am exicted to play and know more about them in an eventual part 3 however. I was a little underwhelmed by a lot of the others stories however. 'Aerith' has lot of heavy important story work in this game and it's generally pretty good. My issues with her story however are twofold. First that from a companion romance aspect, she feels a little unbalanced compared to 'Tifa'. Her scene with 'Cloud' on the saucer is bit more muted comparitively and it's hard not to feel like the game is pushing you in one direction over the other, especially when you pick the "wrong one". Secondly is that her ending in the story is also a bit unclear to me. As 'Remake' was before it, Rebirth's ending is a little hard to follow due to it's vague and ethereal final act. This also extends to 'Aerith' and honestly I'm left scratching my head a little bit as to what it means for her going forward. Maybe a replay before the hopeful part 3 comes out will straighten out my confusion. I feel like 'Tifa' gets the opposite treatment to 'Aerith' however. Whilst it feels like she gets more of a focus during the romance elements, she doesn't get as much to do in the story. Granted, she does get some more involvement during Cloud's arc than the others and she does have some story stuff going on with the flashbacks to 'Nibelheim'. But most of the 'Nibelheim' stuff is largely just the consequences of the story that happened in 'Crisis Core' / prologue. Not as much new stuff really comes of it here. She hasn't got bad development or anything but just comparitively less. 'Yuffie' has a similar problem to 'Tifa'. Her introduction and assimilation to the group is solid and I love her interactions with the others, but she doesn't get as much story as characters like 'Barrett' or 'Aerith' do. And personally I'm not a fan of Red 13's changes here. His backstory revolving his father and connection to 'Cosmo Canyon' is interesting, but the changes they make to his personality and the history of his personality even, is not a change I liked. I understand it's representative of his story in the original game but considering for new players like myself who have the development as two different games, it just feels like a crazy retcon. They undermine the suave, intelligent and broody nature that 'Red 13' had before in exchange for development I don't think he needed, leaving him a completely different and honestly, more annoying version of the same character. As that's likely the 'Red 13' we're going to be stuck with going forward, I can't help but feel underwhelmed. There's also 'Zack' who returns from 'Crisis Core'. I'm a little mixed on his story potential. On one hand I enjoy the potential of his reintroduction to the story and world. He's an interesting character and having him alive in this alternate reality/zone is an interesting concept. The problem is that as of just this game and not knowing where he goes in part 3, his inclusion just kinda seems pointless. Sure, he has an interesting relationship with a lot of the characters that are left behind in 'Midgar' when the group leaves, but as it's unclear if these characters are even real, or in the same continuity anymore, it makes it hard to understand if it even matters. He doesn't get a whole lot of story here anyway, at least beyond referencing to 'Remake' only fans, the backstory he has with 'Aerith' and the others from 'Crisis Core'. Whilst I enjoyed that, it's not doing anything new here. Hopefully if they continue it'll shed some more light onto how his story intertwines with the groups in a meaningful way. The combat is solid, mostly keeping to the same style 'Remake' had and I don't really have much issues with it per se. The addition of 'Cait Sith' as a team member added some new fun abilities, even if he wasn't necessarily my first choice for my team. There's also some new combo moves that are kinda cool, even raising the bonds between 'Cloud' and the respective member if used with him. I do have issues with the balancing though. I can't tell you how many times I've breezed through areas before turning a corner to fight 2 or more mini bosses in the same fight that I either get through by the skin of my teeth, or simply repeat multiple times. There's also so many enemies that use such spam or just plain cheap tactics that I just sigh every time they're on screen. Fights that overuse magic that turns me to stone or "traps" multiple members of my team or even just overly spongey enemies are dime-a-dozen here. I wouldn't say I hated the combat but a lot of it became just frustrating. Sure, I could re-equip my gear between every single fight to min-max, but I just think that's so unnecessary on Normal difficulty (I'd understand it if it were on Hard). This balancing problem (or pacing problem depending on what we're talking about) is sort of my biggest issue with the game. You'll be having lots of fun with the game for a few hours, being hooked by the story and some fun areas, before hitting a wall of frustrating gameplay and bloated content. The bloated content I'm mostly referring to is the open world zones. I liked the idea of the travelling aspect of the story in theory, as it allows for various differing locales with differing environments and a plethora of side characters. In those aspects it usually holds up. The problems start to arise however in navigation, direction and how they populate these areas. At first I thought I'd enjoy moving through the areas, completing side objectives and clearing the map but that wasn't the case. Most areas are visually distinct but almost equally annoying. Most areas are filled with little side objectives called 'World Intel'. They have a few different variants, i.e. help the moogles or kill these fiends etc and most aren't too bad, but there's honestly just too much of it. More often than not I'd unlock a new zone and just sigh that I've got more to do. I'm not against side content like this in any means, god knows I play enough of it in other open world games. The problem to me here is that it just didn't feel very rewarding to do. You don't unlock very much for doing it and the story potential bar 1 or 2 specific variants is pretty small, so to me it just felt like a way to pad out the games empty zones and length to completion. The game's direction and navigation didn't help make getting to these objectives any more fun either. A lot of the areas were reasonable enough, but then you get to zones like 'Gongaga' and 'Cosmo Canyon' which rely on various jump pads and traversal elements to get to certain areas. This intention to make the map feel more exciting came at the cost of ease of play. 'Gongaga' especially had so many points of interest I'd mark on the map to get to, just to get frustrated by as I'd have to find a completely indecipherable pathway to get there that the map doesn't exactly help with. So in some strokes of bad luck, I'd get lost trying to traverse the map, to get to another unexciting 'world intel' objective, that involves fighting 4/5 enemies with cheap tactics (that may also have their own set of 3 specific nonsensical challenges), just to get a slightly underwhelming reward, then do the cycle all over again. It made doing the side content largely a chore, and yes, whilst technically you can skip most, if not all, of it, it doesn't feel like the game should be praised for having content you'd want to skip over. Connecting to my thoughts on the bloated content are the mini-games. To say it plain, there are far too many mini-games here and too many of them are frustratingly cheap. They begin innocently enough with one here and there, usually to gamify some specific story mechanic, but as a lot of the gameplay, the more the game continues, the more annoying, frequent and cheap they become. By the end of the game you have a particular side mission that expects you to get the highest possible score in like 5 or more mini-games, most of which are just unfun due to how frustrating and repetitive they feel. Once again, you can probably skip this side content but besides the fact that you shouldn't have to skip content to enjoy a game, a lot of the mini-games do have a consequential impact on the games story and side missions. You could half-ass a mini-game and stick with whatever score is given, but then you'll return to the mission to hear "ahh Cloud, you suck at this, here's a partial reward". So you either go "no wait, I'll retry this" and get sick of the mini-game (which is what I did), or just become mediocre in the results of every mission and NPC's eyes. So, again, if this was the difficulty on 'Hard' I'd at least understand, but on 'Normal' it's just annoying. There's also this card game they introduce here into the game called "Queen's Blood". Now admittedly I gave up on this earlier than I likely should have. Fearing it was like other side content I lost a couple games early on and decided to ignore this (and obviously ran in to consequential story issues later on). It seems like it has potential to be interesting and a friend of mine said she enjoyed playing this aspect of the game, but honestly I was too wary of it becoming another frustrating time sink. It's definitely an aspect I'd give a stronger go at during a new playthrough. I'm really conflicted on my score for 'Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth' as when compared to 'Remake' I can see there's plenty of content here for value, and you can see how much they've improved in terms of visuals, not to mention how for the most part I really enjoyed the story. But when a good portion of the gameplay is frustrating or unrewarding, it's hard for me to enjoy the idea of a replay as much as I did for 'Remake'. Maybe a replay will change some of my opinions on the game and allow me to do some things differently. I hope this game does well enough that we get the final part as they intended, but I hope it limits itself to the scope of 'Remake' to be a more enjoyable game.