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

Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth is an absolutely beautiful game, and I mean that in a number of different ways. The game is visually stunning, which is pretty much expected from Square Enix at this point. There's a lot of really dynamic contrast in the environments you explore in this game. The first installment, which focused almost entirely on Midgar's lower sectors, was gorgeous in it's own right, somehow making each part of the city's slums feel unique and detailed. But Rebirth's first steps will take you into mountain ranges, expansive meadows, swamps, and more. They really flexed what they're capable of when they have the whole world to work with. Each area is insanely vivid, and every minor character is painstakingly detailed. Characters are emotive and beautifully animated. It's a really interesting world to experience. Combat visuals are equally pretty, sprinkled liberally with special effects without ever feeling overwhelmingly cluttered. The soundtrack is completely absurd (again, Square just doesn't miss when it comes to OSTs). The music never felt out of place, enhanced the atmosphere most of the time, and occasionally slapped so hard I had to pause and just listen. The worst part of this soundtrack is there were too many good songs I'd like to find, but the OST has over 200 songs, so it's gonna take a minute. The combat is more or less the best I could expect from an action RPG at this point. A lot of my biggest complaints about Remake, like not having good defensive options, were addressed quite well. Combat was just fun, outside of a few gimmicky encounters and weird difficulty spikes on some non-boss encounters. If I had to give one complaint, it's that Assess is often extremely useless. The hint text it gives you is often misleading or incomplete, leaving you to guess at what the monster's real gimmick is or die. The game had a lot going on, and I didn't use everything to it's fullest extent in my playthrough, but Rebirth does a much better job of explaining itself than Remake did for sure. Combat never felt pointless in the main story - even minor encounters were threats to be taken seriously. They were never a pointless of time or a grind, which helped to make the characters feel grounded. They aren't superheroes, they're just kind of above average. You have high aspirations, but you have to work for them. One other note I'll make is that I wish I had more control over which characters I used. You're usually forced into certain party compositions. At the very least, the lead character is always decided for you (usually Cloud) and then you can choose the rest from who's available (sometimes it forces all three). Even when just exploring the overworld, Cloud never leaves the party. It's done this way for story reasons, but I guess I just wish that they organized their story in a way where I didn't have to use the characters I didn't like as often, as they have very distinct gameplay patterns. This also lead to a lot of materia and armor swapping, because I didn't have 6 full sets of armor and materia at any point. Gameplay outside of combat was... well, what do you expect from an RPG? There was a lot of pointless QTE-style stuff, a lot of mini-games that are forced on you (I wouldn't even call them bad necessarily, but they get shoved in your face and I'm just not interested), and a lot of slow context sensitive movement through terrain, which while very cinematic, got a little old. Especially climbing cliffs. You can't really fail these sections, and they require minimal engagement, so I'd often rather just have my character climb on their own instead of needing to hop from stone to stone as I climb. It did a lot for the presentation of the story, but I think it could've been done in a way that was interesting or at least faster. There were about a jillion side mechanics that I didn't feel like engaging with, and I mostly didn't need to. One I did use was item crafting, which was admittedly kind of half-assed and I only really successfully crafted enough to level up my crafting, and didn't really get any payoff from it before I beat the game. But if I had needed more consumables, they'd have been craftable, at least. Side content is something I'm not going to touch on much, because I didn't really do any of it (yet?). I'm not really the type that enjoys side quests, and I don't know how good this content is, but there is a LOT of it, and it is at the very least, varied. I will note that they make it kind of difficult to do the side content as you go, as you can't really go backwards until late in the story (I've heard there's a way around this, but if you miss it like I did, oh well). Either way, by the time I could go back I was pretty locked in on beating the story, because it was just that engaging. The story is the main course of an RPG, and this one eats good. This is a wonderfully told story, but I do think it's a little dependent on the player's expectations of what is supposed to happen in the original Final Fantasy VII. It's not a secret at this point that things are a little different, but most things are not. The ways that the game diverges from its first telling are far between, but they really stand out. What I really liked about the way the did this, though, is that I did not really feel nostalgic at all. I'm not the biggest fan of FFVII; I played it just once a very long time ago. I was never excited to get to a new locale because I knew it was coming next, I was excited because I loved the way the story got me there. Instead, it employs the expectations I had from my prior experience as a tool to build suspense. If you haven't played the original adventure, I'm worried you might be missing out, or even worse, kind of confused at points. There's still plenty of good foreshadowing, but when you know what's supposed to be coming, weird moments where the cast acts out of character become stark and appreciable in ways that likely won't be for someone on their "first playthrough" of FFVII, but I can't really ever experience that. The story is told in a way that is very traditional, utilizing plenty of "meanwhile..." scenes to give the player more context than the main characters have. They happen every chapter, usually to show you what the bad guys are up to behind the scene, but also to help show you some scenes that are out of place based on your prior knowledge of this series. It's obvious from the first game that there's some alternate timeline stuff happening, and part of the journey here is interpreting that as its drip fed to you. Often, these scenes even give you temporary control of otherwise non-playable characters, rather than just being a cutscene. They don't stray from flashbacks or any other device they want to use. There's not some unique storytelling mechanic that games sometimes experiment with, it's just a tried and true epic done really, really well. For a story this long, I wouldn't really want them to do much else. It was incredibly emotional at times, and sometimes fun and exciting. Even the enemies were relatable and often had multiple sides to their characters. The Turks especially, were a treat when used for drama or comedic relief. The story follows a mixed bag of characters. Cloud, Aerith, Barret, and Tifa are masterfully written. They're interesting, emotional, complicated, and most importantly, feel human. They have moods - sometimes they're playful, sometimes they need consoling. They have detailed character arcs that made me feel A LOT of things. I cried plenty of times during the 47 hours it took me to complete the story. The supporting characters were also really great, although they took less of a role than they did in Remake. This wasn't a bad thing; Remake went to incredible lengths to make me fall in love with the Avalanche members, Aerith's foster mom, Don Corneo's crew, and many others. Rebirth didn't fail here or even do a worse job, but most of Rebirth's adventure was about the playable character's backstories. The NPCs were usually not the focus, but they fulfilled their roles in making the PCs' stories stimulating incredibly well. The voice acting in this game is sublime, even on the characters I didn't like as much. Barret's story was maybe my favorite, and was really headlined by his voice actor's incredible performance. Aerith has become one of my favorite video game characters of all time, and before Remake and Rebirth she wouldn't have even been on the list. She has a huge role in this game, and I want more of her so badly it hurts. She and Barret were also my favorites to play in combat, so that doesn't hurt. The playable characters I'm yet to mention just didn't do it as well. Despite being playable and having important and compelling stories, they're side characters. Yuffie was the most disappointing, and felt like a bad D&D character for most of the story. She was annoying, and had one personality trait: peppy materia hunter. I thought she was going to be much deeper, because they did a really good job with her in the Remake DLC, but she kind of rebounded as soon as the focus was on someone else. Her parts of the story were good, but she didn't do a good job supporting the rest of the cast with their stories. Still, the story has not gotten to her homeland yet, and she has a lot of room to grow in the final installment. Cait Sith was awful, I hated his playstyle and they didn't touch him on weird ways that I know about from playing the original and can only assume they're waiting for the next game to go into it. However, one of his most important arcs happened in this game, and I think this one was a bit of a miss. He's also occasionally a fortune teller, but never in a way that's serious or relevant. It was hard to relate to Cait Sith at all, but I liked his voice actor and he at least had moments that were funny. Red XIII also disappointed me a bit, but not as much as the others. His personality can more or less be described as "dog". But his story arc is very good, at least, and despite being a party member he's still a side character compared to the Big Four, so he gets a pass. But all three of these characters really failed to make me invest myself in their stories this time around, at least in comparison to everything else that was happening. FFVII: Rebirth is a really incredible title. It's fun, the story sums up to being extremely fulfilling, and the problems are minimal. This is a worthwhile investment even if you don't really like JRPGs that much. The ending is overwhelmingly emotional and satisfying, but also a little muddy and open for interpretation. It's also definitely a cliffhanger. I'm not a big fan of cliffhangers, but I accept that it's part of the experience for movie and game series like this, especially when it's the second in a trilogy. I knew there'd be one going in, and that I'd be left with questions. If you're not into that you might want to wait for the third installment and play them all a few years from now. But I don't think it's worth being shy about it. This is a super enjoyable journey that lets you play at your own pace, be it 50 hours bee-lining through the best content to the end or 200+ hours of basking in every little bit of world building, side stories, voice acting and mini-games available. Final Fantasy VII fans have been waiting for this trilogy since they teased that tech demo for the PS3, and Square is showing they are stronger than they've ever been.