Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Seems they are all bad reviews on here, apart from one who seems to have totally missed the nostalgia of this game, "something in inverted comas" - no, they definitely should have! This is so true to the original narrative. Yes they've thrown in one character to appease the alphabet brigade but other than that, it's a beautiful rendition of the game that meant so much to many of us.

It's a wonderful expansion on a world and characters that meant so much to so many.

Then there's the guys who, I don't know, get paid? The have a pre written awful review that they change some words to the film/game they are trying to destroy.

No character development? Clearly didn't play this game at all. So disregard those reviews straight away.

Final fantasy 7 rebirth is a masterpiece,

The open world aspect is so great.

I loved final fantasy 7 remake also a lot but on that game my playthrough ended at 140 hours of ingame time...

Final fantasy 7 rebirth ended after 1200 hours of ingame time.

Okay a lot of those hours was because of replaying mini games and all of chadley(with his irritating voice) his legendary bouts but eventually i managed to get the piano trophy and i did manage to win bonds of friendship and the one with sephiroth...

I have never ever cheered loudly for achieving things in a game before this.

And to all the not helpfull thumps down people for my comment...

Its not our fault that you are bad at certain games....

I have never played elden ring for example because i know that game wouldnt be my cup of thea but i dont see me posting negative comment on that game.

So every negative reaction i get, i know you are commenting on a game you only played for 5 minutes. Insane in the head i mean.

The remake trilogy pushes onwards, blowing up the middle chunk of the original to bigger and prettier screens.

The main flaw of the first part persists here. The game is bloated; story beats are too dragged out, elongated, never ending, like a sentence that just refuses to let that full stop get in there; onwards and onwards it goes, exhausting the reader, until it's assured that there will indeed be words after it and perhaps it is actually time to quickly wrap up. But, it works. Mostly.

One of the main strengths of the original is how it throws so much at the wall with such confidence. Perhaps this is because in its shift from 2D to 3D the devs were unknowingly setting so many standards, in the same vein as Wells with Citizen Kane. Some of it doesn't work, but that's ok. It's pure unabashed entertainment, with little meddling from above.

Rebirth emulates this, with its plethora of minigames, tone shifts and crazy sequences. Parts of Rebirth are now up there in my favourite gaming moments.

The section this part is adapting is a string of quests exploring individual character's pasts. So the pacing is, like the original, rather stop and go. This is an adventure game, through and through, with extremely well defined characters. Running around the different locations was glorious, simply glorious.

I am a little dubious of the game's final act. After going through the hellscape that is Kingdom Hearts, I'm tentative towards a plot of convolutions. While Rebirth did make Remake somewhat more coherent, I'm still a little weary of complications for the sake of complications. Unless they pull off some interesting narrative tricks in Part 3, I do find this a flaw of the remake trilogy.

Having said that, I like that it's technically a new story. The original is still there. If it was just a straight remake, the trilogy wouldn't nearly have the staying power that I hope it eventually has. I do hope for a remaster of the original though, the gameplay is still pretty fun but a remodel of the Lego people would be nice.

In a shocking change from Remake, the side quests were actually pretty decent. Even the ones that felt initially tedious tended to have something charming or memorable at the end. Some of the songs specifically designed just for sidequests (Bow Wow Wow) were as incredible as the rest of the soundtrack.

By making the world vast and explorable, they've spread out Ubisoft style objectives. Most of these are pretty perfunctory, giving the player an excuse to run around and experiment with the game's excellent combat. I did them all. Every tower, every unique battle, every god damn moogle minigame. And I never, not once, felt bored as I usually do with Ubisoft's approach. This is a testament for either my inhuman patience or how fun the game actually is.

As for the other minigames, I really liked the majority. Some people really seem to not enjoy them, but that's ok, culture isn't for everyone. From Tower Defense, to Virtual Bikes, and a Gwent-tier card game (strong words, I know) there is bound to be at least a few things each player can enjoy. All of them feel pretty fleshed out; the quality found here is just astounding. This is the first modern Final Fantasy to match the grand scope of the originals, both in its gameplay elements and world scale.

Rebirth is a step up in almost every way from Remake. The oppressive and moody atmosphere is gone (I still miss Midgar!), but in its place is a genuine feat that I can't believe actually got made. It's flawed, so very flawed, especially in its final act if Part 3 doesn't pull finger. But I'd rather a game be flawed with style - it's more interesting than a "perfect game" of the times. So many of those are lost to technological improvements. Final Fantasy VII has charm, and the remake trilogy brings it to the future.

FFVII Remake is one of my favorites in the series right behind X that is the very best in my opinion. Remake though it was mostly corridors and very straight forward, it was tightly paced and very entertaining throughout it's 30h runtime while Rebirth is triple the size and a lot more open, it's ultimately a case of bigger isn't always necessarily better.

I myself had a lot of fun with this game as the characters are so well written and excellent specially Yuffie which was a huge standout for me, she brings much needed energy to the group and is incredibly funny. The voice actors do a great job at once again bringing these iconic characters to life.

Though i enjoyed the game i can't disagree with people saying the game is overwhelming because there are so many open areas throughout the game and each one have you doing mostly the same activity and Chadley calling you over and over, i was like boy if you don't get out of my screen... it's almost as bad as a Ubisoft open world game and that very much hurts the pacing of the game where the Remake had no such issues, also the game is like 150 gigs and the environmental textures a lot of time are worse than a ps3 game, it's really distracting. The same problem i have with Like a Dragon games but even worse here and the bright as hell UE4 lighting doesn't help it either. The game would benefit a lot more if there was a day and night cycle to hide it's graphical flaws, now compare to FFXVI from last year, a gorgeous game with far better graphics that has very little open world fatigue even though it had worse side activity than this game. It's just a shame that they couldn't nail the open areas even though they did so much good.

Another annoyance is the affinity system which effects who you romance later in the game and unlike games like Persona where you can actually choose who to spend time with, here it can happen at random with who ever that has the highest point, like come on bro if you wanna do a romance system, at least do it right or just don't do it at all.

As it stands, Rebirth has alot to like, game is huge, the cast is great, Tifa herself is another plus and the music is fantastic as always. It will become a big contender for game of the year but unfortunately it's not a flawless experience. My advice is that focus on the story and do side quests here and there, maybe do some of the mini games (queen's blood is pretty addictive) but ignore the open world activity as much as possible so you don't have to suffer through Chadley calling and boring you to death. He's the real villain of the story not Sephiroth.

8.6/10. While the bloated section of the game can become tiresome, the devs cooked a lot in less than 4 years which is really impressive and time will tell if they can stick the landing with the 3rd and final game.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is a behemoth of an RPG experience. My play through clocked in at over 100 hours, and although I made an effort to complete the vast majority of side content, there was still a surprising amount of material that I have yet to complete. I do, however, feel that I have given it more than enough time to give an informed review.

As my title suggests, this game is astounding on a mechanical level. The sheer amount and quality of varied content available to the player is easily this game's greatest strength. Mini games, world exploration, and combat mechanics are all virtually flawless, and I cannot praise the dev team enough for the evident love and care they used in crafting these aspects. While a depressing majority of modern RPGs fill their runtimes with generic fetch quests as side quests, FF7 Rebirth gives a plethora of great side missions and content that never got bland or repetitive. I would go as far as saying that in this regard, FF7 Rebirth is the standard to which future RPGs should be held. Square Enix outdid themselves in this category a thousand times over, especially in comparison to its predecessor on the PS4.

As far as the story goes, I will avoid spoilers, but suffice it to say that I have some issues. FF7 original already has a hyper-convoluted story in typical JRPG fashion, but Rebirth dials it up to 11. A good chunk of changes made to the new game seem to require a decent amount of knowledge of other games, and I can't help but feel that players unfamiliar with expanded FF7 lore will find themselves confused on multiple occasions. The story still has a lot of strong moments, but longtime fans will likely be scratching their heads at some of the decisions the writing team made. It didn't ruin my experience, but I felt that many story elements were actively competing with each other, as well as with the otherwise very cohesive gameplay mechanics. Ultimately, it's something that everyone will have to decide for themselves.

In conclusion, I would highly recommend this game. It's story isn't a masterpiece, but the gameplay was so consistently and reliably engaging that these issues with the writing were minimal for the most part. Strong world exploration, variety in side missions, and a very polished combat system make this one of the best modern RPGs I've played, and I'll happily sing its praises despite its flaws.