Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

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 has constantly reinvented itself through the years, and Rebirth is no exception. Final Fantasy VII has become its own mega-franchise within gaming and its namesake's universe. And for good reason. This game takes what made Remake great and expands on it with an open-world gameplay design that also blends the seamless level transitions of the Uncharted video games and keeping the otherworldly charm of the Final Fantasy franchise fully intact the whole time.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth may be a bit overwhelming for casuals, but the choice of difficulty definitely eases some newcomers' anxieties of the experience being too overwhelming. Yes there's the trademark difficult boss-fights that require some trial-and-error strategising, but victory is never too far away to achieve for the player. The world on display here is something else, and the open-world design (in select chapters that is) really adds countless hours of replay value and depth to the world's dense story. Cloud and his friends are exploring the massive iceberg that is Rebirth's world-building with absolute swagger that's daring and cinematic all at once.

There's a lot of stuff to unpack here. Maybe almost too much; but hey, JRPGs were always bursting with several hours of stuff to do. Some of the mini-games are unnecessarily hard (the piano is near impossible to perfect with the analog controls), but they're thankfully 110% optional and don't roadblock the story completely. Rebirth gets a lot right, but a game this massive can't be perfect; but it doesn't need to be PERFECT perfect. Rebirth just needed to be a deep exploration of Final Fantasy VII's iconic world, and with that it succeeds many-folds over.

Rebirth has something for hardcore fans, for newcomers, and it delivers on the cut-scenes too. It's already shaping up to be 2024's game of the year. And who knows? Maybe Part Three will be even better?

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is the reason gamers play video games so passionately. It has the characters, exploration, and immersion people have come to expect from the best JRPGs on the market. It's a modern classic that's begging for Part Three to round up the trilogy as soon as possible (but seriously, let's hope they don't rush Part Three THAT quickly).

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is a 5/5-star masterpiece. 10/10 IMDb points. Give this one a go if you love the Final Fantasy franchise.

There is a good, 8/10 game, here, but it's hidden behind the majority of what the game is. That good game is the "main scenario", not counting Chapters 1 and 14. The Nibelheim flashback and Forgotten Capital largely handled very poorly.

The sea of cynically-made open-world anti-accessibility "content" obscures what is good about this game. The main scenario is effectively a sidequest, because the majority of the gameplay time is spent on "optional" side content. That side content (minigames, sidequests, world intel, VR fights) are this game's main features.

Difficulty is forced and accessibility is non-existent. This is the least accessible RPG in history, and it's a remake/sequel/requel to the most accessible RPG in history.

They went out of their way to fill the game with unoriginal Ubisoft Open world content, and artificially unbalanced difficulty.

The game also forces players to engage in some very predatory romantic/sexual actions with underage characters.

Ironically, by choosing to chase money over quality, Square Enix is selling far less than they could have.

Oh boy! What can I say about this game that has not been said already. This game has improved SO much upon the 2020 Remake. And even that game was fantastic. So to go from a game as great as FF7 remake, and to improve on it as much as it did is nothing short of impressive. There is so much to explore and do, and none of it feels like a chore. Also, though there are so many of them, the mini games are very fun. My personal favorite has to be the newly added Queens Blood. It is extremely easy to pick up as the game isn't very complicated. It also has a side story to it as you continue to play queens blood with different players throughout the game. I 1000% recommend playing this game. It WILL be worth it.