Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (Remake pt.2)

Finished it this week. Really enjoyed it and its an improvement on Remake. Ending:

I guess that’s the risk you take when you carve one game up into three. Hype was way higher for Remake and people were stuck at home with lockdown too.

About halfway through and just about to head up Mt Corel. Have enjoyed it so far and beat Jules in the sit-up competition last night. So satisfying.

I get the mini game fatigue issue, although I am happy to give it a pass as I have such nostalgic memories of the original. Combat is decent and I would say dynamic difficulty gives you more of a challenge than normal.

I do think that the side quest element is weak.

I am really enjoying it but I suspect that without the nostalgia for the original game I would not be as invested. The combat is good, and the use of Dynamic mode was a nice idea. I still think that combat only shines in Hard mode though which is when you really have to engage with it. Until then, you can button mash most of the time.

A lot of the side content can be skipped, and I think it is harsh to use that as a stick to beat it with. It is a decent game, but has its flaws.

I won't launch into a defense of the Chadley-ificiation of FFVII. But I will say I've listened to a lot of these pods and I'm always kinda surprised by the 'gotta do everything' mentality people take to games like these. There is a huge checklist of stuff in Rebirth, but while playing it I never saw it as an obligation to check it all off. In fact I think the reason the game has a 'dynamic' difficulty setting with level scaling is to indicate that it's all up for grabs whenever you wish to do it, not to complete an area before moving on. The game's narrative has issues with urgency but imo the game design sort of tries to lean into it a bit and justify itself as a game all about hanging out in its world, and I think if players would adjust their habits a bit they might not have this grinding experience with it as much

The reason I liked this game so much is it had this almost bento box variety to the number of activities you could do in it, something which is completely lacking in a lot of modern titles due to the inordinate expense of their production. But if you try and do all of it then I think you unfortunately just played the game wrong. I recognise this is a sort of ridiculous statement to make, but my energy for the game didn't evaporate until like 150 hours cause I kept changing what I was doing in it. I beat the game around the 75 hour mark, I watched Nextlander beat it and Vinny had slogged for 120 hours before crawling across the finish line.

IMO, you have to know when to move on from an area and maybe save it for later. My best recommendation to people would be to just do the activities in an area until it begins to feel a bit repetitive, and then move on. This is what I did and it made Rebirth the most diverse feeling RPG I can remember playing since the PS1 era and I say that as someone who generally found Remake profoundly disappointing. I found Remake a drag but loved this game, at least until its extremely stupid and overwritten ending. Even with that ending, it gave me much more what I wanted and hoped for from FFVII Remake

Again there's some things I really wish they would change, I wish that the materia wasn't something you just buy in a menu for doing checklist stuff. It's just a bit too gamified and inorganic, but the things it does well make up for the things that are rubbish and it's the most I've enjoyed FF since VIII but I really think you have to just know when to move on from the Hinterlands with it, if anyone gets that reference

I don't think the problem is with the checklist stuff really, the problem is the way the UI for it is integrated via Chadley. There's no real sense of discovery there, no sense of friction.

But I also think the quantity is the quality here as well, personally speaking. There's a Fort Condor RTS game, a tower defense game that reimagines the gambit system from FFXII. A easy, relaxing clone of Mario Kart. A really fun sort of puzzle-based card game. The chocobo world traversal 'puzzles' sort of operate as a necessary 'come down' after the MCU-flavored sugar rush of a main story mission. There's a high degree of kitsch to the presentation that makes it feel like a theme park of the original game, where in the 90s they sort of partitioned development of it in an odd way and kinda integrated it all together in a pastiche of strange minigames and gimmicks.

IMO, that aspect of the original FFVII is something that contributed to how big it felt at the time, and is something that sort of got optimised out of its numbered sequels, especially across generations. That ability to take a break from the (excellent) materia systems and fighting to just do some choco racing or card games or whatever, then feel refreshed for some of the more combat driven story stuff later

Speaking personally again, I don't think this game would be as good without the time-wasting stuff cause imo it is sort of supposed to be a game about time wasting. There's a review in EDGE that kinda articulates better what I'm trying to say so if you can read their review I'd recommend it. There's a tweet here also by Kat Bailey, I don't know how she landed on the end of the game but this feeling of 'fullness' is what I'm trying to describe

https://x.com/The_Katbot/status/1763243994493149410

It's all fairly subjective, I don't doubt that a lot of what I'm describing is precisely what people don't like about Rebirth. But I just disagree that it's a failure of design when the design is precisely this embracing of excess. Between the diversity in activities, the hugely inventive combat mechanics for each character (Cait Sith in particular), I just think it's in the top 3 for me along with original VII and Zodiac XII

Finished this over the weekend, some thoughts below

The basic additions to some of the areas(like pushing around mako hoovers) are dreadful, pointless additions that are thankfully few and far between.

Rebirth does a lot of things well - the combat is as satisfying as the original and has some great improvements, the major game areas are phenomenally recreated, and as you say, the music and characterisation are still top notch, including the new characters(although they made one decision I absolutely hated) and queens blood is absolutely fantastic.

But it still suffers from the same issues as remake. Chiefly, it’s too long. I suffered burnout and needed a break about halfway through for a couple of months before getting back to it. The story update is utter nonsense but thankfully doesn’t deviate as much as I feared it would. The open world is fine but very much an Ubisoft collect-a-thon that I bothered less and less with as the game went on as I wanted to push through the story.

It’s definitely more good than bad and it’s worth playing, but I can’t see myself going through it more than once.

I beat the game again the other day and it's amazing how the ending makes it feel like you've gaslit yourself into liking it, if you happen to have been on board until then. The one really great thing about the PSX version is how each pre-rendered screen can look extremely different from the next. Rather than 7 hours of just **** around a grey-green environment doing everything extremely slowly, where each nagging interaction accumulates annoyingly in its slow annoyingness. Don't get me started with how each part of the UI for managing party member's equipment takes just ever so slightly too long to go to the next screen, especially compared with the original game.

But in the post-game I'm back on board having a good time, but I still just hate the Hobbit-treatment they've given here.