Back in 2022, I wrote a 3-part series about the impact that the Japanese RPG Final Fantasy 7 has had on me over the course of my life, and ended with a quick review of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, giving it a 9/10. Since then, I’ve played through Remake a few more times, including the Intergrade DLC featuring Yuffie, and I’ve gotta say, I’ve upped my rating to a flat, impressive 10/10! The more I played it, and the more I understood the nuances of it, including the story elements that I was worried about, the more I fell in love with it!
So it is with a heavy heart that I write this review of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and reluctantly give the game a 7/10… Very very close to achieving an 8/10, and perhaps with time and replays, I’ll indeed up my rating to that. In this blog, I’ll be giving a detailed review of the highlights and failings (all a matter of personal opinion) of the game.
BE WARNED – SPOILERS AHEAD! If you have not completed Rebirth, and don’t want some pretty ground-shattering revelations spoiled, TURN BACK NOW!
With that said, I’ll conduct this review much like I once was taught to conduct peer reviews of writing – start with what I liked, segue into what I didn’t like, and then end on my overall impression.
Playing Through The Planet
Rebirth is a huge, HUGE game. Whereas a full play-through of Remake, exploring every nook and cranny, would last maybe 40 to 60 hours, my first play through of Rebirth lasted 96 hours! I didn’t know this was going to be the case when we started (we being my wife and I, since my wife watched), since we started right after it came out, but once we hit 30 hours and had barely progressed through the story, we looked it up, and realized we could expect up to 100 hours of game play!
The world. Is. MASSIVE.
And many of the characters in it are larger than life. Just as with Remake, loads of new characters were included in Rebirth, with at least one ‘major’ character being featured in each region as a sort of guiding post. Some side characters felt like stereotypical Square/Enix (Squeenix!) characters, but many had their own unique stories and were fully fleshed out. Some, such as Billy from the chocobo farms, showed up in multiple regions, and you got to see him grow as a person and help him through some pretty tough moments!
Speaking of which…CHOCOBOS! If you’re a chocobo fan, and you weren’t satisfied by their minor appearances in Remake, then you’ll be happy to know that they’re heavily featured in the new game, in multiple ways! First is that they’re a large part of your transportation around The Planet (apparently called Gaia in some of the other games). Each region contains a chocobo with a different skills, such as climbing walls or gliding.
Better still is that, unlike the original FF7, your entire party is always visibly following you in Rebirth, and that includes mounting up on chocobos…so yeah, you see Red XIII/Nanaki on Chocoback! (Though why? I’d imagine he can keep up with any chocobo on his own…)
But beyond that are some of the in-world challenges with chocobos, such as completing several flying courses in record time around Cosmo Canyon. And then? The races!
In and of itself, I am highly impressed with the chocobo racing. It was fleshed out way more than in the original, and despite there being NUMEROUS courses, the racing never felt overly repetitive or boring. Plus the fact that you can actually see your chocobos stats, AND modify them with armor/gear, was a nice touch. I also thought it was a nice touch that they each had unique special abilities in the races!
I’ll admit that some of the choices to condense the world down a little, specifically on the first continent and the apparent proximity between Junon and Midgar, was a bit…jarring for long-time fans like me, but all in all, the size and scope of the world, and the ability to explore so much of it, was in many ways a dream come true. In other ways, not so much, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
And the music? Oh my goodness, the music was superb! There were all of the now-familiar updated versions of the old-school songs that we got to hear in Remake, and then there were remixes and remakes of them for Rebirth that just hit soooo well! And for the most part, I absolutely loved playing the piano mini-game! There were only two songs that I hated, one of which I never got better than a B on…. *grumble grumble* But mostly, as a musician, I found it fun and, in a way, it warmed my soul to be able to make music in-game.
A Story for the Ages
The main narrative of Rebirth was as good as you’d expect following Remake, and it does an incredible job of blending the original story with the new direction hinted at during the final battle and sequences of Remake – the fate of MULTIPLE Planets, across a multiverse of sorts, are now at stake. In fact, intentional or not, I saw this as a sort of love letter to the original fans of FF7 – the story we all know and love, it still exists, as a separate Universe.
Better still were the enhancements and improvements to the side and character stories, and your influence with your team that comes with it! Every side quest with one of your team, as well as conversation choices you make in timed conversation responses, increases or, potentially, decreases your influence and standing with them, a far more traditional RPG element that’s been around since at least Knights of the Old Republic, and made to work extremely well for Rebirth.
We get to learn so much about the main cast that we never got to learn before, and yet despite it all being ‘extra,’ it fits perfectly with the narrative, enhancing and improving upon an already strong formula, and even fixing some short-comings from the original game.
Moments I have to highlight include:
- Yuffie’s random singing throughout the game
- Cloud’s experience with the Midgar 7th Infantry in Junon
- Red XIII’s attempt to be ‘human’ on the cruise to Costa del Sol
- The portayal of Golden Saucer and its homage to Disney parks
- Tifa’s unexpected early experience in the lifestream
- Aerith’s speech at Cosmo Canyon
- The build-up to arriving at Nibelheim, with Tifa and Cloud supporting one another as they nervously drew closer
- Tifa and Aerith’s friendship further blossoming! (Yes, I still ship it!)
And I can’t just briefly mention this: I have to focus a bit on the whole “Big Date” at Golden Saucer! Who chooses you upon your second visit to Golden Saucer is a direct result of the influence you’ve built up with your team, and for my playthrough, that turned out to be Tifa! I expected this to be something different and better than the original, but I was blown away by it all, in particular by the theater performance! First, getting to see Jessie’s recorded performance was such a tear-jerker, and then the virtual interactive performance was so well done compared to the rather corny original version. And that ending? Especially with Aerith singing, and that brief glimpse of Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie? I was in tears, and I loved every moment of it!
Speaking of Aerith, I once wrote that she was the first ‘person,’ albeit fictional, that I ever fell in love with…well, Rebirth made me fall in love with her all over again. Her personality, her antics, watching her learn what it means to be a Cetra and honing her powers at the Ancient Temple was fantastic!
Which made the rather confusing and tumultuous ending soooo hard to deal with. The roller coaster of emotions that came from thinking she was alive, to thinking she was dead, then alive, then dead, then totally uncertain when Nanaki felt her presence… I don’t know exactly what to think now, and I HAVE to find out if she’s really alive or not in game 3!
But Not All Was Perfect…
So if I have so many positive notes and good things to say about Rebirth (and I feel like I’m forgetting a lot…), then why the lower score?
To put it succinctly…there was TOO much in Rebirth. Too many side quests, too many interruptions to the main story (we would spend sometimes 10 or 15 hours in between progressing the story!), and for crying out loud, way too many mini games! More than that, sooooo many of the mini games were beyond frustrating or flat-out annoying!
The worst offender was the common, central mini game throughout, the damned card game, Queen’s Blood! I honestly do not understand why so many people love card mini games in video games (I despise Gwent), and the fact that they made Queen’s Blood so important to completing all of the side quests and story lines in Rebirth annoyed the hell out of me. I hate the idea of your ability to win being completely dependent upon luck of the draw (there’s a reason I don’t gamble!) And nothing drove this distaste home more completely than the final card game against the evil queen herself. I had to turn to the internet to figure out the best deck build just to have a chance to take her on, and then, thanks entirely to bad luck on what cards were drawn, it still took me 8 or 9 tries just to beat her!
Other annoying mini games included pretty much every mini game in Costa del Sol, especially the pirate shooter (I can’t pull the trigger that rapidly for that long on the PS5’s new controller design, it’s waaaay too much resistance, and is practically impossible for anyone with joint issues); some of Chadley’s battle simulations (one in particular in which my entire team was constantly ‘locked’ in stone and then killed off); a lot of the side games that were attached to the protorelic quests (the cactuar ones were particularly annoying); and most of the ‘catch the chocobo!’ mini-games.
Not to say all of the mini-games were bad – I’ve already mentioned that the chocobo racing was fantastic, the piano playing was mostly fun, and I loved how they did the formation maneuvers in Junon compared to the original! But there were many that were just…okay. And sooo many that just annoyed the hell out of me, and as I mentioned before, SOOO MANY. I grew increasingly frustrated having to do so many mini-games that by the end, even if I was forced to do another variation of a mini-game that I loved, I was fed up and didn’t want to do it. I wanted to just get the story moving forward again, but the completionist in me struggled to move on. As it is, I never finished the Golden Saucer Queen’s Blood games, I was absolutely done with those ‘gimmick’ matches.
I also found the final battle royale against Don Corneo and his thugs to be beyond annoying, particularly due to the absolute sensory overload – sound mixing in that arena was horrific! The announcers wouldn’t SHUT UP, combined with EVERYone in the team fighting a rather LARGE crowd of mobs. It was sensory overload, and as a neurodivergent, I hated it (and so did my wife).
There was just…too much extra all around throughout the game, and it disrupted the narrative too much. I didn’t feel this way at all in Remake, the side quests were worked very well into the main story narrative, and the narrative as a whole felt tighter and more focused in Remake. As much as I loved being able to explore “The Planet” more, I felt like it did more harm than good. Then again…maybe if there hadn’t been so many mini-games, I wouldn’t feel that way (and probably would have cut the game down to 70 or 80 hours instead of 90 to 100).
And then…there’s Zack…
Was Zack’s Story Really Necessary?
After working up to being sold on the idea of Zack surviving at the end of Remake, and with Rebirth starting from his perspective in a rather confusing manner, I found Zack’s story to be…lacking. Pointless, even. I know, some of you will call me a blasphemer for saying that (one friend in particular, Hannah, absolutely loves Zack), but from a narrative perspective, he was just kinda…thrown in there half-assed.
I get that it was important to show that he was in an alternate universe, and thus establishing that there WERE alternate universes, and somehow Biggs was teleported to one, thus establishing that transportation between the universes was possible.
But Zack’s interludes in the alternate universe were spaced so incredibly far apart, and lasted for such a short amount of time, that nothing was ever accomplished in them, and they felt like pointless interludes. Seriously, the one and only time that anything truly meaningful was accomplished in the alternate universe was when Cloud went there and got the Holy materia from the alternate Aerith. Which didn’t involve Zack AT ALL.
And then Zack coming back to ‘help’ Cloud fight Sephiroth was just…fan service, and shallow fan service at that. Especially when he ended up right back in that alternate universe at the end, without anything apparently having been changed or accomplished for him.
Now, knowing how important the AU is to Aerith’s story and Sephiroth’s intent to use the multiverse in a ‘reunion’ to gain power, I feel like this could have all been accomplished by instead giving us a view of Biggs’s story in that Universe. I wanted more of that. But even then, it would have had to be more meaningful and impactful, and actually had Biggs change the course of fate somehow, maybe even making it back into the ‘main’ universe somehow. Hell, if Zack had ended up in the ‘main’ universe at the end, that would have been something!
Zack’s story just felt like…lazy writing. An afterthought, in an attempt to satisfy the Zack fans. Which considering how masterfully the rest of the main story was, is shocking as hell, but then, no one’s perfect, right?
Final (Fantasy) Thoughts
All around, the 7/10 (damn near 8/10) could have been a 9 or 10/10, and game production time could have been reduced, had they not spent so much effort and time on mini-games and unconnected sub-plots. And I’m super annoyed to read that the DLC that’s expected to come soon will be focused on Queen’s Blood.
I don’t see myself replaying this game nearly as much as I have Remake.
…But I will replay it again.
Despite the frustrations and short-comings, the positives really, really helped make up for it! The story and the characters were wonderful, and the voice acting was absolutely superb, even for minor characters! I’ll come back to Rebirth at least a couple of times. For now, I’ll take a good long break from it, and not feel bad about it. And I’ll likely skip the DLC if it truly is focused on Queen’s Blood.
Now I just have to wait for the third and final installment of this remake trilogy…and I do so with intense excitement and anticipation! I hope the developers learn from their mistakes, and build on their strengths, and make the conclusion to this incredible and heart-felt trilogy truly something masterful!
I’m optimistic about it…how ’bout you?
Thanks for reading!
-Jon Wasik
A Writer at Heart 