Summary
Coming into 2024,Final Fantasy 7 Rebirthwas by far my most anticipated game, but it has ultimately become the year’s biggest disappointment. Five months ago, aroundFF7 Rebirth’s release, I would have considered myself a burgeoningFinal Fantasyfan. Aside from the odd brush withFinal Fantasy Tactics AdvanceandCrystal Chroniclesas a kid, I never really got into the series. The originalFF7is something of a gaming cornerstone, though, so I felt2020’sFF7 Remakewas a good place to dip my toes in, albeit a few years later when it was available via the PlayStation Plus Extra catalog.
I wouldn’t necessarily agree with the evaluation ofFinal Fantasy 16as a modern masterpiece, but I enjoyed the game immensely for its storytelling and breathtaking scale. Clive’s continent-spanning adventure was exciting, heartfelt, and earnest, but I found it ultimately lacking depth. AlthoughFF16is clearly designed as an action game, I wish it would have hewn closer to the series' RPG roots. Surely, I thought at the time,FF7 Rebirthwould be the game I wanted, building on a story I’m already invested in with a greater scale and more dynamic party system. It certainly delivered these aspects, butmore damning facets of its design have left me almost morose regardingRebirth.
I Was Prepared For FF7 Rebirth To Be My 2024 Game Of The Year
I had the absolute pleasure of being invited by Square Enix to playFF7 Rebirthtwice before its release date. While an exciting experience in its own right, getting to have such an early glimpse and report on it, my firstFinal Fantasy 7 Rebirthpreviewhad me convinced that it would fix the minor issues I had withRemake. While I foundRemake’s combat clever and its narrative enthralling, its level design felt limiting. Most of the game was linear, and pre-arranged parties made the experience too tailored for its rather robust RPG elements.
Rebirthpromised a remedy to both, with bona fide open-world sections and customizable quick-swap party formations. In that first preview, I played most of the Mount Nibel flashback,Rebirth’s first chapter, and got to explore a severely truncated Junon region before entering Under Junon and doing the Terror of the Deep boss battle. My secondhands-onFF7 Rebirthpreviewincluded the Mount Nibel flashback again, but gave me a good look at Kalm, the game’s first side quest hub.
The pieces were beginning to fall into place, and I was eager to play the game when it came out, having built up this idea of how I assumed the game had been designed. DespiteRemake’s linearity being one of my primary critiques of the game, there is an odd sort of comfort that it andFF16have in how structured they are,a welcome reprieve from the exceedingly vast open worlds that have come to dominate the RPG genre. While it was made clear to me the Junon region would be bigger in the full game, underestimating just how much had been cordoned for the preview build exemplifies where my disappointment withFF7 Rebirthcomes from.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Has Too Much Open-World Filler For Me
Exploring Gaia Quickly Turned Into A Slog
I adore large swathes ofFF7 Rebirth; the main quest and story are still endearing and mysterious, side quests being tied to specific party members is great for character development, the combat is incredibly satisfying and deep – so deep that I feel like I might be bad at it for a lack of true understanding – and the game world itself is stunningly rendered. But there’s too much busy work, emulating the most tiresome design choices of modern open-world RPGs.
It’s all so manufactured, gamified in the worst way.
If I could force myself to play straight through just the main story and side quests, I’m sure I’d loveFF7 Rebirth, but that’s just not the way I play video games. I’m not a completionist by any means – you’d have to threaten bodily harm to make me collect all 1,000 Korok Seeds inThe Legend of Zelda:Tears of the Kingdom, myfavorite game of 2023.If meaningful content is there, I’m going to seek it outand get my money’s worth, and unfortunately for me, quite a bit of meaningful content inFF7 Rebirthis directly tied to chores.
At face value, I don’t mind a lot of the optional content inRebirth. Hunting specific enemies, finding a hidden location and playing a little mini-game, and digging around in the dirt with my Chocobo aren’t terrible. Hell, I don’t even mind climbing a few towers to reveal parts of the map. And at least for me, a person who likes to read the books inSkyrimand the item descriptions inElden Ring,the reward of learning Rebirth’s different regions is adequate. The issue is: it’s all so manufactured, gamified in the worst way.
Chadley needs to collect data for… something, so I’ve got to go activate his towers, which unveils the surrounding environs on the map, and adds a bunch of icons for more activities on Chadley’s honey-do list. This routine started growing tiresome around 2011 whenAssassin’s Creed Revelationsrounded out a whole trilogy of this exact gameplay loop. It’s become colloquially known as “Ubisoft bloat” becauseAssassin’s Creedstill suffers from this open-world design.
Exploration inFF7 Rebirthisn’t organic, and it kills my motivation to engage with what is otherwise passable gameplay.Breath of the Wildintroduced an emergent gameplay loop that’s been solidified in my mind byElden RingandTOTKas the obvious future of open-world design – my next objective, most often a largely inconsequential bit of open-world filler, is right over there because I can see it. It doesn’t matter if it’s the three hundredth Korok Seed or something slightly more substantial, like another one of the Lands Between’s catacomb mini-dungeons; I got there and will get to the next of my own volition, not because a map icon or a blip on a compass lead me there.
I Want To Finish FF7 Rebirth, But I Probably Never Will
The Story Is Interesting, But Not Worth The Effort
If I don’t trudge through the map to each marked location, it feels like I’m missing out on something – an interesting fight, a fun character moment, a new item. It’s exhausting, and really ruins the flow of the story following the tightness ofRemake.Rebirthwill understandably have to have some meandering; Cloud and company don’t necessarily have a defined goal when they set out from Kalm, but for the NPC-packed hubs and action-oriented dungeons to be little more than bookends to a bunch of busy work ruins the pacing for me.
I thought maybe theRemaketrilogy was my chance to get in on it, to finally understand.
I’d like to see the rest of the main story play out, but at this point, having not touchedRebirthfor a few months, I have little motivation to return to a game that has left mostly sour memories. I recognize that it’s generally a great game, and I don’t hold any illusions about the manyglowingFF7 Rebirthreviewsbeing wrong;I’m just disappointed thatRebirthdidn’t turn out to be what I thought and hoped it would be. Maybe I would have beaten it already if it still had zones the size of the truncated Junon I first played pre-release.
Sometimes I feel as though I missed out on something important by not getting intoFinal Fantasywhen I was younger.FF7is such a cultural touchstone for gaming, and I thought maybe theRemaketrilogy was my chance to get in on it, to finally understand. Maybe I’ll play the inevitableFinal Fantasy 17, but it doesn’t look like I’ll be eagerly awaitingRemake Part 3. For now, I’ll continue agonizing over whether to deleteFinal Fantasy 7 Rebirthwhenever my PS5 is running out of storage space, and keep lying to myself about how maybe, just maybe, I’ll muster up the will to finish what was my most anticipated game of 2024.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is the sequel to Final Fantasy 7 Remake and will see Cloud and his friends set off beyond the walls of Midgar to explore the world, stop Sephiroth’s machinations, and see the world outside their slum prison. Now that the whispers of fate no longer guide the characters along the pre-destined path set in the original PlayStation classic Final Fantasy 7, the heroes (and villains) will shape the future. The game will still visit prominent locales and revisit crucial story points, but it will be a more significant departure from the first game from the source material.
