Can Rebirth live up to the reputation set by 2020’s Final Fantasy 7 remake and it's more beloved source material 1997’s Final Fantasy 7?
Developer - Square Enix
Square Enix has been reminding us not to forget about the continuation of the FF7 trilogy with frequent announcements. Since Remake launched in early 2020, they’ve released a PS5 remake in 2021 alongside a side adventure ‘Intermission’ featuring the fan-favourite character, Yuffie. In 2022, they showcased a remastered version of the PSP classic, Crisis Core, during a PlayStation event, and even announced a new game called Rebirth. This is a bold move that demonstrates their confidence, and Rebirth is proof.
Part of Square Enix's marketing campaign for Rebirth, is them emphasizing the fact that the game is spread across two entire Blu-ray discs. This is reminiscent of the original release of Final Fantasy VII in 1997, which spanned across three discs. The reason behind the multiple discs was due to the game's long adventure and the large amount of full motion videos (FMVs), Square knew making this a key marketing point would appease to the many nostalgic gamers that had played the OG release.
I was very conflicted on how to play Rebirth, like most modern console games nowadays you are given the choice of a 4k 30 fps graphics mode or a buttery smooth 60fps performance mode at 1440p but from the demo released a few weeks before launch, the impressions on what mode is ‘the quintessential’ choice have been very mixed with people saying the performance mode being a jittery mess and also resulting in blurry textures and graphics mode isn’t up to snuff, they did patch this prior to the games actual release but even with that and a separate day 1 patch for Rebirth these issues aren’t entirely fixed, I would ignore these sort of missteps but after last years superior looking Final Fantasy 16’s, which does match rebirth with scope and ambition, makes it weird why a year later Square have fallen abit short on the technical side, since starting rebirth square did issue a patch a few weeks later to try to amend these technicalities, with more options on the performance side, adding an option for a smooth or sharp image quality, maybe a placebo effect but I personally saw no improvements to note.
As the second part of the trilogy, the game has a lot of groundwork of character and world development built from its 2020 predecessor and the original 1997 release, I personally have no prior preconception about how the overarching tale goes, with only a little knowledge on some key moments, like the sixth sense or the last of us, pop culture has ruined what secrecy lies regardless of how I’ve engaged in the medium. Square knew that with this new retelling of FF7, they had another chance of growing the world built by the 1997 base material, 2006’s spinoff Dirge of Cerberus that featured fan favourite vampire like recluse Vincent, 2005’s prelude to FF7 story, with the film Advent children and the PSP classic Crisis core that focuses on Zach fair journey leading into FF7.
Square had a gargantuan task of pleasing lifelong fans and newbies, by the end of 2020’s remake you can see Square has played with the foundations of the OG game and played with older fans' preconceived notions, being a continuation of Remake has a lot of similarities you’d expect to see return but after a handful of hours and leaving Kalm you see how much bigger in scope Rebirth is.
The game's opening chapter begins with a recap of the explosive ending of FF7R, where Sephiroth causes chaos in Midgar. The scene abruptly shifts to a news reporter who covers the war-torn remains of Midgar and shows all the members of Team Avalanche in pretty bad shape, with medics trying to treat them.
After a brief cutscene, you take control of Zack Fair, the previous owner of the Buster Sword, and a guy who has cheated death! thanks to the lifestream creating new timelines, holding Cloud in his arms, Zack is determined to help his fellow soldier and leaves him with Aerith's mother, Elmyra.
In the current timeline, Cloud and Co are reminiscing about their past experiences. Cloud shares his story of being a soldier and sheds light on the reasons behind Sephiroth's actions. The story takes us back five years in time when Cloud was on a mission with Sephiroth to investigate the mako reactor in Nibelheim, the hometown of both Cloud and Tifa. While waiting for orders, Cloud has a friendly chat with the townspeople and is joined by young and enthusiastic Tifa on their journey to the reactor. Upon reaching the summit, they uncover that the mad scientist, Hojo, is behind some illegal and horrific experiments.
Sephiroth takes matters into his own hands and starts destroying everything in the lab. However, his rampage comes to a halt when suddenly he is struck with a Mako-induced headache, where he discovers the truth about himself being a cloned offspring of Geneva's cells. Sephiroth then retreats to Nibelheim’s library to learn more about the "Geneva Project" and his dark hidden past. Upon realizing the truth, Sephiroth goes on a rampage, burning down Nibelheim and causing many civilian casualties, including Cloud's mother and Tifa's father.
After Cloud and his gang escaped from Midgar, they sought refuge in the town of Kalm. However, they soon realized that they weren't safe there as Shinra was still pursuing them. They decided to leave Kalm and venture into the wilds, following a group of individuals known as the 'Black robes,' who were believed to be leading them to Sephiroth's hiding place. As they travel across various continents and towns, their goals and objectives shift depending on the situation at hand.
THE OPEN WILDS
After the end of the game's first chapter, Rebirth's biggest new addition is apparent, as soon as it meets your eyes, the open wilds, while Remake tries to tell a big expansive tale, its brought down by some old linear game design and only a handful of open areas to explore.
Early on you'll be reacquainted with a familiar face, Chadley. who will be your teacher understanding the lands, all in help for acquiring field data that he needs to further his own research.
After taking a look at the foggy map, only a few important locations are marked. However, finding 'Ubisoftesque' Remnawave towers and activating them will add more key points to the map. These points include hidden life springs, which reveal interesting backstories about the corresponding region once scanned. fiend battles, which are tough encounters that require meeting three objectives. Fortunately, these objectives don't have to be met in a single attempt, the game's many regions are littered with things to do.
Even though the open world of Rebirth may appear extensive and abundant at first, it quickly becomes monotonous. It is overloaded with various activities right from the start, but they are not well-paced to avoid boredom setting in fairly quickly.
Furthermore, half of the things to do in the open wilds are only enjoyable the first couple of times, apart from if necessary to do so I avoided wasting time.
I’d highly suggest getting your first Chocobo as soon as possible. It will make dealing with some of my nitpicks in the open world easier. Fast travel is a must-have staple in most games of the same genre, and you'll find abandoned chocobo stops that you can warp to whenever you please. These stops double up as park benches, allowing you to heal your party if you have a cushion that can be used once. When you get your first Chocobo, keep an eye out for flocks of rabbits as they indicate nearby buried treasure.
Although the cute and cuddly, yellow-feathered friend, Chocobo, is useful for travelling quickly across the fields, they can be a bit of a nuisance as they often get stuck in the terrain, controlling a Chocobo is harder than it looks with it unresponsive at times, making avoiding unnecessary combat scenarios a real pain.
My issues with man's best friend don't end there. During treasure hunts, you must sniff out three hidden items. You must be near the location of the buried treasure and hold a button to sniff it out. If the treasure isn't in your vicinity and is located through a wall, it bugs out and becomes unobtainable. You have to leave the area and try again until the RNG is in your favour!
One such addition is the transmuter, a handy feature that allows you to convert resources found throughout the regions and dropped loot from enemies into useful loot for yourself. You can use this loot to build equipment and materia or healing items. As you progress in the game, you can upgrade from basic potions to hi-potions and upgrade your equipment to hold more materia slots. It takes over 50 hours to beat Rebirth, and you would think the button you would press most is either the square attack button or the X button to continue dialogue. However, you will be using the triangle button the most, as it is the action key that picks up all the loot and interacts with everything in the game.
In order I had complete control over my camera and movement, and to avoid having to stop to pick up loot, I started using the much beloved "claw grip style" that is well-known in the older PSP Monster Hunter games and the Soul's series.
There's a vocal minority of gamers that complain about how ‘beginner’ friendly games have become, with easy-to-see collectables and more recently the infamous YELLOW PAINT! guiding players to the main path, Although I can ignore the big triangle button over small flowers, the yellow paint is too loud and garish. It is used in strange places, mostly on climbable rocks in the sunny overworld, where finding the natural path isn't a problem but missing in dark caverns where it does.
While exploring the lands in Rebirth can be tedious at times, don't worry about missing out on well-hidden chests that aren't on the main path. Rebirth has a unique feature that I haven't seen in any other game - any important loot that you might have missed, such as stronger weapons or unique armour, can be purchased at the next town's shop. When I discovered this early on, it made me realize that I didn't have to waste my time looking for items endlessly.
COMBAT
If you played the last game, you will be familiar with the active time battle (ATB) system that returns from Remake, built on even further, square has made an already great formula even better. While the FF series is more or less known for turn-based combat they have actively tried adopting a more action-focused way for some time now, starting with Final Fantasy 13 back in 2010 and iterating on it ever since, even last years Final Fantasy 16’s combat was based heavily on the character action games Devil May Cry, as much as I love DMC’s combat it just doesn’t fit all that well into a mainline FF game.
I much prefer ATB, the aim of the game is to attack the foe and build up the meter, use a specific ability to exploit an enemy's weakness, which by continuously pressuring, leaves them vulnerable in a staggered state, allowing you to unleash massive damage, you rinse and repeat this method until you are victorious.
It's all very fluid and once you get in the swing of things, it becomes rhythmically precise, which feels very satisfying. To keep with how it all flows, blocking isn’t a waste of a chance to attack, characters can either roll from danger or guard an incoming attack which reduces damage but if timed right will negate any.
You get to be in control of the ever-growing party in Rebirth, like Intermissions' main star Yuffie, thankfully many of them feel fantastic to control, Rebirth’s combat is very team-focused, cycling party members at key moments during a fight being more apparent than in Remake, different pairings of your team have unique actions, called ‘synergy skills’ which are quick team-up attacks, they are varied and buff certain stats but more importantly help develop into the relationship meter you have with your friends, during a fight if you build up enough synergy with members you can unleash a powerful duo attack which has a cool cinematic to go with it, these vary quite abit and upgrading your stats in the skill tree, you can swap and change to help with your own perfect battle plan, returning again are limit breaks which disappointingly haven’t been built upon like everything else.
With all the battle data you helped Chadley within the last game, he’s revised and improved the combat simulator to 3.1! it’s more or less the same as it was, returning are the summon boss battles, now based on each of the 6 regions' guardian protectors, fan favourites return like Gilgamesh, Phoenix and Bahamut, they are a steep bit harder than before and like with Intermission and remake, really test your skills, to help alleviate the difficulty, finding the 4 hidden divine intel in each region can help with the challenge, I found myself hardly using the summons as the battle system is diverse enough as it is and having to watch the unskippable scene each and every time I didn’t feel the need to.
That said materia is still a massive central part of Rebirth, slotting them into your armour and weapons you’ll be able to cast spells, buff stats like health and MP and even summon the previously mentioned godlike summons, using equipped materia usefully in battles increases the level of such and in return boost the enhancements by a fair amount, finding the perfect pairings in your team with having a fair balance of heals and offence spells really help.
SIDE QUESTS
Unlike last year’s disappointing optional quests in Final Fantasy 16, in Rebirth they are one of the best things it has going for it, a fair few more than in Remake, once you are familiar with a new town, members will have you doing all sorts of odd jobs, simple fetch quests, escort missions or defeating a strong foe, while these are plentiful, there are a good few unique ones that really shine, like helping Johnny with his treasure trove and a whole quest based about breaking a frog curse, these funny, endearing and some surprisingly unsettling small tales really help humanize the world, and add cause to main objective of team avalanche saving the world.
With another example of rebirth being respective with your time, you don’t have to locate most people to initiate a quest, simply finding a noticeboard in the towns will be enough, though this can be tough as the bigger cities have a real problem with verticality and I found myself struggling to find my bearings a good few times.
MINIGAMES
Minigames return, like Fort Condor in Remake, Rebirth has an enormous amount, a dozen or so in total, while a big number, these are more or less boring, shallow time sinks, the worst offender is at first, an unavoidable quest of acquiring Pico, your first ridable Chocobo, these are forced stealth encounters that want you to slowly approach said chocobo without being spotted by other chocobos, keeping guard.
while the first time you do this is pretty simple, you are required to do this in each new region, they increase in difficulty with adding more hazards and a bigger arena to creep through, these can lead to some infuriating moments.
If you enter a Moogstool in the overworld, be prepared for Moogle mischief. These mischievous creatures will hinder your progress as you guide them back to their pen, similar to the Chocobo round-up. However, they won't come willingly and throw bombs and spells your way, for the umpteenth time in recent years the Moogles' have been redone and they are downright ugly.
The cute small moogles from the remake and even last year's Final Fantasy 16 have been replaced with lanky, creepy humanoid versions, encountering the foul beasts for the first time, I confused them for enemies.
Most of the minigames are the centre piece of the Gold Saucer, with parts of the theme park being focused around a fair few, there’s a Virtua fighter like 3D brawler which plays like the Nintendo classic ‘Punch out!’ learning to beat your opponent by reading their move set and countering when the time is right, while this seems fun at first, similarities in move tells are unforgiving, there’s not much difference in animations and only give you a split second to react, leading to some rough later battles.
Another is the minigame Galactic Saviours, similar to Star Fox, you control a space plane fighting off against alien invaders, a simple on-rails shooter that is a cakewalk and does not last long.
Quantity over quality is what Square went with in Rebirth, resulting in a lot of them being mediocre at best, padding the already lengthy adventure. including just a few of them fleshed out more would've sufficed.
QUEENS BLOOD
One outlier to this is Queens Blood, a minigame so well made with crazy depth and ease to understand, I’m hoping Square-Enix do what CD Projekt did with Gwent and make a full release later on, even I’d buy physical cards if they did so.
Let’s talk about Queen's Blood then! you start off with a deck of 15 cards and battle on a table set 3 x 5, the aim of the game is to win each lane with the highest power count, you always get the first move and getting a dream hand to start well can really shape how the game will play out. Like a similar fantasy card game Yu-Gi-Oh you can only summon cards on a lower charge.
To play the higher charge cards you must build it up, by summoning monsters that boost spaces ahead on the board, this is where Queens blood strategies live or die by. Also to note, some of the cards have bonus effects which build into the ‘easy to play and hard to master’ some lower power counts while others buff certain tiles.
Each town has people always eager for a game of Queens Blood, a game so good some of your foes include a fellow Chocobo or a black robe, you start off with a basic deck and by beating opponents you’ll win a trump card, another way of cumulating more cards is buying booster packs at certain vendors.
Square Enix is confident enough to show off Queens Blood at every turn in rebirth, it just shows with the amount of depth they put into it they knew it would flourish, even giving a whole chapter dedicated to it.
A DISAPPOINTING TALE
My biggest disappointment with Rebirth is, how convoluted they make the main thread of the story to follow, Square set expectations with Remake, diverting preconceptions set by the 1997 original.
The end of Remake goes into disarray with Sephiroth using the lifestream to create limitless timelines and retconning the ending of Crisis Core with Zach fair living to see another day, which at the time left many fans both anxious and eager to see where it all lead.
The same can be said about Rebirth, where the multiverse is used to conflict suspicions of where it will go, it leads to a further confusing mess of a plot, that’s hard to follow and leaves loads of loose ends that the next game will probably have trouble tying up, in a lengthy game such as rebirth, there is no excuse to hit credits and feel the need to watch a die-hard fan online explain it in layman’s terms.
It’s normal to have the first game of a trilogy end with more questions than answers, with endless theories/possibilities that will be answered in later games, reaching the end of Rebirth though, it’s made the overall arch even cloudier (no pun intentional) with little to no answers and even more questions that lead to further confusion and doubts Square can wrap it all up years later in part 3.
Without going too deep into spoilers, Zach Fair is used very sparingly in Rebirth and is a big part of the vexatious lifestream confusion, his overall inclusion feels like a waste, it’s a personal reminder of last year’s story in Final Fantasy 16 capitulating two thirds through.
The whole multiverse craze has been run dry for years and while movies are already over it, video games aren’t. I despised the Marvel films for theirs, nine times out of ten, Loki cheated death due to some loophole in the multiverse, so when he did actually die it was like a ‘boy who cried wolf’ moment, the constant flip-flopping Rebirth does from very early on with its own multiverse, leaves me with the same issues, that kill any sort of emotional involvement I had.
It's not all bad storytelling though, be it a character side quest, sharing a special moment with a party member or helping a townsperson resolve an issue, Rebirth can tell smaller self-contained stories well, it’s just a shame the bigger picture isn’t.
MUSIC
I don’t want to end this review on such a sour note, so I’ll talk about the music. I am amazed by Rebirth’s actual track count - it's over 400 songs! That is a mind-boggling amount. I haven’t seen that high of a number in a video game since maybe Smash Ultimate in 2018, which, in contrast, is a celebratory multi-franchise fighting game, so it's justified to have such a number. It may sound like I’m complaining about Rebirth having so many tracks, but in fact, Rebirth’s soundtrack is a celebration of the entire Final Fantasy franchise, spanning 37 years. I’m not the biggest Final Fantasy nerd when it comes to memorable classics, but I do know a fair few.
Like other games such as Mario or Zelda, even if you haven’t played any of them, you know the songs. You would expect with such a high volume of tracks in Rebirth that the majority of them would be half-hearted, mediocre fillers, but nearly all the songs I heard in my lengthy playthrough were pleasant delights, ranging in every conceivable genre you can think of - from big, bombastic orchestral pieces to j-pop, rock, and even EDM charged tracks. Rebirth has every base covered, and they all fit.
Classic staples like Tifa’s theme have multiple renditions, with a slightly tweaked version that featured in 2020’s remake and a beautiful piano medley piece, in most other games, multistage bosses have different urgencies of the same theme, playing throughout the fight, but in Rebirth, it will straight up change entirely which elevates the moment.
I almost forgot to mention another great minigame. In most townhouses, there is a piano with a score sheet. As Cloud, you can try playing some well-known classics. There is a surprising amount of depth to this minigame since you can tune the piano yourself to freestyle any song you desire if your personal favourite isn't present. Even side missions have unique songs. For instance, there's an early quest where you must escort a dog to safety. Whenever you encounter foes during the journey, a more upbeat song about the dog plays, instead of the typical battle theme that usually plays. It's charming as hell, and there is so much variety at play here. It's undoubtedly the best Final Fantasy soundtrack from the handful of games I've played, and it might be one of the best gaming soundtracks of all time.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth feels like it’s taken one step forward, two steps back with some high highs and some low lows, it had some enormous expectations to follow, after a great predecessor and a lore rich world already built decades before, while the combat system is better than ever, some charming character growth and maybe the greatest video game music to grace my own ears. Rebirth falls short with its technical shortcomings, very formulaic open world, and a confusing convoluted overarching story.
2024 is setting itself up to be a seminal year for RPG’s. I am excited the year has started with strong releases such as Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and Persona 3 Reload and a good few on the horizon, it’s just a damn shame that Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth couldn’t be the shining jewel in the crown.
Platform: PS5
Hours to beat: 54
Pro's:
Combat system
Spectacular soundtrack
Small contained stories
Queens Blood
Con's:
Open world drab
Naff Minigames
Convoluted story
Score: 7/10
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