Summary
- FF7 Rebirth seemed like it would address all of my issues with its predecessor, but fell short with tedious open-world filler.
- Despite a strong main story and satisfying combat, the game's side content is too much of a slog.
- FF7 Rebirth relies heavily on open-world design principles that have long grown tired.
Coming into 2024, 2020's FF7 Remake was 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 of Final Fantasy 16 as 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. Although FF16 is 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 Rebirth would 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, but more damning facets of its design have left me almost morose regarding Rebirth.
I Was Prepared For FF7 Rebirth To Be My 2024 Game Of The Year
Pre-Release Builds Had Me Convinced Of Rebirth's Greatness
I had the absolute pleasure of being invited by Square Enix to play FF7 Rebirth twice before its release date. While an exciting experience in its own right, getting to have such an early glimpse and report on it, my first Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth preview had me convinced that it would fix the minor issues I had with Remake. While I found Remake'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.
Rebirth promised 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 second hands-on FF7 Rebirth preview included 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. Despite Remake's linearity being one of my primary critiques of the game, there is an odd sort of comfort that it and FF16 have 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 with FF7 Rebirth comes from.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Has Too Much Open-World Filler For Me
Exploring Gaia Quickly Turned Into A Slog
I adore large swathes of FF7 Rebirth; the main quest and story are still endearing and mysterious, side quests being tied to specific party 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 love FF7 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 in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, my favorite game of 2023. If meaningful content is there, I'm going to seek it out and get my money's worth, and unfortunately for me, quite a bit of meaningful content in FF7 Rebirth is directly tied to chores.
At face value, I don't mind a lot of the optional content in Rebirth. 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 in Skyrim and the item descriptions in Elden Ring, the reward of learning more about FF7 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 when Assassin's Creed Revelations rounded out a whole trilogy of this exact gameplay loop. It's become colloquially known as "Ubisoft bloat" because Assassin's Creed still suffers from this open-world design.
Exploration in FF7 Rebirth isn't organic, and it kills my motivation to engage with what is otherwise able gameplay. Breath of the Wild introduced an emergent gameplay loop that's been solidified in my mind by Elden Ring and TOTK as 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 com 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 of Remake. Rebirth will 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 the Remake trilogy 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 touched Rebirth for 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 many glowing FF7 Rebirth reviews being wrong; I'm just disappointed that Rebirth didn'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 into Final Fantasy when I was younger. FF7 is such a cultural touchstone for gaming, and I thought maybe the Remake trilogy was my chance to get in on it, to finally understand. Maybe I'll play the inevitable Final Fantasy 17, but it doesn't look like I'll be eagerly awaiting Remake Part 3. For now, I'll continue agonizing over whether to delete Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth whenever 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
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- Top Critic Avg: 92/100 Critics Rec: 97%
- Released
- February 29, 2024
- ESRB
- T For Teen Due To Blood, Language, Mild Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco, Violence
- Developer(s)
- Square Enix
- Publisher(s)
- Square Enix
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 4
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.
- Franchise
- Final Fantasy
- Platform(s)
- PC
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