I Played Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth.
Completionism is the devil of Narrative. If you want to push ludonarrative dissonance to the tipping point, past the apex where any characters have any true meaning, try “doing everything.” If you want the mainline Hero’s Journey to lose all inspiration, to lose all motivation, try “getting all of the achievements.” Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth is the ultimate testament to this theory. In fact, I’d argue that this game gets so tangled up in its own way with fan service, with anime tropes, with universal goofiness, with traversal puzzling and jumped-the-shark ass hee-hawing that even if you tried to complete the main storyline and nothing BUT the main storyline you’d still be left with a vague sense of what you’ve actually accomplished by the end of it.
I didn’t do everything, but I did a lot. As every 2–6 hour play session ended, I had my phone in hand leaving voice messages for buddies who had completed the game. I probably sounded angrier than I was. I probably sounded more disconnected from the game than I was. But trying to ensure that this open world outside of Midgar felt addressed, trying to be the heroic unit of party members that I was controlling and helping all of the people in these remote villages meant that I had to go about their business how I saw fit. Even if that meant taking photos of the scenic landscapes while my nemesis was chasing down an elemental weapon which could annihilate humanity. Even when it meant that even while a small task force was chasing down the same biospiritual entity, I was willing to go to Vegas-Max and race ostrich like birds in a Mario Kart tournament so I could help a young boy understand what happened to his parents. Even when it meant that trying to stop an assassination attempt on the president of the hypo-global Corpo-Government involved rounding up a group of soldiers who would be able to march in complex marching band formations controlled in the vein of a Dance Dance Revolution-style minigame.
Lotta bullshit, man.
Typically, I’m not the one to talk to about What Happened. So on the outset of this, I will say: There will be no spoilers in this piece.
When someone asks “What’s it about?”, my response is 9/10 times going to be, “Oh, I dono.” It’s not that it doesn’t mean anything to me in the moment. It’s just that when I’m playing these games (or to be honest, watching these movies, reading these books, whatever), I’m so into the moment that my brain isn’t taking notes, it’s experiencing these moments in real time and applying conclusions and extrapolations. It’s the same part of my brain that doesn’t allow me to answer “What’d you do yesterday?” right away. It’s all a part of a fluid experience, a liquid sensation (ew?) that’s in my mind as this nexus of thought and reaction which makes up a storyline or a timeline. I don’t think about these pieces of media as “about” anything. They’re often made up of entertaining instances, emotional crescendos, thought-provoking landmarks. This game is about: the end of the world and how we must work together to save it, even when everything working against us feel a million years ahead of us. It’s about putting trust in the people who we have surrounded ourselves with. It’s about the timelessness and boundlessness of friendship.
I played the first Final Fantasy VII on Playstation 1. I remember sitting in my bedroom in high school for entire weekends locked up and grinding away, trying to level up my characters to be able to get through the next dungeons. I remember having to breed chocobos. I remember having to kill a giant snake in a marsh. I remember an airship. I remember Limit Breaks. I remember the nearly impossible battles against the giant Ruby and Emerald Weapons. I remember Sephiroth. I remember that moment. But I don’t think I remember the story as a whole. And 2020’s Final Fantasy VII: Remake (Part 1 of this series) took that story which I already barely had a grasp on and flipped it on its head. A lot of the main beats are there. The big things that create the spinal column of the game’s core are intact. But the way they introduced the meta concept that this game is toying with the idea that it sort of knows it’s a game, some of the characters sort of know what’s going to happen, the game sort of knows that we know what’s going to happen…and that changes everything. Destiny becomes malleable. The planet, the characters, and fate all fight against the current.
That concept continues here in Rebirth. There are things that are inevitably going to happen in the storyline that all fans of the series remember. Singular gaming moments that exist in the Hall of Fame of narrative turning points in all of games. That moment. We know it’s coming. But the fact that this game is taking events of the game and twisting them… how’s it all going to go down?
After 74 hours of playtime with this game, I want to go all in and express everything that I saw happen. I want to discuss plot points, I want to talk about the way things play out. The drama, the romance, the expression. Lots of heartbreak. Lots of moments of triumph and defeat. The way the game steals the rug out from under you time and again. I want to talk deeply about my emotions, my feelings, my theories on what “actually happened.”
We’re not going into spoiler territory here, though.
What I don’t want to talk about is bloat, but if there was one thing I would talk about in this game… it’s bloat. “Forty year alcoholic bloat.” As someone who loves to go across entire open world maps and find beacons to complete, to talk to every “villager” and complete every side mission, this may partially have been my fault. Though there are elements of this game that feel like they get in their own way. I understand: this game didn’t want you to be able to run forward through it as if you were playing Far Cry, able to get to every portion of the map by simply directing yourself there. But with most of the game operating on a level where the mission is dire, people’s lives are on the line, the fate of the world is in your hands and your hands alone as we trek through the various regions accompanied by one of the last remaining Cetra, an elder whose powers and connection with Gaia are near infinite, it felt a little goofy to have to sneak around minecart tracks, to capture a Chocobo which was able to fly through the air and go from cavern to cavern.
These types of things, like fist-fighting a ringmaster of a three ring circus in a futuristic DisneyVegas felt foul and inauthentic. Backtracking through miles of jungle to make sure I could kill the right monsters (they weren’t two or three times) so that I could gain the trust of a guy at an outpost who wouldn’t “let me into” some small village where I had to ask one guy one question feels like I’m gaming in 1993. There is barely heroism going on through 60% of the game. It’s police work. It’s tedium. Chores. It makes the guns, the swords, the spells, the mastery of avatars of some of the largest and most powerful spirits on the planet feel foolish and impotent. It was unfortunate that for long, long stretches of the game, I felt like I was playing a game that I desperately wanted to love in one way, but could only carve out small moments of joy that were shaped like Mario Party and then shaped like One Piece. The standout moments, though, felt incredible. They felt like fast and furious battles a la Bayonetta and Devil May Cry in the quest to do something eternal, to do something important. And when those cutscenes hit at the end of each chapter, it felt extraordinary.
It’s disappointing that those impactful events are separated by chasms, towers and valleys of emotionless and gray padding. So much of this game felt like watching a stand up comedian bombing on one of the biggest nights of their career. Some of these middle ground stretches feel like watching a 90s sitcom and being unable to hear any of the dialog because the laugh track is overwhelming with volume, absolutely peaking, shredding your speakers.
Was the juice always worth the squeeze? In meager moments, rung by rung, no. But as a full product: emphatically YES. This was one of my most rewarding video game experiences by the time I rolled credits at the end of just over 3 days of game play time.
How I played this game initially was the way that I approach every open world game. I started in the opening area and did main quest stuff until it began to unlock the open world which let me explore. Once that opened up, I did every side quest I could find. I went to every beacon on the map and accomplished whatever the task it was asking of me. I killed the unique and rare enemy according to whatever the Little AI Robot Boy told me I had to do. I gathered all the intel on the Summon materia. I found all the life springs. I cleaned the map, top to bottom. I would drag myself across the finish line of the main story quest bleary eyed and unsatisfied, mentally wounded from the amount of sheer grind I was putting myself through. Which, I’ll be real, was such a crucial element of the original Final Fantasy games which I loved.n The original VII required a ton of running around the over world to ensure that your materia was leveled, to ensure that your skills were peaked, that your HP was maxed out. This is a game play loop popularized in the first game featuring the Warriors of Light just as much as it was important in one of my top 3 games of all time, Final Fantasy VI.
I do not recommend playing the game the way that I played it.
If you have waited this long to get into the game, if you have been able to put the game off for half a year and are not chomping at the bit to get it, I promise you, the experience of “one hundred percenting” the game will not bring you a vast amount of excitement or entertainment. It was not worth putting the time into the game the way that I did.
What I recommend is this: To get the most out of the game, play this game with a sense of enjoyment at the forefront, with narrative and story as the number one priority. Explore the lands and get a sense of the absolutely beautiful world that the game has to offer. Pick and choose which side quests you accomplish not based on checking off a box, but instead basing it on which quests feel like they’ll be the most personally fulfilling. I promise that you will not regret passing on a quest where you have to slowly (slowwwly) bait chickens to walk back to a woman’s farm. This game will not reward you in spades for chintsy little extras that you interact with. I would say that engaging with some of the Protorelic quests is fun, but the main dumbass who is at the core of this quest has his head shoved so far up the CrunchyRoll Premium Subscription archetype that they won’t see daylight. It will probably only be enjoyed by owners and preorder customers of a Tifa, Aerith or Yuffie Body Pillow. But getting his summon materia is pretty helpful, if you do implement the use of that play style. Which, admittedly I mostly do not. Getting summons scratched part of my completion itch, but didn’t really fill my cup.
FOR ME the little side expositions were not fun, and I believe they actually took away from the gaming experience. If I could do it all over, I would mainline this game and do my best to leave the extra flare on the cutting room floor.
If anything, the party you’re surrounded by does have some great interactive moments, so spending time with each of them was really great. Sometimes that does mean getting involved in specific side quests. I love the iconic characters now more than I did when I played them in their polygon era, that’s for sure. My biggest issue overall, as I’ve explained to friends is this: where Mass Effect 3 gave you a chance to throw a 1 hour house party scene to get to see some of your compatriots let loose and show some of their personalities, the rest of the 40 hours are missions. This game flips that entirely. It’s a 39 hour house party and one hour of dark, world affirming missions. Until the final temple, I would say that only about 20–30% of the story was happening. Love the party, love the unity and friendship, but on some level, I feel like I wanted more.
And that brings me to the most impactful part of the story for me. This will be hard to get into without spoilers, so I will be curbed and abbreviated about most of it. Especially considering the fact that the game is playing with the outcomes of the iconic games from the onset, one character comes into question MOST in this game. She is by far one of my favorite characters not only in this game, but possibly my most beloved character in any game since Garrus Vakarian.
Aerith’s involvement in this game is so intrinsically tied to everything I loved about this game. If she wasn’t involved in the game, I don’t believe I’d have the same emotional attachment to any of the narrative, to any of the storyline, to any of the big story beats along the game’s play through.
Most of the latter parts of this game hinge on Aerith’s presence as one of the Ancients and her being one of the only keys to unlocking the secrets to the planet and the way that it is dying and trying to protect itself. As a character, her outward personality is often ‘cute’ and aloof. There are moments, however, where you can see that she understands the burden which befalls her. A lot of times, I had a sense that she knew the destiny that awaited her at the end of the timeline that’s been written (again, the meta; her fate which takes her during a major turning point in the PS1 title). There is a levity about her, a wispy and pure disposition that she becomes known for, even as the weight of her involvement becomes more and more daunting. She struggles with it, but keeps a brightness within. Watching her come to terms with the next phases of her journey during the final 12–15 hours of the game is sublime.
I’m not sure what a solo spotlight on Aerith would look like outside of the party setting. She plays a heavily maternal role for all of the characters and maintains a staunch altruism that somehow finds a way to turn a vivid optimism towards all of the dark machinery at work. Her motherly nature takes on more clarity as the quest progresses, starting as a modest gardener who can “speak with the flowers” building into the illustration that she is communing with the planet, nearly becoming one with Mother Gaia as she unites with the entity.
She knows more than she can say and almost more than she can bear. She seems to get waves of knowledge and prophecy through the life stream and continues her positive demeanor. It’s one of the purist and most uplifting presences I have ever felt in all of media.
Whoever wrote this character had such a finger on the pulse of what it means to be a thorough and dedicated part of someone’s life. They were able to somehow capture the essence of someone who was so wholly committed to the quasi-romantic but more importantly all-encompassing platonic love that befalls the relationship between two people meant to find each other through the entropy of the universe. There are events in this game, one towards the middle, one about three fourths through the game, and then nearly the entire climax which will forever impress me in terms of how an interactive story was told and how much it had me in its embrace. The last couple of stories that really got me this emotional were Bayek’s love story from Assassin’s Creed: Origins and the relationship that bloomed, evolved and blossomed with Triko in The Last Guardian. In Wednesday night’s final play session, a full day’s dive of around 6–8 hours, there were three moments where my throat swelled up the size of a softball, where in the next room, Kaleena had to ask if I was okay from crying.
I’M FINE.
I’M NOT FINE.
It was just too much.
This is a game that requires knowledge and dialog to further explain where I am emotionally and mentally with it. With subject matter and finales as sensitive as this, I am definitely not going to even tip-toe into spoiler territory. But I will say that I can’t wait to talk more about it, for those who finish it and want to jump in, or those who simply do not care and want to gush about the way that video games can make us feel the way that any other media can… I’m open to have that conversation.
I will say that they do honor one of the most memorable moments in gaming in a way that does all of the anticipation, all of the hype, all of the conjecture pure justice.
At the end of the day, do I recommend this game? Sort of.
If this is a game you’re on the fence about picking up, I almost feel like it doesn’t do enough to win casual fans of the series over. I can’t imagine picking this game up because you heard “it was cool” and finding a way to connect with it in any meaningful way.
If this is a game that you’re following up on because you completed Remake a few years ago, but are just bouncing in to “see what happens next” on a middle-ground interest level, I think also that I might say the best move would be to wait this one out entirely. I still don’t know if it accomplishes the task of being a standalone experience to enjoy as it stands.
However.
If this is a game that you already are connected to from your time with the classic PS1 edition or if you found it in your heart to accept the characters from the first entry of this reimagined classic and have needed more over the last four years, or if these personalities live as some distant echo, some swirling whisper in your mind… this game is an incredibly built piece of modern nostalgia and tells a story that not only takes advantage of the cache of emotion you’ve built up for the characters over decades, but also tells a brand new and sentimentally explosive story that will deeply and completely satisfy… if you can make it past the dozens (and dozens and dozens) of hours of extraneous content.
