Demographically speaking, I am the target audience for this game (an adult who owned a PS1 between the years of 1996-2001.) Personally speaking, I am not the target audience of this game. I didn't play FFVII until many years after the PS1's obsolescence. My main experience with it was in the summer of 2000 where I spent a week at a camp in Northern New Jersey homesick, listening to my friend tell me every single thing about the game (I did the same thing for him with Ocarina of Time.) I think the original is a good game but its not something important to me. The subsequent influx of FFVII spinoffs, most of which seemed to miss the point of what made the game and characters interesting, were enough to put me off from wanting to play this for awhile. With Rebirth out now and the hot point of discussion for 2024, I figured it was time.

I'm glad I did. Unlike so many of those spinoffs, this game gets what makes the original characters interesting and embellishes them for this most part. Aeris (I will die with the old translation sorry) is funny and charming, Cloud is a doofus, Barrett is compelling, etc. The weird eccentricities of the game are embraced instead of washed out. And while I have no idea if I will be satisfied with its conclusion, I appreciate approaching the material in a new way rather than it being a completely slavish remake. FFVII has never been a sacrosanct game for me so maybe I'm more lenient than someone who was waiting for this game for decades, but I think the balancing act of keeping the characters true to the 97 original and also taking things in a different direction is its most interesting aspect.

My qualms are more gameplay related. I don't think FF needs to be stuck in the past or locked into a turn based style (I've never beaten it but I think XII is one of the best games in the series for reference) but the Kingdom Hearts sort of combat really never did it for me. There's times in this where it feels good, but more often than not I would feel like it was just a smidge too slow or to unwieldy for me to really enjoy it, especially when you start fighting flying enemies and combat becomes more complicated. It never was enough to break my will, but by the end of the game I was very much ready to just call it a day.

So yeah, its good! I don't think its for me in many ways, but I am glad I played it. I'll probably wait another 4 years for FVVI ReLife or whatever the third one is going to be called before playing Rebirth, even though that game covers my favorite parts of the original. That 60+ hours is terrifying to me right now.

I'm fascinated by what games and franchises Konami chooses to put out these days. First a Getsu Fuma Den game and now this? I never would have guessed we would get one Contra game in the past 5 years, let alone two of them. Need whoever is making decisions to get weird and bring back Goemon soon.

Anyway, Contra games probably have the biggest variance in quality out of all the classic Konami games. This one is firmly in the top half of quality, which isn't surprising since WayForward already made a top tier Contra with 4. I mostly played Story Mode with one hit kill here and had a thoroughly ball busting time. More than nay Contra I've played this felt like a Gradius; I would be cruising along with power ups until an errant bullet hit me and then I was overwhelmed (pro-tip, weapon retention perk is a god send.)