This game was really interesting. I liked Remake quite a lot and was extremely excited for Rebirth to come out as well, since it looked like it was cleaning up the small things I didn’t like about Remake. In a relatively short time period, Square Enix managed to develop a huge, expansive open-world game with tons to do and at a fairly high production quality.

The ability to play a full party, cycling them in and out as you wish and having each character feel fully realized and unique is very impressive in a modern game. I wish more Final Fantasy games did this and still want to see more modern games follow the formula set by the Remake series with the unique blend of turn-based and action combat. The music is still quite good, as is the voice acting. Only a few side characters took me out of the game from how they did voicing, but otherwise it was quite well done. I appreciated having reasons to use most of the party, and learning how each of them does or does not contribute to my strategy as a whole. Some of them I obviously liked less, but my least favourite character might be someone’s favourite. That variety is a nice thing in a game like this.

I have mixed feelings on the open world. The game is huge. One thing I didn’t like about Remake was that some parts felt like padding to “make you experience the game more” but felt strongly like filler (e.g., the robot hand puzzles on the way to Wall Market), but overall the game was quite short so these didn’t blemish the experience. There are sequences in Rebirth where the game feels like it’s milking the moment too long, particularly toward the end of the game, and I simply want to move on at those points. The Temple of the Ancients in particular overstays its welcome, and even doing the final boss gauntlet had me wondering when I was getting close to finished as enjoyable as the combat was.

While I appreciate that with Rebirth the world truly feels big and realized, there is simply too much to do. I recognize I don’t need to do everything, but it is overwhelming to process and I don’t think every side quest is a quality experience. In fact, some of them have good or even interesting narratives and mechanics, while others are extremely repetitive. Going into a new region knowing I would do exactly 4 proto-relics that follow the same format, find 3 shrines to the regional summon, etc. got a little tiresome after realizing the pattern after Junon. The tracking system for each region was nice to know how much I still had to do, but I did not find it much more engaging than any other generic open-world format. Notably, climbing is both frequent and exhausting because the characters move somewhat slowly up and down vertical climbs, and there’s not a lot of forgiveness in the open world when you approach a minor cliff face. The first region actually made me realize this, because many of the hills are jagged and you can get stuck on them. While Horizon has restricted climbing, in the sense that you can only climb specific pathways, the fluidity of climbing in those games is enjoyable and there are ways to mitigate needing to do so altogether at points in the game. The addition of Ubisoft towers to the overworld was also pretty unnecessary. I get that it’s the established format at this point, but it was a pretty forgettable way to uncover the map in the way it was implemented. Even the original Ubisoft tower (in Assassin’s Creed) puts in a bit more of an exciting show into doing it, both by slowly revealing how high you’re going and the interesting ways to climb a building, which is sometimes lost when others emulate the format as was done here.

A notable negative point in this game is Chadley and Mai’s aggressive voiceover. In battles, Mai is tiresome and has very repetitive dialogue that I don’t really value or need past the first listen. Chadley is incessantly buzzing you like an overbearing partner, not realizing that I would like to just go around the map at my own pace and not have his annoying robot ass sending me a FaceTime every 5 minutes. I got a Pavlovian response to the world intel celebrations near the end of the game, because I knew Chadley had an 80% chance of calling me directly after.

Finally, the story was a big question mark coming in and I had mixed feelings here as well. The question of Aerith actually dying or not was on everyone’s mind (including the marketing team’s), and the development team was clearly aware of this since they toyed with scenes that mimicked the original death scene even from the very opening of the game. I am not convinced it was handled well. In the original game, it was a quick and impactful scene where you really feel that Aerith is gone for real and your party feels the loss. In Rebirth, her death(?) scene plays with the idea of if she is dead or not, and we don’t really get a satisfying resolution. Combined with the multiverse Aeriths, it almost seems like the game is afraid to say what happens one way or another, and disappointingly leaves that plot thread for the third game to fully resolve. While I think the true answer is she did die and Cloud is experiencing trauma, I was a little disappointed they played a little too loosely with it and watered it down from the impact it otherwise may have had, even knowing how it ended in the original game. The multiverse timeline thing was another interesting thing most people guessed correctly (i.e., that Zack is in some other timeline). I’m not fully satisfied in how much of the plot was left for the third game to resolve (or never resolve fully?), and my satisfaction with what this game set up is highly dependent on how the third game does or does not stick the landing. Other thoughts on the story were that it was cool seeing reference and story connections to other side content (in particular, Crisis Core, which has many many connections in Rebirth), yet I also had struggles with some moments where the plot was intentionally changed. Sometimes this subseries uses plot changes as intentional twists or to mess with the audience, and sometimes it simply changes the plot. For example, the way Cait Sith is dealt with near the end of the game, the fact that the Temple of the Ancients does not appear to collapse inside the Black Materia (which I thought was incredibly cool in the original), and the weird way Cid is introduced without Rocket Town were things where I couldn’t tell if a later twist was coming that would align things with what I expected or if we were just entirely changing what was happening in the remake. I appreciate the desire to write a new plot to not make it boring, but some of the twists and story beats are missing for me when I can’t tell what is an actual change or what is just a delayed plot moment.

Recognizing there is a lot of negative in this review, I don’t think the game is bad by any means. I had such a good time playing it and went slowly through it and methodically for a month so that I could enjoy it, knowing it was a long game. It is just another case of “bigger and messier” that I’ve noticed in most game sequels recently, and I’d like to hope that the third game reins it in a little, even though it is unlikely at this point given the positive reception to Rebirth. I’m still looking forward to the next game and hoping it can provide a satisfying conclusion to this very impressive trilogy, and hope that Final Fantasy XVII, whenever it comes out, can learn from the very complex and interesting battle system presented in this subseries.