Bit short for the price, and does nothing to address characters with unclear fates in the main story (not even talking about the ending here), but I still had fun with it. The sky and environments look pretty and like a final fantasy game again, new abilities are fun, and I did like the new character. Felt like female characters were treated better here overall too, though it was definitely misleading to claim this was a Jill DLC.

Unfortunately it also serves as a bit of a grim reminder of the fundamental flaws of FF16—sidequests lack dynamic visual flair and always result in a talk -> fight -> talk loop, battle gameplay desperately lacks variety for such a lengthy game with zero minigames or side activities to distract you, only Clive is allowed to participate in major battles since no party system, and the dungeon formula is just... so... repetitive.

I'm admittedly somewhat relieved this is the final DLC, as while I certainly don't outright dislike FF16 and appreciated a lot of its strengths, I'm more than ready to move on from it. I don't like comparing games as I prefer to judge them on their own merits, but it's hard to deny 7 Rebirth is still fresh on my mind, and was exponentially closer to what I want out of an RPG.

"Let's make a sequel that ignores the worldbuilding of the original to focus on new wacky time travel lore, knock down the playable cast from 6 to 2, and harass you with a moogle navi that you can punish by throwing off cliffs!"

Sounds like an idea of the unhinged, one that would be laughed out of the room at pre-production stage, right? Nope—these ideas made their way into the final product, because somehow everyone involved in the decision making process thought this was a good idea.

And they... were right??? This game has no right to be as good as it is, it's a complete overreaction to all the criticisms of FF13, and yet it somehow just works. Making the main cast Lightning's mostly absent sister and this random guy from the future, complete with a cutesy mascot, sounds like the premise of a creatively bankrupt sequel; instead, it leads to one of the most memorable trios in the Final Fantasy series. Serah was already a decent character in the original, especially considering her role as a plot device damsel, and here they capitalise on that by allowing her to shine as a protagonist, on a journey with very real stakes to restore her old life. Noel slots in excellently with the new lore, has amazing chemistry with Serah—without creating romantic girl/boy duo #124812490 in media—and provides a very emotional story that left more impact on me than I was expecting.

Hell, even Mog is pretty lovable; and when he isn't, you can just throw him over the edge and listen to his sweet screams! Ludonarrative dissonance, pfft, more like ludonarrative resonance.

Battle wise I unfortunately don't think this sequel is better, it's one of the areas I feel the original was stronger. The improved QoL such as removing the long animation of the first paradigm shift (thank god) is appreciated, but overall it's just... a bit too easy for my tastes, and lacks the expertly designed game balance of FF13. The monster collector system is a fun idea, but I found it a little jank and grindy, and would've preferred a third character instead. Also, Serah and Noel are garbage synergists!! Either you infuse a chimera of abilities through a monster grindfest, or accept that debuffs are The Way this game. I'll remember you, haste...

Thankfully, exploration is here to save the day! Unlike FF13, which has the openness of my bathroom outside of the Archylte Steppe, 13-2 understands that it's nice being about to revisit areas and walk about a little. Each area is fairly small, and to call them "open areas" would be a ludicrous exaggeration outside of the returning Archylte Steppe, but the way they get around this is quite clever—time travel! There's so many hidden gates to find that take you to completely optional areas and time periods, it really makes it feel like you're exploring the 4th dimension. I wouldn't say the approach to exploration is perfect: a major blemish is how absurdly hidden most quest items and even some story items are, practically expecting most players to have a guide in hand, along with a bizarre lack of sidequest markers. But hey, I still had fun screwing around!

Encounter rate is a bit high for my tastes, though at least unlike FF13, it's pretty easy to avoid most enemies. The big exception to this being a certain "Cie'th city", with such outrageously frequent encounters that I'm convinced they didn't playtest this part of the final product—they even interrupt active voice dialogue! Why is the active voice dialogue longer than the time it takes for battles to start!

I do like the fun little puzzles they throw at you, though I do have to say the clock puzzles are an absurd spike in difficulty, you go from relatively easy puzzles to this... monstrosity. I mean, it's not bad and actually decently big brained, but it's a bit much to expect from a game not designed for hardcore puzzle gamers! Not to mention giving some time limits: it's pure evil, I tell you. Good thing there's helpful tools online to solve these so you don't have to git gud—of course, I'd never resort to cheating like that, I totally solved all these puzzles on my own, haha...

Music-wise I was pretty darn excited to get to this game after hearing how good the tracks were in theatrhythm, and it certainly delivered there. Like FFX, this soundtrack takes full advantage of having more than one composer, delivering a huge variety of tracks with their own unique styles, along with a bunch of beautiful and fun vocal themes. Highlights being: Plains of Eternity, Warrior Goddess, Full Speed Ahead, New Bodhum, Historia Crux, Worlds Collide, Yuel's Theme, Crazy Chocobo (sue me), Noel's Theme - Final Journey -, Unseen Abyss, and 'Closing Credits' which basically collates all the best tracks in the game under a deceptively bland title.

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STORY SPOILERS START HERE
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Wow, time travel! This should be a dreadful idea for a sequel, but it ends up working oddly well. They quickly make it clear that time travel has limitations and consequences, with only one true timeline being allowed, along with so many ways of accidentally creating world-ending paradoxes through butterfly effects. Our protagonists can't go wherever the hell they want either, as they are guided through gates that take them to static points in history. In fact, most of the game is really about undoing the paradoxes created by a certain reckless goddess we never meet, as she's too busy dying in the corner. Etro is a unique take on divinity—unlike the Fal'cie which are predictably manipulative and apathetic, Etro's benevolence towards humanity is her undoing, as every blessing she attempts to bestow leads to equivalent curses that doom others. Even better, that's the motivation of our villain: he's a bit tired of the goddess ruining the timeline by 'saving' people, causing the seeress he's been sworn to protect to keep dying as her brain gets microwaved by forced visions of every little change in history.

Caius makes for an absolutely fantastic antagonist with a sympathetic and downright reasonable motive—erasing the concept of time probably isn't a bad idea when you live in the apocalypse—along with high emotional stakes in facing him, being the mentor of Noel. While Yuel is a giant plot device with little personality beyond Nice and Good, this becomes a non-issue with how well she is used in the story, and it honestly is somewhat believable she's become so emotionless and unaffected considering what she's been exposed to throughout all her lifetimes. This makes Noel and Caius' relationship very interesting, as they both have the same goal, just drastically different ways of going about it.

Noel himself is a great deuteragonist—while the way we slowly uncover his memories is very plot convenient, it ends up unravelling in an emotionally satisfying way as we're exposed to his past and the hopeless world he lives in, where everything is dead and the only people he has left both die and vanish into the black mist of villainhood respectively. By the end he's practically on a suicide mission, until Etro saves him: it's impossible not to feel for the poor guy.

Speaking of Etro, we have Etro's Champion here in the form of Lightning. I'll be frank, I don't think this is an organic continuation of Lightning's role from 13—in that game she was a fairly down to earth person, so turning her into this servant of the goddess feels beyond excessive and doesn't do much for her character. We also don't really get to see much of a relationship get built between her and Caius, despite them both being on the cover and the entire story revolving around their eternal conflict on the edge of time, which is a bit disappointing. However, they do stick the landing in the finale to the story, where she is unable to prevent Serah's death, and forced to accept her failure as she enters an eternal crystal sleep.

Hope's role in this game, on the other hand, feels like a very organic continuation of his role in 13, now pushing the world into a new age through his leadership developed throughout the original game. I found it interesting how he paralleled Etro, in that his good intentions often led to... many problems, until we hit the climax where he creates a new Cocoon called Bhunivelze (????? Hope you madman, read up on your FNC lore!) Alyssa is an interesting character with a fun twist, though unfortunately we don't get a good resolution for her... outside of a novel apparently? I hear that novel also explains why Snow is a L'cie again, talk about cut content lol. Also rip Sazh, he really got the short end of the stick this game... I won't speculate as to why, as I feel that's heading in very dangerous territory!

Climax of the game is absolutely fantastic, with a really strong confrontation between Serah & Noel and Caius, ending in expected tragedy D: Then it gets even worse when oops, Serah died and we all failed, Caius got his way after all! I like the extra bonus ending that reveals Caius planned this all along, one of the rare villains to actually succeed in his goal and win against the protagonists. Though I will say, I'm pretty disappointed at the lack of Noel x Caius content, the angst practically writes itself! I guess I'm going to have to make my own contributions ;p

Paradox endings are all quite fun, ranging from serious to completely absurd, I love it. There's a ton of endgame content that ups the difficulty quite a bit, though I wasn't in the mood to grind up all my monsters to get too involved in it.

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STORY SPOILERS END HERE
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So yeah, overall this game is surprisingly great! For a sequel built on such a ridiculous premise, it ends up playing out shockingly well, and delivers with a really-well done and emotionally resonant story. There are flaws, such as the combat being a bit of a sidegrade from ff13, and practically requiring a guide if you truly want to see everything the game has to offer, and it's admittedly quite low budget compared to the gorgeous graphics of its predecessor. PC port is also REALLY bad, I had to use like 10+ mods and mess around with my GPU settings to get it in a decent state—you sure aren't getting 60fps in certain areas without bruteforcing it. But, BUT, this game is something really special all in all, and I really would recommend it to anyone who wants a shorter, more experimental FF with a strong story, even to those who didn't care for FF13.

I was initially going to write a long section-by-section review of this, but I'm going to keep it short and simple—7 Rebirth is absolutely fantastic, and one of the best RPGs I've ever played. Following on from Remake, which I already absolutely loved, it improves on practically everything that game did, from a more fleshed out battle system with more toys to play with, to hugely better side content and large open areas to explore (worthwhile ones at that!), and continuing to develop these amazing characters in ways inconceivable in the original game. I spent over 90 hours playing this masterpiece, which is shocking to me as it sure did not feel like that—not a moment went by where I thought "this game is too long". There is plenty of worthwhile new story content which fleshes out areas and characters that were underdeveloped in the original game, which this game just does significantly better than Remake in my opinion. Not to say there aren't sections that miss—the box throwing dungeon is the definition of overcomplicating gimmicks and providing an all around miserable experience—but they are simply so minor that it doesn't really affect my opinion of the game.

I also have to give a shoutout to the surprising amount of gay couple NPCs; sure, it would be nice to have actual side quests about them, but the amount we got left me frankly amazed, and very hopeful for the future of this series in terms of representation. Speaking of which, this game does not even attempt to hide the camp of the original, instead embracing it and amplifying it to such an unprecedented extent, it's brilliant. Moreover, there's so much fun humour, bizarre PS1/2 era style side activities full of absurdity, Rebirth really seems to understand what make Final Fantasy so fun, fresh, and entertaining. If I have one minor gripe though, I do wish the affinity system gave you choices rather than forcing whoever had the highest, that left a somewhat bad taste in my mouth when the 'personalisation of your journey' was personalised against me, lol. Granted, the characters in this game are so amazing, I'll take bonding with any of them.

I have to give a special shout out to how they handled Red and his section at Cosmo Canyon, one of my favourite parts of the original. Not only did they restore his missing characterisation from the awful og loc, but they went above and beyond turning it into this magical place full of philosophy and pacifism, and delivering an even more emotional conclusion to his story. And that doesn't even begin to cover other additions, such as a certain heart-wrenching bonfire scene that I'm sure minorities of all kinds can relate to, as well as a significant expansion of lore mostly left uncovered in the original game.

The soundtrack is probably one of the best I've ever experienced in a video game, with such massive variety and outrageously good bangers, even for the most minor of moments. It might actually be THE best video game soundtrack for me, which is saying something—though I'll need to wait for the honeymoon period to end first.

I don't want to say much on the ending, but I have ended up on the side that loves it, contrasting Remake where I enjoyed it but felt the execution was pretty messy. The emotional core this time was massively more successful for me, and it makes me ridiculously excited to see how they bring this trilogy, no, entire compilation to its conclusion. Honestly, the only reason I can't give this game a perfect score is because it is admittedly fairly reliant on the next part sticking the landing, and I have seen many stories push resolution of unreasonable amounts of plot threads onto their finale, pretty much setting it up for failure in addressing them all satisfyingly. I have a lot of faith in Nojima and the rest of the team to tie it up well, but I'll keep my expectations in check for now.

After all... no promises await at journey's end.