I haven't been this conflicted on a game in a while. On one side of the coin, Rebirth continues to do what I loved about Remake. This world gets to be fleshed out and fully realized with this generation's tech and budget, seeing all of these locations and sights on a more personal and intimate scale than anything the original PS1 title could ever hope to accomplish; what was once an abstraction through a big region map you rampaged around by foot or vehicle is now something you feel the journey of by the literal scale of your party's bodies. Every inch of this world, its biomes and its cities, are places you learn to navigate and remember the layouts of. Every story beat that makes you travel to new locations feels earned, and there's so many moments throughout the story that taking a moment to look back on how far you've come feels unbelievably grand. What I cared more about than the world of FF7 was the characters and Rebirth still more than delivers on that front. As controversial as this trilogy has already become in regards to changes and additions it makes (which, we'll get there), the way that the team at Square have re-interpreted this cast and brought them to life works so incredibly well that it's hard not to think that the next time I go back to replay that original PS1 game, I'm going to be hearing the voices of this version's cast, thinking about how they interacted with the world and play off of each other. Essentially everyone has a moment to really grow and expand their personalities and backgrounds with more detail and time than the original ever could have, and in turn it makes this party not just a group of pretty designs and surface level personalities, but a group of well defined believable people. Countless additional moments big and small across the entire game continue to flesh out the world and characters and save for a handful of segments, I thought they were all smartly integrated in adding onto the original story.

Rebirth also takes a bit of time to refine some of Remake's gameplay edges. The menus are initially incredibly overwhelming after not having touched Remake in a few years, but after enough time I appreciate that there's not only more personality in showing the actual character models compared to static portraits over a blue background, but also how much more informative a lot of those initially overwhelming menus actually are compared to Remake. The annoying upgrade system from Remake was slightly revamped with an entire new menu that's more reminescent of the sphere grids from other Final Fantasy games, with my only real complaint being that I wish I could zoom out the view more. Weapon upgrades were simplified to essentially being swappable like materia is including an auto-upgrade option that takes out some of the tinkering if you don't really want to bother with the fine minutiae, especially with how many weapons you end up getting over the course of the game. Combat feels faster paced overall thanks to Synergy Skills, a smart inclusion that at least with the parties I tended to use, resolved a lot of the annoyances Remake had with particular enemy types. While we still don't have a dedicated jump button (the Jump materia doesn't count; thing has a different purpose anyways), a lot of Synergy Skills with most party members tend to either give you a ranged move or send you into the air with proper player agency. There's also a massive quality of life addition in giving every party member unlockable abilities through that sphere grid menu that gives you free elemental abilities without any materia and MP needed, at the expense of less damage. It resolves the issue of being stuck with party members that aren't as well equipped who just need to fulfill the pressure conditions of different enemies across the board and keeps things moving along. There was the occasional frustrating moment or enemy that felt annoying to deal with, but nothing that felt like it was a core flaw with the game design itself. It's more of Remake but more fleshed out; if you liked that game's combat, you will like Rebirth's.

But now I have to talk about the open world, and that's where the overwhelming majority of my issues with Rebirth come into play. Open world games have always been a tough sell for me because I am self-admittedly impatient with very little attention span. Rebirth took me almost 2 months to finish with 76 hours of total playtime. I have definitely played longer games like Persona 5 in less time than that, and to put a long story short I think it's just because Rebirth doesn't respect your time whatsoever. I would go from loving every linear main story segment, stuff that properly moved things along into new territory and things I hadn't seen before, to dreading the moment I would have to step back into open world territory at the end of those segments. There was a period of time during the first third of the game or so that I really had to sit there and debate if I wanted to boot up the PS5 to keep playing because I was so sick of doing Chadley's Chores(tm), running around for Ubisoft towers so I could be given waypoints on the map to fight a group of monsters for Chadley to gain intel on, hold up on the D-Pad for my chocobo to slowly sniff dig sites that Chadley helped locate for you, play Simon Says for lowering the difficulty of summon fights so Chadley can praise you, play more of the godforsaken card game for the hundredth time, finish the tens if not hundreds of VR fights by talking to Chadley who I'm about ready to strangle by that point, and then collecting protorelics on a game-wide hunt for them which Chadley will also talk you to death over finding.

Besides how much I hope Chadley gets fucking popped like a balloon at the start of the third remake game so I never have to see or hear him again, I just... thoroughly do not understand what makes the actual moment to moment gameplay of this open world so awe-inspiring to people. Again, open world games are a tough sell to me; I kind of infamously don't care very much for the open worlds of Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom because I think they get tedious and repetitive, and still kind of filled with a lot of empty nothing. Simultaneously for those games though, I can at least respect them, more in BOTW's case because some of that emptiness was the point in both world building, tone and atmosphere, and pacing. It's also how much player agency and control those two games in particular give you, with rarely a moment that the player doesn't have full control over where they're going, what they're finding, and how they're doing it. Ubisoft towers and checklists aren't anything new, it's that Rebirth makes those tasks so exceedingly mundane and stretched out, pushed to such a degree that it's frankly incredible how dedicated it is to wasting your time. So many animations that are pushed to their limit making you wait around for things to happen that just continually add up, watching Chadley and his own AI creation fucking bicker at each other as your reward for finishing those checklist fights, so many back and forths for things that just don't reward you meaningfully, either in the end result or even the journey that got you there.

I feel awful for anyone who is a completionist because you genuinely, truly have to be a masochist to get everything for that platinum. You aren't just doing everything, you have to attain mastery of everything including the countless number of gimmicks and minigames that Rebirth offers. It might be worse however for people like me, who wanted to at least get a majority of the side content done to see what most of the game had to offer. You aren't just not rewarded for not fully finishing stuff like the protorelic quest, you're given a middle finger by the very last hours of the game when you discover the last side quest is actually one that demands that you perfect every Gold Saucer minigame. Or when you discover that the protorelic quest doesn't just end after completing all regions, you actually get a Brand New Fuck You Zone whose level requirement is the highest level in the game, over twenty levels beyond what you would be at by the endgame. Oh you don't want to do that? Fuck you, you get nothing for all that time you spent doing this game-wide questline. Completing Queen's Blood wasn't much better even if it's actually doable on your first playthrough, you get an alright cutscene or two, a shiny title for yourself and an extra card as your reward which you won't be using because you already finished everything by that point.

There's a cynical part of me that has to wonder if all of this bloat was because this is a triple-A game release in this current generation costing $70 dollars. Was it a value proposition? "Look at this game with over a hundred hours worth of content?" Is this what people actually want? I had said already with Remake that I think it's a great 45 hour game that could have been excellent if it was like 5-10 hours shorter, with tighter pacing and less bloat. I have no idea what spurred on Square Enix to double down on it and create what I think is just a good game that could have been great if it was 30-40 hours shorter. I shouldn't have to shoulder the responsibility that I'm complaining about "optional content" because I'm not a tool. Rebirth is a game that begs and pleads with you to engage with it, and doing so felt like being pricked by needles slowly and agonizingly, because there was the very real chance that it was going to be worth it by the end. The side quests mostly were. The pure junk food with Chadley and the open world were not. I wish I could have those tens of hours back so I could've focused on the main story and helped tighten the pacing of it. I know this is game I am not going to replay for years, and if I ever do, I am actively skipping that content with the post-game knowledge to do so.

The only other thing I have to end my piece on is a light look ahead to the future regarding Rebirth's ending, and without spoiling it. I'll just say that Remake's ending I was sold on, and loved that it very intentionally was going in a new direction akin to something like the Evangelion Rebuilds, even if I felt bad for new players who hadn't played the original that they were going to be thrown for a loop. I am far less sold on Rebirth's ending, and my worries for that final third entry have skyrocketed now because of how messy it was. There's too many unknowns that have raised the stakes for Square to nail the landing, and there's a very real possibility that they're going to miss which would truly be a shame for the insane amount of work and effort on display thus far to be retroactively dismissed if they can't nail the finale. I pray they can to make all of this worth something more.