My first playthrough of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (there will be more) took over one hundred and thirty hours. I spent most of that time screaming.
I have complaints, make no mistake. The demo for Rebirth cooled me off so significantly that I almost started squirming about the fact that I had taken time off work for the full release. There were a few choice moments where unnecessary deviations from the original's storytelling, such as in one of the first battles of the entire game, left me sour and skeptical. I have read every Final Fantasy VII book, or at least some shitty fan translation thereof. I know just how bad ALL of the compilation stuff is, and even after what I felt was an adequate performance in Remake, I still had my doubts about how well the writing staff truly grasped their own story. Some of those minor changes made me question this, and at other times an overwrought orchestra drowned what should definitely be an emotional scene wrapped in golden silence, but I could not have possibly imagined the absolute mastery Rebirth has over the characters and tone of its source material.
The moment-to-moment character and scene writing in Rebirth is the best that Square has ever produced. I refuse to dilute that statement with qualifiers. It is as hilarious as it is impactful. It is a script that could only ever be written by someone who is in deep, sincere love with every one of its characters, as well as the quaint yet outlandish stupidity of 90's video games and everyone who loved them. It is a blatant refusal to tone down its freakish, lovable soul.
Rebirth is the best time I've had with a video game in almost a decade. It represents everything that anyone has ever liked about Final Fantasy VII, Kingdom Hearts II, Final Fantasy XV, or even Chrono Trigger. It is a non-stop landslide of delightful surprises, and it had me yelling aloud at what must have been close to once per hour. Its characterization is flawless, its music is divine, its visuals remain on the cutting edge, and for most of my seventeen-day playthrough I could not stop smiling.
I would be willing to name Rebirth my Game of the Year here and now, in March, by virtue of the writing's perfect audacity and unmatched playfulness alone. Fortunately for me, I don't have to pretend that gameplay doesn't matter. Remake's battle system was already the best Final Fantasy had ever seen, and one of the best in Action RPG history. In Rebirth it has been further improved by valuable tweaks to the various characters, new mechanics, and better encounter design. Considering that players spend probably a third or more of their time in Rebirth fighting, that's an obvious blessing.
In discussing the rest of Rebirth's gameplay activities, I'm going to play coy, as the surprises should remain surprises, but I will at least address the somewhat depressing presence of towers and map icons. To put it briefly and simply, they're fine. The concept itself may be played out, and some players may sigh in exhaustion at the very thought of them, but Rebirth's map icons are, for the most part, well-varied, entertaining, and unlikely to incite much tedium. They are distributed reasonably well and contain enough diverse flavors of interest to be worthy supplemental story material. Frankly, after finishing a marathon of tightly scripted narrative setpieces, it's nice to have some more "filler" activities to hang out with at one's leisure.
The greatest strength of the SNES and Playstation Final Fantasies was that they never lingered on any one thing long enough for the player to get bored of it. They were iconic, memorable setpiece parades, full of goofy, stupid minigames, bizarre sidequests, lovable characters, and eventually wild, confusing twists that online gorillas will fixate on in a way that is devastatingly literal and utterly oblivious to thematic intent. Many, including me, thought the exact cocktail represented here to be fully extinct. Having it served to me now, by largely the same people who wrote the recipe, roughly twenty years after I began to fear it lost, is rapturous. Rebirth has given me some of the most glorious highs of my entire gaming career.
For the first time since Final Fantasy X, I feel entirely satisfied with a full Final Fantasy release in the way I did when I was a child. It fills me with hope for the near future, and an absolute, unconditional confidence in the inevitable Final Fantasy X-3.
I have complaints, make no mistake. The demo for Rebirth cooled me off so significantly that I almost started squirming about the fact that I had taken time off work for the full release. There were a few choice moments where unnecessary deviations from the original's storytelling, such as in one of the first battles of the entire game, left me sour and skeptical. I have read every Final Fantasy VII book, or at least some shitty fan translation thereof. I know just how bad ALL of the compilation stuff is, and even after what I felt was an adequate performance in Remake, I still had my doubts about how well the writing staff truly grasped their own story. Some of those minor changes made me question this, and at other times an overwrought orchestra drowned what should definitely be an emotional scene wrapped in golden silence, but I could not have possibly imagined the absolute mastery Rebirth has over the characters and tone of its source material.
The moment-to-moment character and scene writing in Rebirth is the best that Square has ever produced. I refuse to dilute that statement with qualifiers. It is as hilarious as it is impactful. It is a script that could only ever be written by someone who is in deep, sincere love with every one of its characters, as well as the quaint yet outlandish stupidity of 90's video games and everyone who loved them. It is a blatant refusal to tone down its freakish, lovable soul.
Rebirth is the best time I've had with a video game in almost a decade. It represents everything that anyone has ever liked about Final Fantasy VII, Kingdom Hearts II, Final Fantasy XV, or even Chrono Trigger. It is a non-stop landslide of delightful surprises, and it had me yelling aloud at what must have been close to once per hour. Its characterization is flawless, its music is divine, its visuals remain on the cutting edge, and for most of my seventeen-day playthrough I could not stop smiling.
I would be willing to name Rebirth my Game of the Year here and now, in March, by virtue of the writing's perfect audacity and unmatched playfulness alone. Fortunately for me, I don't have to pretend that gameplay doesn't matter. Remake's battle system was already the best Final Fantasy had ever seen, and one of the best in Action RPG history. In Rebirth it has been further improved by valuable tweaks to the various characters, new mechanics, and better encounter design. Considering that players spend probably a third or more of their time in Rebirth fighting, that's an obvious blessing.
In discussing the rest of Rebirth's gameplay activities, I'm going to play coy, as the surprises should remain surprises, but I will at least address the somewhat depressing presence of towers and map icons. To put it briefly and simply, they're fine. The concept itself may be played out, and some players may sigh in exhaustion at the very thought of them, but Rebirth's map icons are, for the most part, well-varied, entertaining, and unlikely to incite much tedium. They are distributed reasonably well and contain enough diverse flavors of interest to be worthy supplemental story material. Frankly, after finishing a marathon of tightly scripted narrative setpieces, it's nice to have some more "filler" activities to hang out with at one's leisure.
The greatest strength of the SNES and Playstation Final Fantasies was that they never lingered on any one thing long enough for the player to get bored of it. They were iconic, memorable setpiece parades, full of goofy, stupid minigames, bizarre sidequests, lovable characters, and eventually wild, confusing twists that online gorillas will fixate on in a way that is devastatingly literal and utterly oblivious to thematic intent. Many, including me, thought the exact cocktail represented here to be fully extinct. Having it served to me now, by largely the same people who wrote the recipe, roughly twenty years after I began to fear it lost, is rapturous. Rebirth has given me some of the most glorious highs of my entire gaming career.
For the first time since Final Fantasy X, I feel entirely satisfied with a full Final Fantasy release in the way I did when I was a child. It fills me with hope for the near future, and an absolute, unconditional confidence in the inevitable Final Fantasy X-3.