A really huge expansion pack, feels like it's almost as big as the main game. All the same cunning and storytelling is on display, with almost no written words either.

The only thing dinging it is, it got a bit long in the tooth for me. Every loop you have to jet back to the location of the expansion, and then you have another step of procedures to go through to navigate there, including some timed puzzles that you'll have to reset the whole loop for when you make a wee mistake. I hit a point where I more or less knew all that was going on, but still had several hours of mucking about with stealth sections and timing puzzles to wrestle with before I got to the end. It managed to make the trick of "you had the power all along!" feel a teeny tiny bit tired.

But it still tugged on my heart strings in all the right ways. Plus, it's on a spinning space colony!

Sometimes I don't like to think.

I like to roll around the map, hoovering up crafting items, stomping on monsters and finding little objectives to complete while I listen to a podcast. I like to play six matches of Queen's Blood back to back without listening to what any of the NPCs have to say, just slapping down my best card combo. This is my favourite part of Rebirth. It never rises to the level of Breath of the Wild or Elden Ring in these segments, but it's an absolutely fine way to wile away an afternoon. It makes me feel self conscious about the game though, because I sunk over a hundred hours into it, and my favourite part is just "fucking about". When it comes to the core of the game, the stuff the game itself seems to think is important, I'm a lot less satisfied.

Rebirth continues the mission of Remake to broadly remake the beats of the original VII, while constantly teasing that maybe this time things might be different. I found a great unpleasant tension between the sections where you get to roam around the overworld, and the sections where you're pulled into the cutscene dimension for a string of back to back boss fights and laboriously paced story. Where the original would have three screens, a cutscene and a boss fight to finish up Dyne, Rebirth instead will have two boss fights, a long action battle chase minigame, three cutscenes, and then a ten minute interlude where you play as Zack picking his nose. I want so much for someone to come in with pruning shears and ask - does the player really need to know what Rufus is up to right now?

Whenever I contrast anything directly with the original, it's an unfavourable comparison. The Shinra Mansion is maybe the worst offender. The fixed perspective spiral staircase where you shrink down to a dot as you descend into darkness is gone, replaced with a lift. In fact, the whole "mansion" is now just two small rooms leading to an unhidden lift, the whole "hidden" element is gone. Instead there is a series of large industrial cube rooms with the game's worst hour of glameplay, a section where you're forced to play Cait Sith. It demolishes the creepy atmosphere of the original.

Still, I spent so much time with this game, and I really did enjoy most of it. The combat system from Remake has had a significant improvement with the addition of combos that use a secondary resource, so now battle will be hopping about between characters, building up metre and firing off commands to build up to the combos, which in turn enable your really flashy limit breaks. It's super satisfying. The game is also something like 50% minigames by volume. They're a mixed bag- Queen's Blood is an all timer, Glide De Chocobo is reeeal bad, and the pirate shooting minigame doesn't support Y Inversion so I personally had an extremely bad time. In the main though they're good, and the variety is fun, it's nice to play a dumbed down version of Mario Kart that you can clear in an afternoon.

Overall I had a good time with the general fillery time consuming aspect of the game, but I really don't rate how it handles the story and a lot of the adaptational elements of the original.