What should've been a thoroughly enjoyable second part of this remake trilogy, with improved gameplay and a more interesting section of the story compared to FF7 Remake, is unfortunately overshadowed by often tedious and frustrating design choices that ultimately sours my experience of both this game and its predecessor.


The Good: Aerith Gold Saucer Chapter 12

- Voice Acting: As with the last game, all the voice acting is very good. There are few, if any, flat line deliveries, and the cast from the main characters down to background NPCs are all top notch.

- Visuals: Rebirth looks even better than the Remake, which is in part due to the setting it takes place in, as the dreary factories and slums of Midgar are less visually appealing compared to the dense forests and canyons prominently featured in Rebirth. But it looks great, nothing much to comment on really, its one of the best looking games on modern consoles.

- Characters: Rebirth effectively builds on the character interactions that were the highlight of Remake, and expands upon them by introducing new characters that fit into the dynamic of the main group. The main group are up there as one of my favourite core casts of characters in any video game I've ever played, and that is often in part due to the little things like random bits of dialogue and side quests.

- Core Gameplay Direction: I found that in Remake, most of the fights throughout the game wanted you to win by exploiting elemental weaknesses through spells. This often placed focus on having the right materia equipped, and setting up your party to efficiently hit spells (typically Aerith with a bunch of wards). However, I found that in Rebirth, they shifted away from this by nerfing the tier 3 magic spells to cost 2 ATB charges. Theres also more opportunities to pressure enemies outside of spells, such as dodging attacks or hitting ATB attacks at the right time. This focus on abilities over spells makes for much faster-paced and more interesting gameplay. Although, I will mourn the loss of melee Barret and spamming chi 2 Unbridled Strength with Tifa.

- Story: The story's great. I don't really have much to comment on, given that I've never played to originally and I don't know how the story ends, but it's really good. Thoroughly fleshes out all of our main characters and our antagonist effectively while providing enough story to the new characters that they are compelling in their own right. The chapters in Nibelheim are very good, and while there are some down moments and padding throughout the rest of the game (which I'll get to), for the most part, when the story's rolling it's very good.

- Music: From Tifa's Theme on the piano to new One Winged Angel in the last fight, all the music is great in this game.

- Queen's Blood: Once I got some good cards, I really enjoyed it. The only side quest type I actually had fun doing.


The Bad: I might have to go back and score FF7 Remake lower as well.

- Open World: After Remake was (fairly) criticised for being a hallway simulator, Square Enix decided to address this by introducing large open world areas that are prominent throughout most of the gameplay. In almost every chapter, you're introduced to a new map with it's own set of side quests and objectives, an exclusive Chocobo, and more.
But it all sucks. It all sucks. The objectives are a complete waste of time, from activating radio towers and analysing lifesprings to the irritating protorelic questlines, I was so thoroughly unengaged by the entire affair that I completely skipped almost all of it from Gongaga onwards. Traversing the regions is also annoying, as the Chocobos lose all momentum after bumping into anything and you're constantly interrupted by running across another pointless objective that doesn't take long enough so you feel compelled to complete it, but does takes long enough that you know you've just wasted minutes of your life. And in Cosmo Canyon, the traversal is made even more frustrating with the stupid flying and gliding range mechanics.
The entire open world concept only serves to drag out the time spent away from the actual fun things this game has to offer, and I honestly don't think I'll be able to play another open world game for at least 6 months after this shit.

- Boss Fights: Just like in FF7 Remake, and despite what I said earlier about the appreciating the change in gameplay direction, the boss fights in this are still annoying.
A good example of this is the Reno and Rude fight, as with Reno you're supposed to pressure him by dodging his physical attacks. The only problem is, he doesn't use them that much, mostly just after he's stunned you and you can't dodge anyway. He also dodges all your standard attacks. The only way I could really damage him was by hitting him with Fire attacks when he was charging the EMPs and hope it pressured him. This ended up being the point in this game where I dropped the difficulty down to Easy, and it became a 5 minute beat-em-up the rest of the way through the entire game.
Another example is the Rufus Shinra fight, which was the last straw that made me change over to Easy mode in Remake. The whole fight is so stupid I was laughing rather than yelling. You're supposed to dodge his attacks and attack him when he reloads. But if you stay too close he'll dash into your dodge path and stun you, dealing big damage, and if you stay too far away you can't counterattack long enough to effectively build the stagger bar when he's pressured. Sometimes he even recovers instantly after being pressured.
There's a few other instances I can remember, but I won't get too far into it. I am admittedly quite bad at action RPGs, so it is a bit mad-cause-bad. But given that Easy mode is such a walk in the park it's mind-numbing, and Normal mode is perfectly fine 70% of the time, I think it's fair to put some of the blame on the mechanics.

- Padded Story Missions: This was a problem in Remake as well, I just felt that often times sections of the main story missions were broken up by entirely unnecessary passages that completely fucked with the pacing. Anything that involved dragging a box around, splitting up the party for longer than 10 minutes, or setting up for the third mini-boss in this third of the mission did nothing but take my attention away from the best part of the game (the story) and focused it on the worst part (dumb shit).


All in all, I want to give this game an 8 out of 10, as there is an 8/10 game in here somewhere, but it's just buried under some really poor design choices.
I think I would still recommend this game, as I'm glad I played it, but with caveat that you will be slogging through a decent amount of filler content to enjoy the amazing story and characters.

I had never played a Final Fantasy game until I played this, something about 16 entries made it a little daunting to get into. But I had this in my PS store wishlist for a while, and bought it on a sale.

Overall, I quite enjoyed the game. The story does a good job of setting up the rest of the story, while ensuring that it feels like its own arc rather than solely one third of a larger product. The characters were good overall, some of the Shinra villains were a little bland, but for the most part the side characters are good, and the main cast of Cloud, Tifa, Barrett and Aerith are all great. Aerith was easily my favourite part of the entire game.

I was a little mixed on the gameplay though. I know I'm not very good at real-time combat RPGs, I really suck at any Souls-like games, but this game just seemed to be thoroughly split between really easy passages and annoying gimmicky minibosses. It could be my stupid brain that can't use critical thinking skills from years of CoD and Siege that makes me bad at these kinds of games, but I'm pretty good at turn-based RPGs, so I don't know. The split between real-time and turn-based elements is okay, but I really hope they improved on it in FF7 Rebirth. The level design also got old pretty quickly, everything funnels into setups for a mini-boss fights that I would just get mad and yell at. And most of the boss fights were annoying as well, and so were the bike chases. While none of this sounds very positive, the gameplay is well polished, the special moves are pretty cool, and when the game lets you get into a rhythm it is pretty satisfying.

Despite some gameplay hiccups, I still that found FF7 Remake was worth playing, and all the cutscenes with Aerith were easily worth the $25 I spent on this game.

An enjoyable split between time-sensitive puzzle platforming and a dating sim/visual novel, Catherine: Full Body is definitely a worthwhile game to play in 2024, if purchased on sale. Still portraying the original story about pathetic yet kind-hearted Vincent Brooks, who cheats on his longtime girlfriend Katherine with another girl named Catherine, Full Body continues in Atlus re-release fashion by adding on to the story in the form of another character named Qatherine. This introduces a new route and ending, and a few extra scenes throughout the game.

Looking at the game as a whole, the basic gameplay loops functions through a series of cutscenes that play during "the day" that progress the story after the events of the previous day, followed by giving the player free-reign to move Vincent around the Stray Sheep bar and interact with the other characters and Catherines, and ending with a multi-level platforming segment in Vincent's dreams.
The puzzle/platforming elements are fun and engaging, providing somewhat of a challenge that encourages you to think on your feet. I haven't really played enough platforming games to comment extensively on that part of the gameplay, I personally played on Easy so I could focus on the VN/dating sim aspect of the game.
Now, those elements of the game are also quite good. You can control the outcome of the story through answers to questions between platforming stages, as well as through dialogue options and text messages responses while in the Stray Sheep bar. These all affect a mysterious meter that can sway from "blue" to "red", which have an impact on dialogue prompts in the final days that lead to 1 of 13 endings the player can receive on Day 10.
The characters and their interactions are well written and do a good job of portraying the idea that they are meant to have known each other for many years. The voice acting is very good, with many of the characters being voiced by people who were in Persona 3 and 4.
The game also looks a lot like Persona 5, although not stylistically, just in that the character models and animated cutscenes are quite similar. This makes sense given the developmental overlap between the original versions of these two games.

Overall, I quite enjoyed playing this game. The gameplay is engaging, the story is good, and I like the characters. I got the Reunite with Katherine ending, which was what I was aiming for, and while I probably won't replay it for another ending soon, the possibility is definitely there.