Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth is a behemoth. It's filled to the brim with sights to see, places to be, things to do and monsters to fight. And it... overwhelmed me. I've never been this overwhelmed by any game, which may be because I thought I knew what to expect after playing Remake. I've never been so wrong. The devs added an immense amount of new features and tweaked the central systems to the point of unrecognizability. The end result is, at its core, the most full open world game I've experienced yet - keep in mind, there aren't many, I don't really vibe with these games normally. And, in the end, I did experience almost none of it, instead going for my established Xenoblade-strategy of just always waltzing over to the next map marker and adjusting the difficulty when the going got too tough. So yea, in the end, my experience with Rebirth was that of a Xenoblade game, mostly. But, and this is actually the important bit, I still enjoyed that experience immensely.

Because, oh, does this game have the vibes: the wonderful enviromental and character designs, the quirkyness, the really esoteric and kinda hippie enviromentalist message, the clusterfuck of a story. It's raw and yet beautifully realized. Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, for me, is an engine running entirely on its vibes and themes, pulling off the most difficult part of creating any trilogy that aims to tell a single story: not making the second part shit. Only time will tell if it avoids the other pitfall of feeling mostly irrelevant after the conclusion of the story.