This is probably gonna be one of my longer review since i have alot of mixed feelings on this game and its sad that i cant put this game any higher. I was waiting for this game as long as any other ff7 fan with high expectations, and i spent 100 dollars on this shit so this game leaving me with unsatisfactory rlly bothers me.

I want to start with the positives cuz dont get me wrong its not a BAD game by any means.

First, rebirth is one of the most visually beautiful games you will ever see, cutscenes, areas, land, characters all look better than it ever was compared to prior ff games and im glad to see how attractive the game looks, similar to OG, rebirth does a great job at getting comfortable and enjoying all the characters in the cast giving them individual dungeons, focus in the story and the constant back n forth between one half of a party to another allowing the player to have a chance to explore and play as each and every character. The combat is a big stepup from remake, with the addition of synergy attacks and vast combinations of abilities.


I am a little mixed(or confused)on the story but the one thing im satisfied the most is cloud and sephiroth as they have a huge stepup narratively compared to OG, i like how rebirth focuses more on the degration of a soldiers body and particularly how clouds psyche is affected+with sephiroth interference. Rebirth emphasizes on how powerful sephiroth is by manipulating clouds mind to doing things without a conscious such as when the visions he sees and his impact to attack other people such as when he attacks the sephiroth clones constantly or to the extent of attacking tifa, or he when he retrieves the black materia from aerith. rebirth rlly shows us how messed up and unreliable cloud truly is and that what looks like is going to be the main focus of next game has me hooked.

Now the positives of this game is unfortunately cut short as square enix still suffers from making an engaging open world game, mission layouts and pacing for when it comes to ff7. I never rlly had the love other ff fans when it comes to 7 and unfortunately its the same for rebirth as it continues to make this game feel like a chore, now to specifically what im complaining about is:

The open world, one of if not my biggest concern when starting this game was if square enix was able to create a fresh, unique and engaging open world that allows players to freely explore the unknown without some kid calling you every time you discover something or when you open up the map and dont see a whole checklist that makes up the exploration.

Oh well to no surprise im talking about rebirth, Now i full cleared the first three regions before i got absolutely bored of the other and half assed them and holy shit man this game did not change a SINGLE thing in each region, its the same thing every region, get chocobo,find towers, investigate summons,scan that crystal shit who even knows what that does, and do some battle challenges maybe a mini boss thats not rlly challenging and side quests which as per usual arent good. the open world is very limited and the only thing that is not marked on the map are chocobo stations but they are impossible to miss when a big ass chocobo is leading you to it.

this is like assassins creed type of open world, which are also not good, this was by far the biggest disappointment and it was sad that i didnt have the motivation to continue to explore the world by like chapter 8.

Another thing that bothered me is the unusual amount of mandatory mini games during the main chapters, there should never EVER be like 4-5 chapters where minigames take up majority of the chapter, like what type of bullshit was square enix on? Excluding the last 2 chapters, im sure there is more mandatory minigames than main bosses fought, and like 75% of the minigames werent even good and all the good ones were locked in late game where i was alrdy drained out and tired of rebirth.

Dont get me wrong i dont hate games that have 1 or 2 mandatory sections of minigames, i was even enjoying it in rebirth early in the game with minigames such as queens blood. But when u have filler chapters every other chapter it not only slows down the pacing but it makes the game (for me at least) disengaging, and its not like the dungeons are that good that it kept me going cuz even those were pretty boring and basic dungeons, the pure motivation to finish this game was cloud/sephiroth and the 100 dollars i potentially wasted.

I do wanna leave off a positive point of rebirth because i do think this game is more good than bad, as for example the last 2 chapters of this game was the first time i was like “i might’ve gotten my money worth” since it actually looked like square enix put effort and time intos the final dungeon and ofc the iconic scene and sephiroth boss fights. It sucks cuz the ending hooked me like the remake did and i know im gonna buy the next game, i jus hope that some of these problems are fixed/improved.

I do really want to like this game, i like the cast and the concept in ff7, and it sucks cuz probably im the only ff7 player who feels this way about this game because this is not the first time i have these mixed feelings about ff7, its every single ff7 game ;from og to crisis core to remake and now rebirth, where I enjoy the story but the gameplay keeps it from the score i want to put it at.

it’s unfortunate this game didnt live to the expectations not only i put on it but as well as square enix did and the only thing i can hope is it grows on me or the next game whenever it is, makes up for it but this time i should probably keep my expectations a bit lower.

I didn’t think i would be giving out the worst game i ever played contender out so soon, let alone a .5 stars but i cannot stress enough about how i disliked everything about this video game. I played this game hoping at the very least would be better than nier automata (low expectations because i didn’t like automata) but even then it failed.

First, would be of course the gameplay of the game, now automata isnt known for its quality in combat, enemy variation, bosses, exploration just about everything but the story(which still is pretty underwhelming) and that doesn’t change with replicant but its much worse, the combat had potential to be better than automata but all of it went out the door with replicants poor enemy variation and boss battle design etc. You go from like 8 abilities with Weiss book to forced to having one of them in ur arsenal since all the bosses are in the air and dark lance is the only ability that takes out air enemies and all the other abilities are pretty much useless or take too much time when u can simply dodge or block, so i was stuck with dark lance and dark hand for the entire game.

Referring back to the point of enemy variation, replicant falls incredibly short on creating a grindy engaging rpg, all the enemies use the same attacks and pretty much are sponges which eliminates all potential difficulty of the game. The bosses aren’t much different, they are all usually in the air so majority of the fight ur spamming dark lance and waiting for the blue bar to slowly refill up to repeat the same actions. The boss fights are just straight up awful, theres no uniqueness or identity that makes any of the bosses stick out and they are basically just a bigger version of common enemies.

Exploration is downright awful, and the fact that majority of the game is a fetch and report just makes the world feel so dead and repetitive. the world building is hardly apparent and the only area with potential (the desert kingdom) felt rushed and poorly executed. Dungeons in this game are probably the most boring areas to explore and the puzzles don’t make it any better, it’s disrespectful to even call them puzzles cuz its just stupid shit that makes the game more tedious (PRIME EXAMPLE;FOREST OF THE MYTH)

The soundtrack of this game is actually terrible, i know people like to praise this game for its music but it literally sounds the same, high pitch choir with the same set of orchestra or it sounds like they took automata soundtrack and reused it, theres no originality in its soundtrack and the game plays the same 5 soundtrack the entire game which just becomes boring.

One last thing about the gameplay is its graphics and voice acting, the graphics look very awkward especially during cutscenes, characters barely show expressions on their face or it doesn’t even match the situation and the voice acting (Japanese va btw) doesn’t make it better, the quality sounds like it was recorded under a thick blanket.

Unfortunately the gameplay isn’t the only thing bad about this game, debatably not even the worst about this game, what i hate most about nier replicant is its story.
I honestly dont know where to begin, the story feels like if you gave the fans who wrote ANR (Aot no requiem which is a shitty fan-made ending for those who don’t know) the opportunity to make a story inspired from the concepts of aot. both protagonists start off with losing smth they care for and declare to kill every last of these creatures, difference is aot does it in a unique compelling way which makes the story amazing while replicant does the exact opposite.

Replicant suffers majorly from its poor execution and nier protag suffers the most from it as to me he was the only character who i thought was interesting but didn’t get the depth he deserved due to yoko taros tendency to put more detail on the ass of the main female lead and his unoriginal fetch quests that does not progress the plot. The one thing that bothers me the most is kaine, i feel like kaine wearing her undergarments cuz of her being unisex so she has the need to reveal herself to represent a “feminine” characteristics is an excuse for yoko taro to sexualize another female character and appeal it to players, cuz her concept was just awfully executed and jus poor writing all around. every other character is just there and don’t rlly add much

As I said before the plot of replicant hardly progresses because of its fetch and report for majority of the game so it literally feels like the plot gets split in two parts which is: Yonah is sick, protag ask popola about medicine for yonah, she will say no then send us off to a fetch mission for that whole first half then the time skip happens which turns to yonah gets captured by shadowlord, nier protag ask popola about shadow lord and yonahs wherabouts, she will say nothing important and then she will send you to a fetch mission, its horribly structured and hard to play through.

Its honestly hard to take this game seriously alot of the cutscenes have the most bullshit convenience or some dumbshit happening, like how many times did kaine nearly fucking died due to her having the reaction time of a sloth and how she forgets she has the ability to jump really fucking high, or the junk heap incident where jakob clearly dies trying to save Gideon after his clumsy ass almost got himself killed and then Gideon develops hatred to the robot who happens to jus be standing there, Gideon never shown any type of self hatred to himself for his brothers death and its jus stupid, another stupid cutscene is when emil blows up an entire town after he randomly goes on a rampage, just out of nowhere with no lead up or anything, and
had zero impact on the story, like it was forgotten right after that shit and his rampage never happened again, thats how random it is. I could go on and on about these stupid cutscenes but i would be typing the longest review ever.

The fact you have replay the game 4 times to fully grasp the lore of the game is absolutely terrible and it doesn’t make the game have replay value, it makes the game worse in fact especially since replicant barely adds any new content in each of its route. You shouldn’t have to play the game more than twice to grasp all the content of the game anything more than that is absurd.

In conclusion, nothing about nier replicant does anything i like in a video game and a complete waste of time, unless you like to look at an woman’s ass crack for hours and hours then i do not recommend this game.

ok backloggd deleted my long ass review so im gonna keep this short

cons: pacing sucks(universal square enix flaw),side quests prob the best in the franchise(low bar cuz most ff side quests sucks) but still not that good, side cast sucks, how square enix forces you to explore a linear ass world acting like its a open world, the story can get a little messy and stretched out at times, very inconsistent and uninteresting when its not eikon focused

pros: obviously one of the best combats you will see in a game also some of the best boss fights in video games, amazing voice acting and graphics combined with amazing soundtracks to develop the games setting and dark tone,

Edit: This game aged horribly

If I was to rate this game mostly off story over gameplay like I usually intended to I would give an extra star maybe 1 and a half but the flaws in the gameplay got to the point where I just could not ignore it. Now before I shit on this game I played on 7th heaven mod which actually made this game more playable for me, it was far from perfect but it did enhance the gameplay alot compared to without mods, ok back to shitting on this game.

FF7 does everything that I dislike in a JRPG, the battle mechanics (although this is just a flaw in every old turn based ff game) is just something that always bothered me, the time bar and the real time mechanics, like yea it makes things more challenging and requires strats in a boss fight but for random ass encounters it jus becomes irritating, refering back to the challenging point, the strategy is really repetitve and op for the player, literally every boss fight is open up with big guard, haste and regen, spam all limit breaks and summons, spam ultima and whatever weakness the boss has and replinsh any MP or HP during the process then repeat. 85% of the materia feels useless in the game as long as you have , haste,cure,ultima,maybe comet some sort of shield materia (which i found myself not using for a lot of the boss fights because i would usually just beat them before they do any significant damage to me) and limit breaks then you basically completed the game.

I dont want to seem like i am a jrpg pro and that im going to compare everything to fuckin persona 5 or sum shit because im not i am actually awful at these games but one thing about jrpgs is that they make it addicting so although im bad its still a fun experience and the game at the very least teaches me and allows me to adapt to the mechanics that makes me more than happy to grind for hours but ff7 unfortunately doesnt meet that expectation.

The exploration in this game is one of the worst I have seen in a jrpg, the overworld is the essence of the word boring and tedious, the fact that square enix was so lazy that they couldn't simply LABEL the areas on the map so I wouldnt have to guess or search up where an area is, as something simple as that, it should be easy but no square enix doesnt know that. Other than the highwind(which you get like 75% into the game) the vehicles in this game is just useless or boring, the sub wouldve been more fun and interesting to use if square enix used more quests or areas to search underwater but other than that one easy mission i never used it again, that one big car that you get early in the game to cross the sands forgot its name, was also useless because once you reach it to nibelheim it just stays there. Most of the time in the overworld ( which is a big chunk of the game) I just ran through rushing to the next destination with no interests of doing any of the sidequests which i was fine with letting go of vincent because the quest looked tiresome ( i hesitated on yuffie but i got her tho i never used her) .

The shops in this game are very unrewarding, other than the 2-3 new equipment in every area its basically the same thing, the consumables never upgrade so youre stuck with potions and ether(other than cosmo canyon which jus sells high potions) tht barely do anything in battle when you cross half way thru the game so gathering gil felt very unrewarding. On the same note, grinding in this game feels like a waste of time, like i said before alot of the materias are not consistently useful so grinding ap points didnt feel worth it, majority of the game i was 4-6 underleveled because I didnt bother grinding but i still breeze thru the game, this game also doesnt have animation skip so every random encounter when i want to end it quickly with a summon or ultima i have to watch a slow ass cutscene and then repeat which made grinding even more tedious so I rarely ever played thru a random encounter, i only grinded when there was a save spot and a boss fight is right before it which does the job.

the last point i want to bring up is the level designs, HOLY FUCK was this game annoying when it came to exploring dungeons and whatnot, the biggest part was the shitty camera angles I mean its awful , its awful to the point where i need a IGN guide and a yt video on the side just to help me when i get stuck to look where to next for example a door or ladder or bridge can be right in front of me but it looks like a fucking wall cuz the camera angle makes it seem like one. the minigames specifcally the snowboarding shit is straight up one of the worst things i played in fact that whole level was one of the worst quest, i mean i havent seen a jrpg with so many bad level designs it made me realize how easy of a job it is to satisfy ff7 players with the remake when it comes to level designs and combat. This review makes it sound like this game is a one star which it probably would be if cloud wasnt such a great character, him and sephiroth were the main factors in my motivation to progress thru the game and would i say if it was worth it? Idk tbh bcuz the gameplay is just that bad but this score just shows how much i value story over gameplay (or maybe its to cope with the time i wasted who knows)

TL;DR cloud and sephiroth is hot but the gameplay sucks