[There will be spoilers for the original game as well as both current entries in the Remake continuity as a heads up!]

The original Final Fantasy VII is about many things, but I would say its most enduring theme is processing loss--being able to say goodbye, persevering in spite of that loss, knowing that those we love can live forever through the legacy they've left behind. So here we are, with the middle chapter of the Remake Continuity, which would ostensibly include that pivotal thematic moment, and its impact on me as a sequel is less about continuing the original story [or even branching off into its own retelling] and more a follow-up to my review for Final Fantasy XVI, an admittedly pretty goofy but sincere eulogy for my love for Final Fantasy as a franchise moving forward. Now I feel I can actually say goodbye, and it's because in an unfathomable number of ways Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is incapable of the same.

When you leave Midgar in the original FF7, the bounds previously placed on your understanding of the physical world expand into, as far as you're concerned, the infinite. Midgar is enormous, and its enormity amounts to a gross blemish on a much larger planet the second you escape its walls. Similarly, when you leave Midgar at the conclusion of Final Fantasy VII Remake, the exciting thing is the increasing size of the story's possibility space. It doesn't necessarily land its telling, but Remake ends with you severing the threads of fate. Now anything can happen--Aerith even says as much, and that character delivering that story beat provides some obvious [and frankly emotionally manipulative] implications.

I was okay with this. I love Final Fantasy VII, but I am not married to it being faithfully recreated [as much as I would probably actually enjoy that], even when it comes to the fate of Aerith, one of the most widely familiar Video Game Story Moments. Obviously the original Final Fantasy VII does not work if Aerith does not die. But that's why the Remake trilogy could have been something exciting--the story wouldn't necessarily have to rely on it. It could thematically pivot--maybe someone else dies as a reminder that fate is still outside of your grasp, maybe Aerith still dies because fate is never truly conquered. I don't know, I'm not a terribly capable writer and I certainly can't craft stories, and thankfully there are people in the world who will do that for me.

What I do know is that I strongly appreciate stories told with conviction and stories with actual emotional weight, and after finishing Rebirth I'm not convinced that the writers know how to do either. Sometimes character performances power through and connect, but so many important emotional moments are undercut immediately by overexcited, childlike bursts of "ideas."

There were several moments of doubt before, but the sequence with Dyne and Barret--friends years ago, separated by their ideologies and tragically set on different paths in life--sent deafening sirens. In the original, following an intense encounter but before falling down a cliff to his death, a physically and emotionally broken Dyne makes Barret promise to never make Marlene cry--Dyne's biological daughter whom Barret has adopted under the assumption Dyne died years in the past. In Rebirth, after a fight in which he becomes fucking Magneto [what?], Dyne instead tells Barret to live with his guilt [incredibly dark, and an interesting alteration] before dying--not by falling to his death, mind you, because mirroring the events of the flashback sequence in which Barret let go of Dyne's arm and watched him fall and presumably die was I guess too much for the storytelling, but instead by being gunned down in a blaze of glory by Shinra soldiers [not an interesting alteration]. Then, before the player is allowed to dwell on his grim parting words, Shinra immediately sends in a huge frog robot piloted by Palmer, a side character who largely exists for comedic purposes, and the party is forced into a fight with it. Then the game gets back to Barret and Dyne for a moment [a minor and genuinely satisfying moment in which Cloud shows support for Barret] before the party is forced into a bad vehicular shooting minigame on rails. Consider me moved!

Final Fantasy VII is a rollercoaster of vibes and frequently jumps between melancholy and humor, but it also knew when to let moments just exist. After concluding the sequence with Dyne in Rebirth, I had no faith that Aerith's destiny would be portrayed in a satisfying manner--after all, the implications of her fate are far more complex, with much heavier player investment, and tied to expectations of where this narrative might diverge on top of all that. Meanwhile, Dyne's story is a fastbreak open layup of an emotional payoff that the game somehow managed to botch despite recognizing some of the details, simply because it can't help itself and needs to keep adding things.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is a game about being More, at the expense of the journey's details at every possible turn. Nowhere is this more evident than in the open world activities of the game, which feel partially necessary if you're interested in improving gear or obtaining a lot of materia types to play with, but are so laborious and dreary that after completing the first area I simply... stopped doing them, outside of anything that was on the way to my objectives [since every activity you do serves as a fast travel spot, which feels like a concession that getting around is eventually just annoying]. I would identify the most interesting sounding materia available from Chadley in each region, keep a mental note of roughly how many points I would need to get at least one of each, and do the quickest activities with least resistance in order to get the required points. But then the game kept adding regions, even turning Gongaga into an incomprehensible mushroom jungle, and so I just stopped engaging with the side content pretty much entirely, even refusing to talk to Chadley. [Which, honestly, fantastic.]

And what are the activities? Some roughly mirror normal activities in the game [combat activities as well as towers which almost always have a combat encounter at their base], but others are braindead. At one, you press triangle three times and look at pretty scenery. At another, you repeat a sequence of button presses. At another, you awkwardly stumble around on a chocobo and hold up on the D-pad so it can sniff out item locations very slowly. I eventually identified which ones were potentially the most helpful and tried to stick to those, though unfortunately the chocobo excavations were the most interesting to me as they led to crafting recipes for upgrading gear, and even more unfortunately you have to do the expeditions, the aforementioned "press triangle three times" activity, to unlock them.

In my meandering review of Final Fantasy XVI I mentioned how the bloat in that game existed, as far as I can tell, for the sole purpose of extending the experience for perceived value. The open world side of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is very much like that kind of bloat, and even more hilariously resembles common big-budget game design [the towers are distinctly Ubisoft open world garbage]. What's absolutely puzzling about Rebirth, however, is that a lot of its other non-narrative bloat comes with good intentions. [Not pushing mako vacuums around though. What on earth.]

A lot of older Final Fantasy games thrived on relentless throwaway minigames that were charming through their frequency and brevity. I don't doubt that the creators of Rebirth love that particular aspect of Final Fantasy VII--all you have to do is look at the setup for the soldier routine sequence in Junon. Originally a set of simple quick minigames in which you pretended to be a Shinra grunt soldier and do militaristic routines for a parade, it's now been elaborated upon so that you track down and "recruit" ranks of soldiers of different formations and then "equip" them depending on your desired difficulty/reward for the eventual parade minigame [basically the Honeybee dance sequence from Remake, which, sidenote, is still the worst-presented QTE in terms of clarity I've maybe ever seen in a game, so I wasn't exactly thrilled that it was being reused]. Is this setup unique? Sure, I guess! But it's setup, and it is exhausting to be presented with a tutorial for the setup to a minigame when in the original it was something that took maybe a couple minutes.

Or look to the dolphin sequence, also in Junon. Originally a dolphin helps you reach the top of Junon by jumping you up onto a tower; you simply find the right position and hit a button, and it takes a minute but is immediately understandable. In Rebirth, you now run a race course with the dolphin, running into balls to increase your speed [???] in order to complete the track within a given time limit--all to accomplish the same exact thing. It requires tutorial explanation as well, it lasts maybe 2 minutes, and it's not very interesting. Cool!

There are countless other examples, some of which simply attempt to add fun moments for characters--though I refuse to even talk about the Shinra mansion "puzzle dungeon" with Cait Sith. But most of these were obviously made by people who love the original game. That's what's so utterly maddening. Why in God's name would you go through the effort of creating a specific racing minigame with unique mechanics to elaborate on a small throwaway moment if you didn't? It's a game that serves as a tribute to the lovable, zany qualities of the series, but doesn't recognize that it's embracing its inspiration so tightly that it's suffocating it.

Which brings me back to Aerith, and the most egregious failure of the story. So Remake ends with a vision of a surviving Zack Fair as an indication that nothing is guaranteed anymore and that fate has changed. What Square coyly neglected to elaborate on with Remake is that it's not necessarily that the world has changed, but instead that there are many worlds. You know, parallel universes, probably one of the worst and most difficult storytelling devices for emotional payoff? So the possibilities are endless not in the way that a player familiar with Final Fantasy VII should be on edge with excitement as they can no longer predict the central narrative of a story they cherish, but instead in a way that stakes are hard to establish anymore. So when Aerith is "still" killed at the conclusion of Rebirth, she is also not killed, because she exists in parallel worlds, kind of? It's having it both ways, and the verb "dulls" doesn't properly communicate the damage that does to processing Aerith's character emotionally.

When you feel Aerith's presence for the remainder of Final Fantasy VII, it's with a great deal of sadness because she is still gone. The end of Rebirth implies all the characters will continue to feel her presence as well, but since we're likely still going to see her throughout the final game--whether it's through some Marvel Cinematic Universe-esque horseshit or simply through Cloud's imagination--we won't be able to say goodbye in the same way. And no amount of pretty good combat mechanics [as satisfying as most of the characters are to control, and as confident as Square is getting with this battle system] or strong voiceover performances from the main cast [the actual saving grace of Rebirth] will make that better.

[There will be spoilers for the original game as well as both current entries in the Remake continuity as a heads up!]

The original Final Fantasy VII is about many things, but I would say its most enduring theme is processing loss--being able to say goodbye, persevering in spite of that loss, knowing that those we love can live forever through the legacy they've left behind. So here we are, with the middle chapter of the Remake Continuity, which would ostensibly include that pivotal thematic moment, and its impact on me as a sequel is less about continuing the original story [or even branching off into its own retelling] and more a follow-up to my review for Final Fantasy XVI, an admittedly pretty goofy but sincere eulogy for my love for Final Fantasy as a franchise moving forward. Now I feel I can actually say goodbye, and it's because in an unfathomable number of ways Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is incapable of the same.

When you leave Midgar in the original FF7, the bounds previously placed on your understanding of the physical world expand into, as far as you're concerned, the infinite. Midgar is enormous, and its enormity amounts to a gross blemish on a much larger planet the second you escape its walls. Similarly, when you leave Midgar at the conclusion of Final Fantasy VII Remake, the exciting thing is the increasing size of the story's possibility space. It doesn't necessarily land its telling, but Remake ends with you severing the threads of fate. Now anything can happen--Aerith even says as much, and that character delivering that story beat provides some obvious [and frankly emotionally manipulative] implications.

I was okay with this. I love Final Fantasy VII, but I am not married to it being faithfully recreated [as much as I would probably actually enjoy that], even when it comes to the fate of Aerith, one of the most widely familiar Video Game Story Moments. Obviously the original Final Fantasy VII does not work if Aerith does not die. But that's why the Remake trilogy could have been something exciting--the story wouldn't necessarily have to rely on it. It could thematically pivot--maybe someone else dies as a reminder that fate is still outside of your grasp, maybe Aerith still dies because fate is never truly conquered. I don't know, I'm not a terribly capable writer and I certainly can't craft stories, and thankfully there are people in the world who will do that for me.

What I do know is that I strongly appreciate stories told with conviction and stories with actual emotional weight, and after finishing Rebirth I'm not convinced that the writers know how to do either. Sometimes character performances power through and connect, but so many important emotional moments are undercut immediately by overexcited, childlike bursts of "ideas."

There were several moments of doubt before, but the sequence with Dyne and Barret--friends years ago, separated by their ideologies and tragically set on different paths in life--sent deafening sirens. In the original, following an intense encounter but before falling down a cliff to his death, a physically and emotionally broken Dyne makes Barret promise to never make Marlene cry--Dyne's biological daughter whom Barret has adopted under the assumption Dyne died years in the past. In Rebirth, after a fight in which he becomes fucking Magneto [what?], Dyne instead tells Barret to live with his guilt [incredibly dark, and an interesting alteration] before dying--not by falling to his death, mind you, because mirroring the events of the flashback sequence in which Barret let go of Dyne's arm and watched him fall and presumably die was I guess too much for the storytelling, but instead by being gunned down in a blaze of glory by Shinra soldiers [not an interesting alteration]. Then, before the player is allowed to dwell on his grim parting words, Shinra immediately sends in a huge frog robot piloted by Palmer, a side character who largely exists for comedic purposes, and the party is forced into a fight with it. Then the game gets back to Barret and Dyne for a moment [a minor and genuinely satisfying moment in which Cloud shows support for Barret] before the party is forced into a bad vehicular shooting minigame on rails. Consider me moved!

Final Fantasy VII is a rollercoaster of vibes and frequently jumps between melancholy and humor, but it also knew when to let moments just exist. After concluding the sequence with Dyne in Rebirth, I had no faith that Aerith's destiny would be portrayed in a satisfying manner--after all, the implications of her fate are far more complex, with much heavier player investment, and tied to expectations of where this narrative might diverge on top of all that. Meanwhile, Dyne's story is a fastbreak open layup of an emotional payoff that the game somehow managed to botch despite recognizing some of the details, simply because it can't help itself and needs to keep adding things.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is a game about being More, at the expense of the journey's details at every possible turn. Nowhere is this more evident than in the open world activities of the game, which feel partially necessary if you're interested in improving gear or obtaining a lot of materia types to play with, but are so laborious and dreary that after completing the first area I simply... stopped doing them, outside of anything that was on the way to my objectives [since every activity you do serves as a fast travel spot, which feels like a concession that getting around is eventually just annoying]. I would identify the most interesting sounding materia available from Chadley in each region, keep a mental note of roughly how many points I would need to get at least one of each, and do the quickest activities with least resistance in order to get the required points. But then the game kept adding regions, even turning Gongaga into an incomprehensible mushroom jungle, and so I just stopped engaging with the side content pretty much entirely, even refusing to talk to Chadley. [Which, honestly, fantastic.]

And what are the activities? Some roughly mirror normal activities in the game [combat activities as well as towers which almost always have a combat encounter at their base], but others are braindead. At one, you press triangle three times and look at pretty scenery. At another, you repeat a sequence of button presses. At another, you awkwardly stumble around on a chocobo and hold up on the D-pad so it can sniff out item locations very slowly. I eventually identified which ones were potentially the most helpful and tried to stick to those, though unfortunately the chocobo excavations were the most interesting to me as they led to crafting recipes for upgrading gear, and even more unfortunately you have to do the expeditions, the aforementioned "press triangle three times" activity, to unlock them.

In my meandering review of Final Fantasy XVI I mentioned how the bloat in that game existed, as far as I can tell, for the sole purpose of extending the experience for perceived value. The open world side of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is very much like that kind of bloat, and even more hilariously resembles common big-budget game design [the towers are distinctly Ubisoft open world garbage]. What's absolutely puzzling about Rebirth, however, is that a lot of its other non-narrative bloat comes with good intentions. [Not pushing mako vacuums around though. What on earth.]

A lot of older Final Fantasy games thrived on relentless throwaway minigames that were charming through their frequency and brevity. I don't doubt that the creators of Rebirth love that particular aspect of Final Fantasy VII--all you have to do is look at the setup for the soldier routine sequence in Junon. Originally a set of simple quick minigames in which you pretended to be a Shinra grunt soldier and do militaristic routines for a parade, it's now been elaborated upon so that you track down and "recruit" ranks of soldiers of different formations and then "equip" them depending on your desired difficulty/reward for the eventual parade minigame [basically the Honeybee dance sequence from Remake, which, sidenote, is still the worst-presented QTE in terms of clarity I've maybe ever seen in a game, so I wasn't exactly thrilled that it was being reused]. Is this setup unique? Sure, I guess! But it's setup, and it is exhausting to be presented with a tutorial for the setup to a minigame when in the original it was something that took maybe a couple minutes.

Or look to the dolphin sequence, also in Junon. Originally a dolphin helps you reach the top of Junon by jumping you up onto a tower; you simply find the right position and hit a button, and it takes a minute but is immediately understandable. In Rebirth, you now run a race course with the dolphin, running into balls to increase your speed [???] in order to complete the track within a given time limit--all to accomplish the same exact thing. It requires tutorial explanation as well, it lasts maybe 2 minutes, and it's not very interesting. Cool!

There are countless other examples, some of which simply attempt to add fun moments for characters--though I refuse to even talk about the Shinra mansion "puzzle dungeon" with Cait Sith. But most of these were obviously made by people who love the original game. That's what's so utterly maddening. Why in God's name would you go through the effort of creating a specific racing minigame with unique mechanics to elaborate on a small throwaway moment if you didn't? It's a game that serves as a tribute to the lovable, zany qualities of the series, but doesn't recognize that it's embracing its inspiration so tightly that it's suffocating it.

Which brings me back to Aerith, and the most egregious failure of the story. So Remake ends with a vision of a surviving Zack Fair as an indication that nothing is guaranteed anymore and that fate has changed. What Square coyly neglected to elaborate on with Remake is that it's not necessarily that the world has changed, but instead that there are many worlds. You know, parallel universes, probably one of the worst and most difficult storytelling devices for emotional payoff? So the possibilities are endless not in the way that a player familiar with Final Fantasy VII should be on edge with excitement as they can no longer predict the central narrative of a story they cherish, but instead in a way that stakes are hard to establish anymore. So when Aerith is "still" killed at the conclusion of Rebirth, she is also not killed, because she exists in parallel worlds, kind of? It's having it both ways, and the verb "dulls" doesn't properly communicate the damage that does to processing Aerith's character emotionally.

When you feel Aerith's presence for the remainder of Final Fantasy VII, it's with a great deal of sadness because she is still gone. The end of Rebirth implies all the characters will continue to feel her presence as well, but since we're likely still going to see her throughout the final game--whether it's through some Marvel Cinematic Universe-esque horseshit or simply through Cloud's imagination--we won't be able to say goodbye in the same way. And no amount of pretty good combat mechanics [as satisfying as most of the characters are to control, and as confident as Square is getting with this battle system] or strong voiceover performances from the main cast [the actual saving grace of Rebirth] will make that better.