Rebirth is an excellent improvement upon Remake's solid foundation, elevating the combat system and introducing a surprisingly addictive open world with improved dungeon designs and a plethora of side content to enjoy.

While I feel like the story they adapted for the second installment should have gone farther—to the end of disc 1's coverage to be specific—it's still a damn good adaptation for the most part, with the characters being the absolute highlight, just as they were in Remake. Unfortunately, also not unlike how it was in Remake, some of the adapted content loses the atmosphere and charm of the original due to certain changes made. Whether those changes are for the better or for the worse can be subjective. Luckily for me, they didn’t hinder my enjoyment of the game and only really stood out as I looked back on the 150+ hour journey.

The bigger changes to the story—namely the “meta” elements and those involving the Compilation—continue to intrigue and have the potential to make certain parts of the original story even better, though whether these setups will have satisfactory payoffs… is something that’s gonna take about 3 more years before we’ll find out.

Out of the many things I loved about Rebirth, one of my favorites is how it took the already incredible fusion of turn-based combat and real-time action and turned it into something even better, resulting in my new favorite action RPG combat system. Aerial combat was essentially the only issue with Remake’s combat system, and INTERmission was a preview into how they would address it going forward via Yuffie’s fighting style. That improvement now extends to the rest of the party, and works alongside the new synergy system. Synergy skills give each character whole new ways to deal with various situations without relying on the ATB commands, giving them access to ranged and aerial attacks, new defensive options, or even entirely new combo strings! All while helping generate ATB charges faster for the two characters involved. On the other hand, synergy abilities are powerful new team-up attacks that provide powerful buffs alongside cool animations not unlike Limit Breaks. Mastering the combat system becomes an even more impressive feat thanks to these new systems, making the combat challenges and various boss fights especially satisfying and fun.

The open world design is what surprised me the most, and in a positive way, thankfully. The game initially sets up the expectation that it would be a repetitive open world like many others out there, but the way each region is introduced and how they handle the content within each of those made for a very refreshing experience throughout my entire time with the game. Instead of getting tired as I reached later regions, I found myself still enjoying everything because of the varying locales, transporation methods, and how they dole out the story and different sections of each of these regions. And it certainly helped that (most of) the mini-games were a lot of fun too, so we weren’t locked into simply engaging in combat as our primary means of interacting with the world.

Overall, there’s so much I love about Rebirth, and fortunately only a few minor issues to complain about such as the occasional weird lighting or unintuitive menus. The unique nature of the remake trilogy makes the story a bit hard to judge fully since it’s still waiting to be completed, but the rest of Rebirth’s package is simply fantastic to say the least. Some of the best ARPG combat out there, wonderful mini-games, a beautiful and satisfying open world to run around in, and damn good character moments all throughout the game.