The best way I can describe my feelings after rolling credits is that FF7 Rebirth is a game that wants to be the quintessential form of everything it takes from. A game that brazenly embraces the “good” and “bad” of everything it encompasses, even when the two are diametrically opposed to each other.
Rebirth is the quintessential AAA game of the last decade, featuring both the “good” (top of the line production values, the highest quality models for characters with incredible performances across both EN and JP casts, 400+ tracks with seamless transitions between world and battle themes, ambitious scope for world design in both size and complexity) and the “bad” (menial busywork to keep the player occupied between main story moments, map boils down to going to the objective and cleaning the icons out instead of genuine exploration, all game design trends meant to add artificial speedbreakers - slow walking, climbing on yellow ledges, squeezethroughs etc., animation locking preventing you from doing things faster than you should like healing from the command menu).
It is also the quintessential nomura game, even though he had a different role this time round his footprint is clearly felt. Whether it be the earnestness of the character interactions with their idiosyncratic quirks and the distinct rhythm of conversations, or the inherent multiplicity of narrative design - where anything and everything is a crumb-trail that leads to something that is to come, something to endlessly look forward to.
This nature of being everything all at once is important, because it rears its ugly head once you get to the thing it has to be first and foremost - a Final Fantasy VII game. The original game is pretty (in)famous for being all over the place tonally, but one of the more charming aspects of FF7 is that it really felt like an abundant accumulation of ideas. If they thought of it, they put it in. This philosophy combined with the inherent abstraction present for PS1 RPGs lent itself to be a leaner game, exceedingly so when you compare it to today’s RPGs. It meant that even in this so called idea factory, you’re going from one moment to next briskly. Naturally when they decided to break this game up into multiple parts, that was one of the aspects I assumed they would change. To not necessarily remedy, but to just make those moments of transition feel more organic. It is baffling then that this new high fidelity unreal engine FF7 part deux makes the tonal shifts feel even more bizarre. Every scene/fight has been made more bombastic with lavish splendour and spectacle, restraint has been discarded and the intent was clearly to keep adding more and more. Barret and Dyne's confrontation is one of the worst offenders of this, where Dyne is depicted to be this criminally inhumane monster with a gnarly robo-arm made of junk. Their heart-to-heart moment then hard cuts to a Palmer mech boss fight where he pats his ass while techno/trap music plays (this shit made me so mad I actually don’t remember what kinda track it was lol).
The willingness to stick so close to the original script while merely “expanding” on it with the “more-is-better” philosophy yields a bloated mess of a game. Any spark of genuine brilliance is undercut by stretching events longer than they should or muddying it with beats of the original game. One such example of the latter is when Gi Nattak reveals that the lifestream has been rejecting the Gi - a revelation that would break the foundations of FF7's ethical balance because it would mean the Ancients and everyone who opposes them aren’t as black and white as the original game expects us to believe. This detail is not picked up subsequently at all and the party continues onward on their preordained path of FF7.
Which brings us to the ending. Split worlds, multiverses, stamps, reunions, straddling those split worlds, Zack and Cloud combo attacks, Aerith dying, her not dying - as is the trend, it had it all. Underneath all of that gibberish, what is the actual message being said here? That she can have her final date with Cloud (which was cute I will admit) but ultimately can never be with him happily ever after? Then they’d have been better off keeping the elegance of the original scene and just remade the game faithfully. Or is it that she can be with him but there will be a price that will have to be paid, most likely by everyone else? Then they should've made a meaningfully different game that incorporated that choice as a legitimate what-if scenario. What I got instead feels like straddling both decisions (much like Cloud straddling worlds) and ending up at a non-committal 3rd place where they pulled a lot of punches.
Maybe this is supposed to be meta commentary on them being indecisive, maybe I'm being too harsh reading into it from that lens. Either way I don’t think it would change my thoughts on the ending.
That combat system bangs though, demonstrable improvement over Remake. It’s just a shame that it’s the only unequivocally positive thing about the game.
Rebirth is the quintessential AAA game of the last decade, featuring both the “good” (top of the line production values, the highest quality models for characters with incredible performances across both EN and JP casts, 400+ tracks with seamless transitions between world and battle themes, ambitious scope for world design in both size and complexity) and the “bad” (menial busywork to keep the player occupied between main story moments, map boils down to going to the objective and cleaning the icons out instead of genuine exploration, all game design trends meant to add artificial speedbreakers - slow walking, climbing on yellow ledges, squeezethroughs etc., animation locking preventing you from doing things faster than you should like healing from the command menu).
It is also the quintessential nomura game, even though he had a different role this time round his footprint is clearly felt. Whether it be the earnestness of the character interactions with their idiosyncratic quirks and the distinct rhythm of conversations, or the inherent multiplicity of narrative design - where anything and everything is a crumb-trail that leads to something that is to come, something to endlessly look forward to.
This nature of being everything all at once is important, because it rears its ugly head once you get to the thing it has to be first and foremost - a Final Fantasy VII game. The original game is pretty (in)famous for being all over the place tonally, but one of the more charming aspects of FF7 is that it really felt like an abundant accumulation of ideas. If they thought of it, they put it in. This philosophy combined with the inherent abstraction present for PS1 RPGs lent itself to be a leaner game, exceedingly so when you compare it to today’s RPGs. It meant that even in this so called idea factory, you’re going from one moment to next briskly. Naturally when they decided to break this game up into multiple parts, that was one of the aspects I assumed they would change. To not necessarily remedy, but to just make those moments of transition feel more organic. It is baffling then that this new high fidelity unreal engine FF7 part deux makes the tonal shifts feel even more bizarre. Every scene/fight has been made more bombastic with lavish splendour and spectacle, restraint has been discarded and the intent was clearly to keep adding more and more. Barret and Dyne's confrontation is one of the worst offenders of this, where Dyne is depicted to be this criminally inhumane monster with a gnarly robo-arm made of junk. Their heart-to-heart moment then hard cuts to a Palmer mech boss fight where he pats his ass while techno/trap music plays (this shit made me so mad I actually don’t remember what kinda track it was lol).
The willingness to stick so close to the original script while merely “expanding” on it with the “more-is-better” philosophy yields a bloated mess of a game. Any spark of genuine brilliance is undercut by stretching events longer than they should or muddying it with beats of the original game. One such example of the latter is when Gi Nattak reveals that the lifestream has been rejecting the Gi - a revelation that would break the foundations of FF7's ethical balance because it would mean the Ancients and everyone who opposes them aren’t as black and white as the original game expects us to believe. This detail is not picked up subsequently at all and the party continues onward on their preordained path of FF7.
Which brings us to the ending. Split worlds, multiverses, stamps, reunions, straddling those split worlds, Zack and Cloud combo attacks, Aerith dying, her not dying - as is the trend, it had it all. Underneath all of that gibberish, what is the actual message being said here? That she can have her final date with Cloud (which was cute I will admit) but ultimately can never be with him happily ever after? Then they’d have been better off keeping the elegance of the original scene and just remade the game faithfully. Or is it that she can be with him but there will be a price that will have to be paid, most likely by everyone else? Then they should've made a meaningfully different game that incorporated that choice as a legitimate what-if scenario. What I got instead feels like straddling both decisions (much like Cloud straddling worlds) and ending up at a non-committal 3rd place where they pulled a lot of punches.
Maybe this is supposed to be meta commentary on them being indecisive, maybe I'm being too harsh reading into it from that lens. Either way I don’t think it would change my thoughts on the ending.
That combat system bangs though, demonstrable improvement over Remake. It’s just a shame that it’s the only unequivocally positive thing about the game.