I'll start by saying that I was uncertain to mark this as abandoned or simply played because 66 hours in multiple pace halting game design decisions, or minigames, made me rage quit and decide to watch the rest of the story in a compilation on Youtube. So for all intents and purposes I both played, finished and abandoned Rebirth which I think is a good description of what this game feels like narratively and conceptually.

Rebirth is a reminder that a well made game can still be a bad game. Or more specifically, a well made game can be put into a blender and pureed into children's food. Rebirth continues the trend of broad assumptions that yes, you the player did in fact play FF7 or you're at least familiar with it's story because it goes to great lengths to change things in ways that seem interesting but only if you know what was changed in the first place. These changes set up interesting questions and genuine intrigue into progression of the game. Why is Zack here? Why are Avalanche being helicoptered out of the rubble of Midgar? Why are Aerith and Cloud in a coma? These questions are all asked within the introduction of Rebirth, before you're thrust in to Cloud's tale of his derring-dos with Sephiroth back in the day, in the Kalm inn. This is all great. It's well paced, has good character writing. There are some weird changes like why is Nibelheim a bustling town with a similar population to a Midgar city sector? But whatever, I'm sure it's just a small change to make the world feel more alive. Then you arrive in the Shinra Manor, or what was the Shinra Manor. The place was completely gutted and instead of being a creep filled atmosphere of degradation it boils down to one room with a literal elevator in plain sight down to Hojo's lab. Okay, whatever, let's get the fun of Sephiroth's mental break and mass murder out of the way. Sephiroth's monologue to Cloud leads a lot to be desired but sometime it's understandable they might remove some of the PS1 weirdness like him literally flying out of the building, but at the very least he could have thrown the materia at Cloud. I'm getting a bit uncertain now. We go back to the inn and then the burning of Nibelheim starts. What follows is one of the slowest "video game walks" imaginable. Cloud gets crushed under the town sign and has to limp his way through a burning village, emphasis on limping. While this is happening entire citizens who were trapped in burning buildings get to run past him at full sprint. We come up on Sephiroth, being approached by Nibleheim citizens with guns and as Sephiroth deflects their shots and kills them Cloud must crawl forward, by the way of the player pressing two large L2 R2 prompts that are on the screen. This is a microcosm of all the problems that are to come in Rebirth. Important scenes having all tone and pacing removed from them, arbitrary QTE's included in pivotal moments of the game up to and including That Scene. YES, That Scene. A scene that was so perfectly crafted in 1997 that it's baffling to me that any developer would look at such a thing and think "yes, adding QTE prompts where you must fight the haptic feedback triggers is truly what this emotional climax of a game needs!"

If it wasn't clear, one problem leads to an example of another problem. FF7 Rebirth feels like a tech demo for the PS5. The overabundance of minigames with new tutorials every 5 hours of a 100+ hour game, multiple minigames having automatic controller motion controls active, sections of the game where you pilot Cid's airplane with limited control on where you actually go to because the open world isn't really an open world anymore, but it has motion controls! Look at how the plane moves when you move the controller! An entire chapter is dedicated to one single boss fight and an entire minigame just to show you "hey, look! Check out our new cardgame!" and yeah! Queensblood is really good! It's a shame you're forcing me to play it in the middle of the story. And right after this big, important Jenova boss fight on the ship that only lasted a couple minutes even on dynamic difficulty you arrive! In Costa del Sol! The biggest pacing crash in the game. Which is what I'd call it if there wasn't several of them. The characters explicitly remark that you're on an urgent mission but Tifa and Aerith beg you to take a rest on the beach because Sephiroth can wait I guess. But you're quickly introduced to the gimmick of the area, you can't progress until you get a swimsuit for Cloud. You literally can't go to the beach without a swimsuit. Why you may ask? Don't worry about it. You have to do minigames to get Cloud's swimsuit. After going through these hurdles control is shifted to a scene with story implications where Aerith talks to Red about the white materia she has. This doesn't last long and quickly you're whisked away with Tifa for their "date". The two are immediately approached by the same NPC that told Cloud he had to get a swimsuit so now, again, you have to get swimsuits for both Aerith and Tifa. So once again, you're charged with doing minigames! Lot's of minigames!

At this point the game was starting to great on me but I decided to persevere! I was so looking forward to Rebirth and the potential implications of the promised batshit reveals and changes to the story we can expect! And after all these minigames we finally get it, a scene I didn't ask for and I don't think anyone who doesn't still maintain a high school crush on two fictional women asked for. We're subjected to a notification of whether or not Cloud has similair taste in swimsuits to the girls, and we get to see the two girls bounce around in their bikinis from Clouds pov which feels... not great as the player who is clearly not the target audience for stuff like this. But then, Hojo arrives! And is allowed onto the beach in his labcoat which begs the question why you had to waste time doing multiple different full fleshed out minigames. You then get a boss fight because honestly, it's been awhile. Unlike the PS1 game where Hojo just vibes on the beach he summons his robot to come kidnap Cloud, the gang and a bunch of robed men. After some fuckery the gang gets free because of course they do and Hojo just... leaves. And then Costa del Sol becomes an open zone for side quests and more minigames! One of which you're gated from finishing until you've made it past the Gold Saucer of all things.

At this point you get the gist but what really matters is the point in which I stopped. Corel Prison, what once was an absolute dumpster of a location is now a vibrant wall market knock off with it's own eccentric Like a Dragon style gangsters that want Cloud to do chocobo racing! Which is a given, it's a requirement in the original game but there's a twist! And you guessed it! You're required to do at minimum 3 minigames out of 6 or all of them to get extra rewards before you can even consider doing the whole other chocobo racing minigame to progress the story. I tapped out. CBU1 made a big deal about how Final Fantasy 7 is so big it can't be contained to one, or even two games. It HAD to be a trilogy. But out of 60 hours of gameplay, only 10 hours of that was story related and the other 50 was entirely devoted to minigames and maybe 6 was devoted to my stubbornness to beat the summon VR fiights on the hardest difficulty. This review does not even unpack my broader problems with the main story of Rebirth, like it's absolute cowardice to do anything interesting with major story beats, the fact that the developers have already explained the endgame of remake to tie it into Advent Children which means all the big mysteries are solved if you have any knowledge of On a Way to a Smile, the refusal to let this game go above a T rating meaning that any horror or visceral story beats that happened in the original are completely gutted, and the tone of important scenes are ruined. Such as Dyne and Barret's story where in the original Dyne threatens to kill his own daughter after fiinding out she's alive and then throws himself off a cliff, where in Rebirth it's replaced by Dyne comitting suicide by cop and then having a man in a speedo and a cape drive into scene in the buggy and do poses over Dyne's dead body while Barret is visibly in the background crying. Which is ALSO immediately followed by another boss fight against Palmer of all people.

Idk dude, some other people have reviewed this well and expressed my other grievances. What I want to understand is why people think this is game of the year and I mean genuinely. This is not a dismissive question, I actually want to know deep down what made them consider this game as a whole is such a great piece of art to them. A game with so many minigames distracting from an already spread thing plot, a game that has you press Call of Duty QTEs during the Aerith dying scene, a game that is so convoluted just to say nothing in the end. What do people see in this? I need to know. And i need to play the original FF7 again to wash my mouth out.