Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: Thoughts After Playing

So I finally finished Final Fantasy VII Rebirth this week. Not having a PS5, I had to wait until it was available on the Steam Deck to get a chance to play it. Which was kind of annoying, since Final Fantasy VII Remake came out on PS4 and I enjoyed playing it on that just fine. Oh, and spoiler alert and all that, you have been warned. It’s funny, I don’t think I have so much to say that this will be a long blog post, but I guess I did have some feeling that I wanted to express. Mixed feeling and confusion, mostly!

First of all, I feel I need to talk about the length. Because good lord, I am not into super long games these days, and this one was beginning to test my patience. I’m an adult, and I have if I am lucky, an hour or an hour and a half in my day to dedicate to video games. This game took me 100 hours over the course of 3 and a half months. I feel like it does not value my time. Granted there was a lot to see and do, but I feel it could have trimmed it down a little bit.

When Remake ended, Sephiroth had basically forced Cloud and company to fight the concept of fate itself, and they won, which seemed to imply that the future would no longer just be a ‘Remake’, as now anything could happen. But for the most part in Rebirth, you’re following the same story beats that you followed in the original FF7. The ending of Remake shows that now Zach is alive and returning to Midgar, and in fact the Rebirth game seems to pick up around there, with what I assumed at the time was a flash forward to later in the game where he rescues Aerith from Shinra. But which I now know was an alternate reality. Of which there were at least four happening in the game? I feel like Tetsuya Nomora is taking his love of convoluted stories like the Organization XIII in Kindgom Hearts and inserting some of that here. It’s weird because unless there’s a huge payoff in the next game, it really didn’t feel like this story needed it. I don’t find it a sign of good storytelling when the first thing I do after finishing a game is do an internet search explaining the ending of said game.

But I don’t want to sound all bad here, because when it comes down to it, I did play the game for a full 100 hours, and believe me I wouldn’t do that if I was not interested in the game. The characters are great, and the remake is able to make their personalities shine in their voice acting and animation. Cloud in particular had great acting in his subtlety, both in his English voice acting and his facial animation. And I think I like Barrett quite a bit more than I did in the original game, between his acting and getting more of his backstory in this one, I really warmed up to him. A bit of a double edged sword though, I think I like Yuffie less than in the original FF7 game!

There’s some great game mechanics too. While I still think turn-based RPGs can be a thing in 2025, their approach to making the standard Final Fantasy menu system into a hybrid of action mixed with menu based spells and abilities offers a lot of strategy. I felt like I had a much better grasp of the mechanics with this game than the last, and it helped me enjoy it a lot more.

I ended the last game having defeated Fate, and it made me think that the second chapter would now have endless possibilities instead of simply remaking the original game. Now I’ve ended the second game with some weird twists involving other realities, and IF they do end up getting intertwined, it makes me think once again that the next chapter might have a very different story to tell. I hope this time I’m right!