I honestly don’t know what to say about this game, and that’s mostly because I started playing it the week it came out, i.e. right at the beginning of March, and I’ve just finished it today. It’s taken four months for me to play Rebirth and I’m not even a completionist. My approach to sidequests was the same as it is for most games that don’t grab me in a chokehold, i.e. do the ones that present themselves to me without my having to go looking for them, and aren’t extremely annoying to complete, so I’d guess I did 60–70% of the terrain stuff. Even with that this game dragged on and on with the strange sudden tonal shifts that a number of FF games are known for, making it hard to know what kind of emotional reaction the player was supposed to have.
I obviously don’t think those shifts are necessarily bad, because I do in fact play Final Fantasy games all the time. I guess they’re just much harder to pull off in an environment where a. the player already knows the story, or at least its main beats, and b. the protagonist’s mood and actions are equally erratic (for good reason). At least with Tidus, to pick a completely random protagonist of a game that I’m not at all obsessed with, there is some consistency in the way he reacts to what’s going on around him, and also, he’s a generally happy and optimistic person which means the more lighthearted moments can shine and the sadder ones hit hard, but in a good way. I suppose that kind of protagonist can also undergo a more satisfying journey from “naive but likeable young person” to “guy who has seen some shit and been forced to re-evaluate his life choices”, rather than just “He’s messed up! He’s still messed up!”. Maybe this is one of the reasons why I preferred Crisis Core to the original FF7.
The plot of that original FF7 struggled with the basic concept of making sense, and the same is true of Rebirth, although for different reasons, i.e. the multiverse. Some of the eccentricities of the original game have been smoothed over, with the result that regrettably, there are no longer characters called Chole and Ester. (Tangentially, it’s odd that NPCs in this universe often have quite ordinary names and then the party members have, like, uncanny valley names … quick, this child’s parents gave them a strange name, send them to the Shinra building to join up.)
Aerith spends most of the game being unnecessarily cryptic, a highly hypocritical thing for me to criticise as an Auron fan, but perhaps I’m predisposed to suspicion of Aerith as someone who prefers Tifa. The game seemed to have a pretty heavy Clerith agenda but that may also be a result of my preference, just like how Tories (RIP them amirite) think the BBC is too left-wing and socialists think the opposite. Speaking of characters gratuitously acting like Auron, Vincent did this par excellence, with the result that I was actually interested in his character for the first time. Every time he leant against a wall, folding his arms and frowning, I was like, that’s him! My boy!! The only drawback of this experience was that it made me wish I was looking at PS5-quality Auron instead.
I’ve maybe been slightly harsh on the length of this game because admittedly, I’ve been spending most of my free time working on the WIP/increasingly esoteric coding projects, and also recently found myself in the grip of a sudden Pokémon obsession a few weeks ago, and the FF16 DLC came out halfway through the process and I’m going to have to go back to that now and attempt the seemingly ungrindable Leviathan once again after noping out of it at the time. As a person who is deeply uninterested in loadouts and also too stupid to respond to visual clues with appropriately well-timed use of the block button, I tend to rely on grinding as an integral part of my gaming strategy, and I’m bitter about the fact that the Games Of Today seem to have stopped allowing players to use this technique. Rebirth has the side quests, which get you some of the way, but then it has the whole section at the end where you can’t go back into the open world, can’t go back to Chadley to take advantage of his supplies of useful materia, can’t have a nice break playing some Queen’s Blood, and eventually (in the entire last section) can’t even use random encounters to get stronk, because there aren’t any. Of course this also culminates in an extremely lengthy boss fight for which you have to ensure that every party member is appropriately equipped. I ended up doing the same thing that I did for the Yuffie DLC and turning the difficulty down to easy for the final boss, which then made it too easy and fairly anticlimactic. I just want to be able to level up a little bit and then go back in to attempt it again with the satisfaction of seeing that levelling make a small but significant difference, and I also want “it” not to last two hours.
Most amateur reviews of this game I’ve seen (I have not read professional reviews) have seemed fairly unequivocal: either it’s the best game of the past few years or it’s trash. Or maybe, because everyone else who started the game when it came out finished it months ago, I’ve forgotten the more nuanced ones. Either way, I suppose I’m broadly indifferent. It’s a very good game, and it’s obviously beautiful, as all big-budget modern games are. It’s quite clearly trying to be all things to all people and there was probably no way of remaking a game as iconic as this without doing that.