Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Sur Pc
Vida Hubbert
A bit over a year ago, on this very website, I proclaimed my love of "silly little mini-games." This is still true: I do love them and, as I stated then, I have wasted hundreds of hours of my life playing these games-within-games. Of particular note was the Final Fantasy series; in my ode to miniature distractions, I singled out Final Fantasy IX and its Chocobo digging game, as well as Blitzball in Final Fantasy X. I felt happy with the way I portrayed a quirk of my gamer experience, especially when it came to my favorite video game series of all time. Then Final Fantasy VII Rebirth ruined everything.
First, some context: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (I am going to call it Rebirth from now on) is the second in a trilogy that aims not just to modernize the original Final Fantasy 7, one of the most beloved and "important just for existing" games ever, but to re-conceptualize the entire project. The first in this trilogy, Final Fantasy VII Remake, released in April of 2020, teased some interesting deviations from one of video games' most famous stories; I won't bore you with the specifics, but they boil down to "fate is mutable" in both a narrative and meta sense. Remake also expanded the initial section of the original game, which was at most seven or eight hours of exploring the city of Midgar, into a full-blown experience. It was a game of substantive length and depth, and it took me about 80 hours to complete.
It was thrilling to see a section of a game that I knew become something different, weirder, and more engaging. What would Square Enix, the venerated developers behind the Final Fantasy series, do with the larger part of the original game covered in Rebirth?
The answer, it pains me to say, is "way too much." Rebirth wants to be everything under the sun, and it wants to do that a lot, but it ends up trapped in an open-world hell of its own making. I have played 35 hours of Rebirth as I write this, and I am only at the start of chapter nine; there are 14 overall. That is a good pace, if the goal is to get my money's worth in terms of hours played. The quantity of those hours, and the hours yet to come, is not in question here; the issue, and what keeps Rebirth from its potentially towering peaks, is the quality of those hours. Put simply, there is so much bullshit on top of so much other bullshit in this game that it hides and hinders what works best about Rebirth under a pile of directionless extracurriculars.
I must deviate here, briefly, just for a second, to complain about Assassin's Creed. In my mind, no marquee video game franchise has done more harm than Assassin's Creed, thanks to its over-reliance on open world checklist content that's plainly there to pad playtime. In those games, the player can track down towers that then show a myriad of collection activities; it blurs together in a repetitive gameplay loop of "tower, explore, repeat."
"It's all optional," is generally the defense from those who defend the choice to utilize the Assassin's Creed playbook. And, a couple of exceptions notwithstanding, Rebirth does make it clear that all of the open-world content, all of the tower hunting and puzzle solving, is not strictly required in order to complete the main storyline. Does that make it acceptable that Square Enix has hidden some of the best spells in the game, and some of the most fun combat challenges in the history of the series, under a layer of going here, then going there, then going back in the other direction, while hours of your life slip by? I do not think so, but I can see the counter-arguments.
What is less acceptable to me is Rebirth's obsession with mini-games. There are so many mini-games here, and they all stink. (A walkthrough website lists 23 different mini-games, which is just obscene.) Final Fantasy has always had mini-games, and some of them have been great. Others have not, but the mini-games have never been as much of a focus as they are in Rebirth. Some of the games, like an annoying obstacle course in which the player rides a dolphin, or a race on the aforementioned Chocobos that one must win in order to advance the plot, are required. Others hide some juicy rewards to entice players away from the core gameplay.
The story of Rebirth benefits from urgency. To summarize it briefly, the party is chasing after Sephiroth, the biggest of bads, before he does something irrevocable to the planet and its inhabitants. (There's also some corporate intrigue with Shinra, a power company that is so strong that it function as a nation onto itself.) That's a stock fantasy RPG plot, but it's perfectly paced within the story sections, and the player party faces intriguing obstacles and personal character stories on the way to the conclusion.
It's also fundamentally at odds with the out-of-the-story sections, especially in terms of narrative cohesion. If there is such urgency to catch Sephiroth, why in the world are we stopping for hours on end to chase down some towers? (For those who know the original game, I have also not yet gotten to that death, one of the most famous and revered in gaming, because I've been so bogged down with all of this nonsense.) Open-world games, even great ones, generally all have these problems, but that narrative dissonance can be offset by sufficiently intriguing side quests. Take The Witcher 3, one of the best games of the last decade. The main character, Geralt of Rivia, is on the trail of his would-be daughter Ciri, and there's urgency there, but he also is helping the people of the world in what are in turn heartbreaking and thrilling questlines. The two aspects are not remotely at odds.
Rebirth, on the other hand, slows its world-ending stakes seemingly just to throw more mini-games in the player's face. I can only speak for myself here, but I have lost the momentum to keep playing whenever faced with a new region, new towers, and new mini-games. Just last night, I thought I was about to continue into the bulk of chapter nine when one of the side quests introduced yet another mini-game (Cactuar Crush, for those who have reached that point in the game). It's not required for the main plot, but it is required in order to get 100 percent completion. At least that mini-game uses Rebirth's excellent and kinetic combat as the base gameplay; it's one of the better ones just for that reason, even if it is dull in comparison to the big boss fights of the storyline missions.
Remakes are a precarious proposition. Do too much and you risk losing a fanbase. Do too little and fans question if it was even worthwhile. With a game as iconic and beloved as Final Fantasy 7, the risks are gigantic. This new trilogy, based on the PlayStation classic, is proving to be less remake and more a re-imagining of the original, a reinterpretation - a rebirth, if you will. But how do you balance old and new? How far can the boundaries of this story be pushed?
These are the sorts of meta-narrative questions Final Fantasy 7 Remake posed. In that game's brand new finale twist, Cloud and co battled the physical embodiment of fate to break away from destiny and carve a new future. It was seemingly a message from Square Enix: just like Cloud, its developers wouldn't necessarily be sticking to the script. Now in Rebirth, it appears both parties are wrestling with their decisions as the game attempts to answer the ultimate philosophical question: why should it exist?
I've also wrestled with these thoughts. FF7 was the first Final Fantasy I played and remains a favourite. But am I too protective of the original, too invested in my own nostalgia? When changes are made, should I bemoan the difference or relish something new? Over time, I've come to appreciate the developers' desire to not simply repeat the same story and release a near-identical product, but steer it in a new direction - for better or worse.
So while this is still deep down the same Final Fantasy 7 with its science experiments and cover ups and cosmic events and conspiracy theories, it's also a fresh experience - albeit one that's overstuffed in a bid to please. By its close, it buckles somewhat under the weight of the original's legacy as a groundbreaking game with a seminal twist that, in 1997, shocked the world.
Anyway, enough of all that heavy stuff. Let's talk about Chocobo Racing. Upon reaching the kitschy glamour of the Gold Saucer amusement park, this minigame unlocks, though it's more a game-within-a-game. There are tons of tracks to race through. There's boost drifting and special abilities. You can deck out your chocobo in silly cowboy hats and armours to vary their stats. It's like the now defunct Chocobo GP game is stuck inside Rebirth. And it's awe-inspiring how many remixes of the chocobo theme tune there could possibly be. It's too easy to win, but it's a lot of fun.
Forgive me the segue, but that sort of tonal shift is indicative of this toy box of a game that's messy but loveable. It continues the story of protagonist Cloud Strife and members of the eco-terrorism group Avalanche as they chase down the assumed-dead war hero Sephiroth and thwart the omnipresent Shrina Electric Power Company that's sucking the planet dry of its natural resource, Mako energy. As an allegory for fossil fuels and destroying our own planet, the narrative is as prescient as ever. And if all that is lost on you, there's a handy recap video at the start of the game - though honestly, Rebirth is not a starting point for the series, as much as Square Enix may state otherwise.
As part two of the remake trilogy, Rebirth begins soon after the events of Final Fantasy 7 Remake and comprises the majority of the original game's second act, closely following each key story beat or location and expanding into lengthy episodes. So far, so familiar. Progression is linear, but the world is divided into six open areas connected by dungeons and events players can freely explore. So while Rebirth covers a specific section of the original game, there's an almost excessive amount of stuff to do to flesh this out into a complete experience in its own right.
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