Four years ago, deep in the despair of a global pandemic, I wrote:

This section of the original was some of the weakest source material they had to pull from, and they turned it into a jawdropping fantastic game. I want them to do that to the actual good part of the game, and get the same or at least similar returns. But I just don’t know how they’ll do it.

We now have our answer: mini-games. Mini-games as far as the eye can see. Really bad mini-games of every size and shape and genre.

Structurally Rebirth is exactly what I expected, it opens with Cloud’s retelling of The Nibelheim Incident, and ends at the end of Disc 1. It sticks pretty close to the original, only really dropping Rocket Town and Wutai in favor of an expanded (and now mandatory) segment in Gongaga. The pacing of these segments is Fine, the environments are far more varied than Remake because it all takes place outside of Midgar.

The big shift, though, is that this is a segmented open-world game. You’ve got 5 major regions, and each region has it’s main plot segment, but you can absolutely ignore it and go do whatever you want. As is required by an open world game there are numerous towers to climb that unlock other activities like Enemy Intel (which lead to Enemy Skill Materia skills), Lifesprings (which dump materials on you), Summon Intel (which decrease the difficulty of the region’s summon fight), Protorelics (Mini-game Hell), and Moogle Intel. Each region also has its own Chocobo breed, which has its own mini-game to unlock, and provides you with special traversal options. None of these are incredibly stand-out experiences, or particularly long, they’re just . . . there. You do them because doing them gives you currency to get otherwise unique materia.

Protorelics are the most stand-out of these activities, but not because they’re good just because they’re different. They’re tied to unlocking the Gilgamesh summon, and each region has its own mini-game to make progress, all of them really bad. The Grassland region is just a series of fights, Junon is Fort Condor remade as a lane-based auto-battler, Corel is a series of weird cactuar fights, Gongaga is just more fights, Cosmo Canyon is another autobattler (but now with Gambits!), and worst of all, Nibel is just push dudes. You seriously just push Black Robes like 100 meters across the map as they slowly amble towards a fight. That’s it. Frustratingly, your reward for all that garbage is the opportunity right before the Point of No Return to do ludicrously difficult re-fights of all the new summons. Some of the summon fights – especially Odin – are reasonably difficult, and they expect you at the endgame to do two at a time. This is the point that I tapped out, because even though I was over-leveled for basically all other content, most recommendations are that I should grind out another 20 levels before attempting this content, and nah, I have better things to do with my time.

The other mini-games are all largely forgettable. Even Chocobo Racing which was transformed from “hold a few buttons on your genetic freak of a chocobo you spent hours assembling in a mad-science lab” to a comprehensive stat-driven Mario Kart Clone still falls short of being “actually good”. The mini-games are all so frustrating because you can tell someone obviously spent a lot of time building this with care, building out endless completely bespoke mechanics and systems and control schemes and design elements and art assets and the result is just not good. It often feels like the design guidelines must have explicitly asked for every game to have completely distinct control schemes, because how else do you end up with control stick piano or touchpad crate chucking.

You can do a game that mixes a serious plot and combat with an endless array of mini-games, RGG has successfully done it like 20 times with Yakuza, et. al., but the mini-games have to be good.

After the quality of the mini-games, my second biggest gripe with the game is forced character selection. During the game’s linear plot segments, once you get outside of Kalm, they almost always force your party selection. FF7 has an expansive cast and this stretch of Disc 1 is where you rapidly ramp up from 5 to 9 to 8, and originally you could roll with whatever party you wanted for the duration. You can still do that in Rebirth when you’re messing around doing open world stuff, but when it comes time to actually progress the plot, nope, sorry, you’re stuck just using Cloud, Aerith, and Red right now. You’ve been focusing on Tifa? Tough. The whole Cosmo Canyon section? Sorry, figure out how to use Red & Barret effectively. Gongaga? It forces you to start playing as the boys, then forces you to run though the whole section again as the girls.

That’s fine, but every time this forced switch happens you have to swap all your materia and possibly your accessories around, which sucks. You’re encouraged to keep all materia slots filled at all times because all equipped materia gains AP regardless of party, so with all these swaps you’re CONSTANTLY switching materia around and making sure everything’s filled and making sure your active characters have some kind of coherent materia build. It’s very easy to screw up and then you’re stuck in a boss fight and one of your characters is completely useless because they’re configured as an HP-Up Mule.

The absolute worst of these segments is Mt. Nibel / Shinra Mansion, a lengthy segment where you start locked as Cloud / Tifa / Yuffie, then it swaps to Cait / Barret / Aerith for a segment that features the most unnecessary and worst-designed “mini-game” where you have to slowly trundle around as the Fat Moogle and throw crates at things WITH THE TOUCHPAD. THEN it shoves you into a section where it’s JUST Cait. INCLUDING A BOSS FIGHT. AS SOLO CAIT. And when you finally think it’s all over, and the party is all finally back together, it IMMEDIATELY says “Now it’s time to play with Cloud, Cait, and ✨ A Character of Your Choosing ✨”. Surely it’s done, but no, after one more boss fight it gives you your party back again and then takes it all away ONE LAST TIME for a Solo-Cloud boss fight. I’d say I spent more time in this chapter fiddling with my inventory than I did actually playing but that would be a lie because the crate throwing was incredibly time-consuming trash.

As an aside, in my previous review, I also prophetically worried that anything involving save game transfer was going to be an absolute mess. Lets talk about what it took to get all my bonuses. I did not play Intergrade or the PS5 port of Remake when they were released, but I bought the SKU of Rebirth that included both of those for free, so I would be entitled to all categories of bonuses:

  • Demo Cleared Save Game
  • Remake Save Game
  • Intergrade Save Game

So I just needed to install them and have my save games pulled down! And maybe make a save for Intergrade! No. For my Remake save game to have been transferred I would have had to have done some kind of unholy ceremony to explicitly upload my save from the PS4 for it to be retrievable on PS5. Could I download the PS4 version on my PS5 and have that find my save game? Of course not, because PS4 saves are apparently not cloud-enabled by default. I ended up having to start two new saves and import those. And could Wife use the same save games? Of course not.

It’s ludicrous how Sony has yet again bungled a generation transition. Over in the Microsoft Ecosystem I happily still have both an Xbox One X in service alongside my Series X, and if I download a game it just figures out what version to get. If there are versions for each console, I can still share my save game between them and it automatically syncs remotely. How is Microsoft the only Console company who has figured this out by now?

I also was worried about how pick-up progression was going to be handled, and huge surprise, it basically wasn’t. And you don’t just have your skills reset, the entire weapon-based skill unlock procedure was ripped and replaced by a weird “folio” system that’s a tiered skill tree. It’s simultaneously per-character and shared, because the specific choices are per-character, but everybody gains skill points at basically the same rate and the tier is tied to a “team level”… but don’t think they removed individual character levels, that’s still there, but I have no idea why. It’s like they wanted to streamline these archaic progression systems, but didn’t have the guts to actually remove things like “levels”. Like there’s a whole “Weapon Upgrade” menu item on the main menu, and it’s got all these options for weapon config and stuff, but all it really does is change what weapon abilities get equipped.

I don’t want this to come off like I outright hated the game, or even hated all the mini-games. Queen’s Blood was the best card game Square has made since Tetra Master. It’s got a perfect amount of depth, it’s quick, and it’s presented in a thoroughly goofy way throughout the game. I also liked the shooting gallery. It has tonberries with pirate hats. Some of the side quests were great too, and the soundtrack goes unnecessarily hard in areas where it absolutely does not need to. Every mini-game has its own custom theme music, some side-quests have their own custom theme music, and there’s at least 10 distinct Chocobo themes with one per breed and a bunch of extras thrown in for Chocobo Racing.

I spent 80 hours with this game, roughly what I did with Remake. There were bits of Remake I didn’t like, or found cumbersome, but they were few and far between, and everything about presentation was spectacular. The proportions feel flipped in Rebirth. It was full of play sessions where like five hours of my life evaporated and it felt like I made zero meaningful progress. It also doesn’t get credit for being an insanely pretty representation of Final Fantasy 7, because it’s no longer new.

I expect the finale is going to directly follow the model established here, which makes me slightly sad. But I’ll still buy it, because now I’m in too deep. I’m still recommending it, because it’s not a bad game. It’s also definitely still for me, I’m just burned out by open world games. So it gets an asterisk.