There sure were a lot of mini-games in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, huh? By my count, there are 21 different activities you can experience as Cloud and his company venture out from Kalm and across the planet.
Some are fantastic – Queen’s Blood probably rivals Final Fantasy 8’s Triple Triad in terms of being one of the series’ best additions – but some pale in comparison. Glide de Chocobo? 3D Brawler? Cactuar Crush? Crunch-off? It feels like a lot of them were just there as filler, with less thought and polish than the obvious, keystone diversions.
A cursory look online will show you that the proliferation of mini-games split the audience in two; some loved the variety, the challenge, the nonsense of it all, and some hated it. ‘Pfft, it’s just busywork,’ they cry, ‘needless time-wasting’. Well, it turns out Square Enix has been paying attention to all you loud-mouth malcontents, and for Final Fantasy Remake Project, Part 3, the developer is keen to do things slightly differently.
“Just talking about Rebirth, I think I’m very happy with the volume and the balance of mini-games we have in that game,” says Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director, Naoki Hamaguchi, in an exclusive interview with VG247. “And I think we very much achieved what we set out to do with the mini-games, as well. I’ll explain what that was.
“I play a lot of games, a lot of open world games, and something I feel whilst playing a lot of these games is that you’ve got the core mechanics – or their fighting systems – and most of the content you’ll encounter, most of the places you can go, most of what you’ll be doing, can get repetitive. [These games] just use the same mechanics. There are no real changes, there’s nothing new to experience around the different regions of these worlds.”
He’s right. You’ll often see open world titles these days simply have all the various mini-games on offer available to you throughout the world; think of Far Cry, or Assassin’s Creed, or even The Witcher — the various mini-games on offer populate the map, they’re not really ‘locked’ to any one region. The world at large enjoys Gwent, or Orlog, or whatever else; it doesn’t necessarily vary, region-to-region.
But in making Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth feel “like a whole planet” rather than just “one big open area”, the development team made the conscious decision to put different mini-games in different regions. Not everyone, everywhere, enjoys the same thing, right? The downside is that some players thought there was simply too much to do, and a gulf of quality between the best of the best, and the worst of the worst.
“Obviously, there’s a great battle system in Rebirth – and there’s a lot of fun to be had in fighting the various different monsters in each region – but I wanted it to feel like a breath of fresh air when you entered each different region,” continues Hamaguchi. “That you feel like there’s something new and exciting to do when you enter a new area. That you can experience something different with the mechanics. That’s why we wanted to put so many different mini-games in, and I feel we really managed to achieve our goal with that. It’s simply a breath of fresh air in an open world (or ‘open field’, as we call it for Rebirth).”
But he’s aware that doing the same thing again and again isn’t necessarily going to get good results. There’s a law of diminishing returns, after all, and Final Fantasy is – and has always been – known for its desire to innovate and not rest on its laurels.
“So are we going to continue with this same balance going forward? Have we reached perfection? I think if we did just do the same thing again for the third game in the series, then it wouldn’t really be very new or exciting anymore, “ he says. “I want to add a different twist, rearrange things slightly for the next game, and have a slightly different look to things.
“We don’t just want to make more of the same, we want to make new and exciting experiences.”
There is very little information about Part 3 out there at the moment – we don’t even know its name yet – but this is refreshing to hear. It’s clear that Hamaguchi, alongside (assumedly returning) creative director Tetsuya Nomura and producer Yoshinori Kitase, want to keep things fresh for the third game. It needs to be a satisfying climax, after all, and we’re not going to get that simply by retreading old ground, are we?
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is out now on PS5, and looks even better on the PS5 Pro (if you can afford one). Final Fantasy Remake Part 3 has no release date, but we may get it sooner than we thought.