This review contains some story spoilers for the original FF7 and subsequently some elements of Rebirth, but doesn’t spoil how Rebirth ultimately reinterprets these elements.
I argued with myself for several weeks in university about whether to go to a seminar discussing T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock. The poem meant enough to me that I didn’t want to dissect it with a class. I wanted to keep for myself. I went in the end, and though I hesitated, I talked because I had things to say. It didn’t kill the poem for me, but it does have a slightly awkward gait now, having never quite recovered from the incisions.
I now have to etherise Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Cait Sith is splayed upon a table. It’s all scalpels, forceps, and oversized novelty dice. It’s a strange way to treat art you love. The feeling I remember most from Rebirth on release is how grateful I felt to be alive to play it. Acute, active awareness of my own mortality with thoughts like “it would be properly shit if I died right now because I’d really like to see how this pans out”. A personal ‘never kill yourself‘ moment months before the meme gave voice, as the best often do, to an obscure and precious feeling.
An RPG where your character sometimes knocks on doors before opening them? What a time to be alive.
Also nice: a huge world split into story-heavy towns and explorable open zones where you play as a group of plucky friends brought together in a fight against a world threatening megacorp through the medium of hybrid real-time turn-based combat. I called it “one of the most lavish and charming RPGs I’ve ever played” in our annual roundups. I’m still confident that’s the feeling most people are going to walk away from their first playthrough with. Like Remake before it, Rebirth captures so much that is wonderful and specific and anomalous about its impossible source material. The how-will-theys and how-can-theys answered with shimmering, stagy confidence and surprise wit. Cloud’s perfume and dress!
But I digress: Rebirth shines beyond the callbacks. Final Fantasy’s best card game and best combat? In this Kupoconomy? Builds are planned and team-plays executed in flurries of giddy spectacle. Moments are brought in line with memory, decades of building adoration and mythmaking accounted for. The gang’s all here, and they are all fiercely lovable and massive dorks.
Playing Rebirth again has been a more muted experience, and I can hear the elevated pulses of those who made it beating through more clearly. Excited. Reverent. Overeager. Pulled akimbo by priorities not so much split as omnislashed: the expectations of the market. The tyrant spectres of legacy (made text in Remake and backgrounded here, left to linger mainly around Aerith’s fate). The sheer brass saucers required to follow the artist’s instinct to leave their own mark on a work so vaunted that every diversion runs risk of derailment. Unbelievably talented. Unbelievably outmatched. Unbelievably brave about it. Star-struck by fictional characters and leitmotifs. Toiling in awe. In short, afraid.
Eyes up, SOLDIER. There are men in black robes to track across huge regions filled with promise and prehistory and pinnable activity icons. Enter teenage android side character Chadley, a grotesque Satnav of a pimple of a productivity app, a creature spawned from fear of Not Enough Game, to squeeze the universe into a ball and wrap checklists around it. All exploration is fed back through him. He gilds every crested hill or vista with a completion percentage reward and sucks the land dry of mystery, little stripmining enthusiast that he is. You can take the boy out of the Shinra building I suppose. What fuels the towers I have to climb to reveal more icons, Chadley? (I’m grasping him by the collar. Barret is poking him in the ribs with a gun the size of a country) It’s Mako, isn’t it Chadley? You little mole rat shrew gopher android fuck. You will hit the Gold Saucer mini-game stuffed amusement park after either fifteen hours or several dozen depending on how much you let him boss you about, and it’ll click: Chadley must have loved this place so dearly he decided to terraform the planet in its image.
(Avoid all of Rebirth’s green marked sidequests until you absolutely feel like it. Do the open world activities that look interesting to you but don’t feel compelled to clean up. Get your chocobos. Definitely do the protorelic quest. Absolutely play Queen’s Blood. Otherwise, just follow the story. You can come back and do everything else later. Do not let this little bastard run the show and kill the pacing.)
But theme parks suggest safety. A simulation of danger. And that would be true if it wasn’t for Aerith, whose fate remains uncertain thanks the multiverse ideas introduced in Remake. And so the Masamune of Damocles hangs over the entire journey from Kalm (with its intricate clockwork skyline seemingly a response to Elevatorgate) to the Temple Of The Ancients (with its single, unbelievably dull puzzle type an example of that elevator’s same flattening homogeneity). Then, to the City Of The Ancients for a denouement so emotionally satisfying and chronologically obtuse I’m still reeling from it.
In between, everything. A hundred visions and revisions. Sidequests that all feel like slightly different flavours of that one goat hunt from The Witcher 3. Moogle wranglin’. Stray NPCs to play at cards with personality quirks that feel as deliberately weird as the most accidentally weird parts from the original. The yellow paint that rubs its nose upon the cliff edges. More Moogle wranglin’. Barret’s concern for the planet expressed through sections in which he mostly blasts the shit out of beautiful and impossibly ancient crystal formations. On Junon’s wharf, an old man sits and tells tales of a republic fallen to Shinra’s greed as gathered children sit enraptured. Down some stairs, there’s a minigame that casts toad on your whole party and makes you play Fall Guys.
Nibelheim’s fossilised tiger-teeth mountains. Nibelheim’s potato tuber mako springs. Nibelheim’s unbelievably boring background NPCs. Were they real, they’d have run Tifa’s martial arts trainer Zangan out of town because the way he moves like he did in ’97 unnerves them, a man fallen through time to make everyone around him look like a remarkably polite and reserved plank of balsa wood in casual wear by comparison. What a &^#$# pizza-fried conundrum: how to deliver the expected perfection of a mid 2020’s giga-budget with source material from which every janky, characterful oddity has settled long enough in memory to become iconic? Junon is so charming and so lively but all the rusty, dusky, proto-fascist foreboding of the original is gone. I feel like a culture blogger and a conservative grandad occupying the same body and looking at a street mural, alternately shouting “art! Art!” and “vandalism! Vandalism!”.
Moments that are pitch perfect Final Fantasy 7. An orb of materia falling from the blades of a repaired windmill. M.C. Escher-esque tangles of switches and ladders. Screw it, some Final Fantasy 8 and 9, too. Chocobo-pecking treasure hunts. Monster hunts that offer up secret region bosses. Queen’s Blood, a card game with such powerful draw and aura that it not only has its own sidestory about how dangerously compelling it is, but leaks into the main story as well. Moments that are better than the original; foregrounded and fairgrounded fan favourites. The Junon Parade. The Gold Saucer play. Moments that are Rebirth’s alone, but just feel right. A showdown at Gongaga. A far more intriguing role for the Weapon creatures. Everything Barret or Yuffie says or does.
Feeling cosy next to an ecologically disastrous pipeline under an infinite sky. I want to listen to Barret complain about Shinra not because I need another reason to dislike Shinra, but because I know Barret’s happy when he’s complaining about Shinra. Feeling forlorn and hopeless beside a motorcycle minigame near a stand selling tonberry ice cream. Rare unmarked paths that lead to an overwhelming question: Not “will it end?”, but whether you’d let yourself enjoy what little time you have together, if you knew that it had to. And would it have been worth it, after all?
Like Remake, Rebirth can’t do horror. The same dab hand that replaced the Shinra Tower blood trail with a spilled Grimace shake returns to turn Shinra Mansion’s desolate melancholy into a series of DualShock gyro box-chucking minigames. You start losing faith in the whole project until Vincent turns up, all black-pilled mall goth, and he’s everything you could have asked for and more. Cid’s here too, although neither are playable, which is totally fair when you realise the absurd amount of work that went into every single character’s combat presence. This is the best Final Fantasy combat. It is. It’s the best.
It’s the best because in the time it takes for Barret to toss Tifa whirling into the sky to knuckle baguette a spindly drake into a thousand pieces, before falling to earth to brush the fragments from her skirt, you’ve already whizzed around the whole party building up ATB gauges with dodges and parries and slashes and planned out which abilities to spend them on. Many games are equally breathless but lack Rebirth’s sheer lung capacity in the getting there. Rebirth is big lung breathless. Bottomless, even. A linked materia slot housing glinting strategy and shining spectacle, each single minute brimming with decisions and revisions. It’s the best because it’s a joyous covenant between Final Fantasy’s past and future, bringing all that nostalgia up to speed with the perhaps destructive ambition that these games always be more than. Christmas morning captured in a ward that turns Aerith’s plinky staff sprites into a quad-barreled laser cannon.
Chiefly, it’s the best because it doesn’t lose the essence of back-and-forth decision duels or Final Fantasy 7’s sheer breadth of silly or niche approaches. In a game where most non-combat sections have some sort of novel twist or their own minigame baked in, combat remains the glue that holds it all together. You’re always building on it, always excited to get a new weapon or piece of materia all the way through to NG+ where it truly comes alive, passing the stress test of harder difficulty with aplomb.
Right, so: there’s a sidequest quite early where you have to escort a dog carrying some money to the mayor of Junon’s son. He wants to start a new life and his mum wants to help him out. You have to protect the dog, who has more HP than Barret for some reason, from periodic monster attacks. A song plays which I assume was not a contributor to the Best Score Game Award: a chirpy, sugary Soundcloud beat with lyrics about Stamp, the Shinra mascot dog. It’s all very cute, but in a “what the hell even is Final Fantasy anymore, man?” way. It feels thin. Brainstormed under duress. Tonally jarring for a project based on a game where you pop balloons on a snowboard moments after a tragic bereavement.
But then, Barret talks about his adopted daughter Marlene the whole time and it’s just touching as all hell. Classic Barret. So, sure: some of Rebirth is dull. Much of it is tedious. Some of it is disappointing. A lot of it is Chadley. All of it did not run in ultrawide for me. I wanted to see Barret’s sailor suit in ultrawide, Rebirth. But every time I want to get mired in complaint and confusion that one of my favourite parts from a game made of favourite parts is all wrong, actually, something else happens that makes me grin a waxing crescent, woken by the voices of the humans that made this thing speaking loud and excited through an impossible work. Final Fantasy Rebirth is imperfect, incautious, uneven, and gloriously, fearlessly unfocused. Final Fantasy Rebirth is unmissable.
This review is based on a review code provided by the publisher.