Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (ending spoilers!)

[RedRooster]

I know a good few of us are playing through this game right now, and I wanted to create a thread so we could talk about it, without spoilers being an issue. So I’ve you’ve not finished the game and are still reading this, you have been warned…

My overall assessment of Rebirth is that it’s a very good game that could have been an all-time classic had it not been for mad choices made along the way. Some of the later dungeons were so overly long and tedious that it made me completely ignore the side content. The section where you play as Cait Sith was particularly awful and I’d go as far as to say it’s the most tedious thing I’ve ever played through in a video game.

I also could do without ever hearing the ‘evil laugh’ again in any sort of setting. They really go in hard on that in the second half of the game, if you’re a bad guy, there’s no nuance and you’ll piss yourself laughing at all of your evil antics.

The most controversial bit is going to be, I imagine, how they handle Aeris’s death. They don’t even play the iconic music! But it’s not clear what has happened, outside of it maybe being a multiverse thing, which can just fuck off. If the idea is that Cloud is damaged and is an unreliable (and slightly psychopathic) narrator, and is struggling to cope, I guess I can get on board with that.

Still, the longer I played the game, the more I felt they’d have been better off sticking rigidly to the original story; rather than going off on an alternate path as they did. 

[TildeGuy~!]

Just finished it after 90 hours! 

It’s probably one of my top 10 games of all time(possibly top 5?) 

The longer and deeper I was getting into the story my feelings of how it would end kept changing and Zack and Cloud joining up to fight Sephiroth was a mark out moment although I thought they should have saved that for the third and final game.

The whole date scene played out beautifully with the loveless play(I got Tifa)

I know many didn’t like Queens Blood(I assume because they weren’t good or understood the game) but I loved it as well as collecting all the cards.

The final battle was epic, although annoying as I died a couple of times on the final section which took you all the way back to the first form! 

 

Edited March 12, 2024 by TildeGuy~!

[RedRooster]

21 minutes ago, TildeGuy~! said:

I know many didn’t like Queens Blood(I assume because they weren’t good or understood the game)

I loved it too! I’m sure it exists if I look hard enough, but I’d love an RPG that focuses entirely on this kind of game - maybe something triple triad inspired. I’m not a fan of deck building games, but something like that would definitely interest me. Annoyingly, I completely missed that games take place at the Gold Saucer. I thought the final game was against the Shadow Queen, a match I struggled to win anyway and gave up on.

24 minutes ago, TildeGuy~! said:

The final battle was epic, although annoying as I sided a couple of times on the final section which took you all the way back to the first for

I thought the final form of Sephiroth was really cheap, with that move at the end that one shot kills you. It took me a while to realise that you have to kill him before he uses it, and even then I found it challenging to counter. 

[Dr. Alan Grant]

I’m not going to read the posts here until I’ve finished the game, but I just wanted to say that Cosmo Canyon and the temple underneath is beautiful. I love when the game gives you the chance to control a different character for a bit.

[TildeGuy~!]

Also wanted to comment on Barrett who was my party MVP throughout the game and the evolution of his character and constantly showing emotion and hiding his tears by putting on the sunglasses, I love all these characters so much and seeing them come to life once again left me so emotional in most cut scenes.

[RedRooster]

On 3/12/2024 at 3:11 PM, Dr. Alan Grant said:

I’m not going to read the posts here until I’ve finished the game, but I just wanted to say that Cosmo Canyon and the temple underneath is beautiful. I love when the game gives you the chance to control a different character for a bit.

Looking forward to your thoughts once you finish the whole thing! 

[Dr. Alan Grant]

You may be waiting a while, Rooster. I just started chapter 12, thinking I was maybe off to the Temple Of The Ancients and possibly the end of the game (seems a good place to leave it on a cliffhanger for part 3), but oh no. It’s back to the Saucer, and MORE side quests have opened up all over the map. I’m already 71 hours in. It’ll be 100 by the time I’m done, I’m sure. Curse my need to finish every region before I move on. I’ve been jotting down some thoughts on the game as I go, so prepare yourself for a very unstructured mess of a post. Probably due in 2026. 

[RedRooster]

On 3/15/2024 at 6:57 PM, Dr. Alan Grant said:

You may be waiting a while, Rooster. I just started chapter 12, thinking I was maybe off to the Temple Of The Ancients and possibly the end of the game (seems a good place to leave it on a cliffhanger for part 3), but oh no. It’s back to the Saucer, and MORE side quests have opened up all over the map. I’m already 71 hours in. It’ll be 100 by the time I’m done, I’m sure. Curse my need to finish every region before I move on. I’ve been jotting down some thoughts on the game as I go, so prepare yourself for a very unstructured mess of a post. Probably due in 2026. 

You’re close to the end - at this point, I gave up on the side quests and ploughed on through the story. The main story were so long and tedious that it put me off doing anything that wasn’t Queen’s Blood. I thought the side quests were, on the whole, really good, though.

I hope they remove the needless padding in game 3, whenever they get round to releasing it.

Still, XVI and Rebirth have me fully invested in the Final Fantasy series again. I really enjoyed XV too, for that matter - although the subsequent games were a massive step up for me. 

[Dr. Alan Grant]

Right! Finished! Some 80 something hours later, here are my garbled thoughts.

Having a world map makes such a difference. The linearity of the first part bugged me so much. Narrow corridors aplenty. But now you can explore! You can climb over shit! You can ride various modes of transport! Huzzah. I loved the buggy. I also loved the feeling of arriving at a new location and seeing how it looked in this new expanded remake. Cosmo Canyon and the Temple Of The Ancients was a highlight. I didn’t like Gongaga at all however. I blame the big bouncy mushrooms.

The voice acting was pretty good for the most part. Cloud and Sephiroth were a bit bland. Yuffie and Barrett were the standouts. Superb work. I could listen to Yuffie’s singing all day long.

The side quests. Fuck me. Too many. Way too many. And I didn’t really enjoy them. It was nice to have some character relationship scenes spruced in, but I found the quests themselves a slog. Dragging a bucket to lure some chickens in one of the most interminable moments in gaming history was worth it though, just to have the chickens eaten at the end. 

The beachwear scenes at Costa Del Sol were a tad creepy.

I can’t fault the music. 

Combat is still fun and the synergy skills were a pleasant addition.

With this and part 1, it’s made me realise how many names I’ve been mispronouncing since 1997. Aerith (not Aeris?!), Nanaki, Yuffie, Sephiroth, Mako, Tseng, Gi Nattak. I’ve been a fool.

Protorelic missions. Across the board shit. I thought the cactuar ones would be the worse ones, but oh no, here comes Gears & Gadgets or whatever the hell it was. Dreadful.

Chadley. This motherfucker has more dialogue than any other character in the game. And his voice comes blaring out of my controller every 3 minutes. I hate him. I hope Sephiroth guts him in part 3.

I found the sound mixing a bit off at times, with the music drowning out the dialogue.

Any opportunity to briefly control another character for a section was always fun. Red at Cosmo Canyon in particular. Except Cait Sith as already mentioned. His section was baaaad. Speaking of Mr Sith, boy is he a shit character.

Kid G the Protorelic elf is perhaps the worst example of character design in history. 

I wish they would do something about NPC dialogue. Whenever you’re walking through a populated area and you’re talking to a fellow party member, the NPCs are all chatting away as you go past them. Just a cacophony of noise.

The need to bring back every character from part 1 was strange. Does anyone really want to see Leslie again? Or Kyrie? Or the Angel Of The Slums?

My date was with Tifa. I wanted Aerith. Boooo.

Mini games. So many mini games. Some were fun at first, like Moogle Mischief and 3D Brawler. But I came to hate them all except for playing the piano. Queen’s Blood, Fort Condor and Gears and whateverthefuck are not for me. 

The individual character trials at the temple were emotionally crippling.

Aerith dead again? Come on! I thought we were saving her this time around. I suppose she’s going to be haunting Cloud in the next game. Unless they find a way to bring by her back properly. Please.

There’s a lot of criticism here. Reading it back, it sounds like I didn’t enjoy the game at all. But I did. Walking around with your entire party following you never got old. I took a screenshot when all 9 were together for the first time and it made me really happy. The character interactions were delightful. The main story, whilst confusing at times, was pretty epic. I’m a bit of a completionist so I felt compelled to finish every region before I moved on. But I think this hampered my overall enjoyment. A second playthrough, focusing solely on the story, is the way forward. No distractions, no Chadley and definitely no mini games.

 

 

[TildeGuy~!]

Just bought tickets to Final Fantasy VII Rebirth at Royal Albert Hall in September! 

Went to watch Distant Worlds a couple of years ago and loved it, so looking forward to hearing Rebirth only!

[TildeGuy~!]

Japan had an amazing fireworks display for the release of Rebirth a few weeks ago, played music from Remake and Rebirth throughout.

 

[seph]

Just finished it an hour ago. What an experience... for the most part. To be honest i was way too drained after the final fights (I got massively caught out with the Wings/Core phase as the characters didn't all have elemental spells) to react so much at the twist in the tale... or lack thereof. The ending of Remake lead to the promise of a complete overhaul of the storyline, but I feel they went too far in bringing things back to an interpretation of the original plot as opposed to making an actual divergence.

The worst aspect of this is that with all the time spent on deepening the relationship between Cloud and TIfa, that he doesn't even address her in the ending - while Aerith's death has hit her the hardest out of everyone - is a glaring note. And with the Girl Power being ramped up throughout the remake series, Dead!Aerith completely blanking Tifa as well is a crowning WiTaF moment.

Zack's presence was a bucket of red herrings as well, with the grand reunion (ahem) being a single fight and a 'see ya later folks'; after foreshadowing the parts of him inside Cloud that draw him to Aerith, we had the potential of her sussing out the composite creature that Cloud is especially with the 'i want to see the real you' line being repeated; that nothing happened with that... gaah.

Cid and Vincent being supporting characters... meh I can live with that, but Cid being retconned into taking coin from Shinra when it suits him is a no-no.

Now the positives. The combat being improved over Remake, the open world being a massive breath of fresh air despite the - again, from one extreme in Remake to the other - overabundance of sidequests (most of them really good) & minigames (most of them really dreadful outside the Gold Saucer). As Alan above stated the new expansions of each area are delightful to look at along with the music being tip-top across the board. Nothing's out of place with the locales, they all feel like the liviing and breathing spaces we thought of when we were kids. I would have loved a day/night cycle to show the contrasts in how the environments look... With that said the Flat PNG Midgar images returned and I actually laughed at that considering that exceptions had to be made for the sake of the asset sizes. Perhaps we can keep Part 3 down to under 200GB if they used a black screen with 'It's Midgar just trust us.' 

The characters, bar the above, are a delight as Alan said. Not even Cait wound me up so much as I know that there's plenty of time to emeblish on his origins. Yuffie being even more of a one-track mind than before stands out,

On 3/17/2024 at 9:54 PM, Dr. Alan Grant said:

Chadley. This motherfucker has more dialogue than any other character in the game. And his voice comes blaring out of my controller every 3 minutes. I hate him. I hope Sephiroth guts him in part 3.

I legit had to turn the controller speaker off during one of the monster trails, the worm fight where the binding condition would fail and you had to restart the fight and hear the pre-fight narration in its entirety. WIth that said, I have a theory that, as both Chad and Mai are Hojo products to begin with, 

Spoiler

Instead of them both rebelling against Hojo just for his own sake they are complete aspects of Sephiroth himself, with the notion that he wants Cloud at his strongest when they finally meet. It would certainly explain how he's been alongside Cloud the entire time right under his nose.

I think I'll rest this a bit before going back to the world - probably won't be touching Hard Mode as I was reliant on res'ing items during the last stages of the game, and I'll need to pick up an M2 drive before restarting, getting tired of shufffling games around.

Edited May 25, 2024 by seph

[The Gaffer]

Finally getting around to this as it's sort of one of the few big releases of a mostly lapsed gamer. 

I'm about 15 hours in and just got on the ship to Costa del Sol. To be honest, I'm finding it quite jarring and disjointed so far, but I know there's a long way to go and I really want to get sucked into the ride so I'm going to plow ahead because it's at this point in the original the whole town to town, road trip style flow to the open world really popped and became so memorable for me. 

Remake impressed me way more than I ever could have dreamed. Though it had some padding out sections and additions that either didn't leave an impression or were just outright the worst parts of the game by default, I thought they were few and far between enough that it wasn't an issue. Similarly, anything they added to the story almost seemed to be - by default - bottom of the pile stuff, but it only really started get proper, proper crazy right at the end so it wasn't a problem. Remake's main impression for me, then, was that it was the original as you loved it, but really, really zoomed in. Tonnes of detail and expansion to areas but they still basically felt the same, even down to using the exact same little codas and hints in the score even for some of the more generic stuff like the Sector 5 slums walkabout music. 

Rebirth's different from the off though. The story beats are evidently a lot more altered, but mostly for me it's the flipping between open world sections and the story driven sections that I'm finding off-putting. I much preferred Remake's semi open-world design where the slums functioned as a sort of big escape room, Resident Evil style, where it was mostly corridors but you'd gradually click open more routes, items etc. 

All the open world stuff in Rebirth feels really watered down, though. And I know a lot of it's optional - and I'm not 100%ing it - but invariably I'm compelled to do some of it to take in the experience, make sure I'm not missing out on anything and level up a bit. I kind of dread them, though. It's slogging for a few hours, frantically pressing triangle to skip pass the game's main character - Chadley - and eventually just relishing getting back on track with the actual story. 

Basically, it feels like a whole new game for a whole new era and inside that game, there's a decent approximation of Disc 1 of Final Fantasy VII. 

I'm hoping it improves though as the sections I've played so far in the original game are really the story at a quiet point as well. I'm also curious as to how they'll pull off part 3 (Reunion? Reloaded? Revolutions?) though I imagine it'll have some of the biggest changes/add-ons yet since post City of the Ancients you've essentially seen most of the map anyway in the original!