Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is both the best and worst game of the year

A reader isn’t sure what to make of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, which he enjoys for the core experience and gameplay but hates for the bloat.

I find myself in two minds about Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. It’s at once one of the best games I’ve played in years, but also perhaps the least satisfying experience overall. There is a whole lot I like about Rebirth: the characters, the way the story has been fleshed out, the side quests are markedly better than Intergrade, and that combat is just so sweet. But it’s not all Moogles and Chocobos.

It’s a really big game and one thing I was really bummed about, when I got out of Kalm, was that they went full-on open world, with everything that entails. Find the high point, then chase the map markers. It’s like literally every open world game made before it. It’s unnecessary fluff, and horribly repetitive. By the time I finished up in the Grasslands, I was already over that. And when I set foot in Junon, surprise, you have to do it all again.

There’s adding to the story and then there’s padding and fluff. Rebirth leans heavily on the latter. There’s so much unnecessary fluff that it actually negatively impacts the game flow and pacing severely. But that’s not all. By the time you get to the third region, you’ll probably have mini-game fatigue. Rebirth has included a nauseating amount of mini-games to further distract you from what is otherwise a fantastic game. Many are optional… many are not. Some are intensely frustrating.

Some of the mini-games are tied to the main quest – you’ll have to pass them if you want to proceed – and some are the focus of a side quest, and often very frustrating to boot. So even if you want to skip the optional mini-games, there are still quite a lot of these distractions you’ll have to choke down; often with frustrating controls or lacking proper instruction.

And the sheer number of combat simulators/arenas is just overwhelming. Man, if I didn’t do them on the way, there’s no way I would have bothered getting through them. There’s literally dozens just for Chadley, but then you’ll also have several arenas throughout the game. It gets old. And yeah, I know the OG had a lot of mini-games, but that wasn’t one of its endearing features.

This was a chance to improve but, instead, they weighed it down even more. After about 130 hours I’ve reached the end of my first playthrough. And normally I’d be ecstatic with that kind of play time. But 80+ hours of that was chasing down side content that adds nothing to the narrative and, arguably, actually takes away from the core experience. I would estimate that at least 40 hours was dedicated to mini-games alone, and that’s more playtime than the entire original game.

And, yeah, I guess a lot of these are optional, but if you plan to attempt the New Game+ hard mode, the rewards acquired from most of these activities are practically essential. Ideally, I would have liked less to explore and more narrative focus. I gravitate towards Japanese role-playing games generally, because they shy away from open worlds and offer a more focused story flow. If I want to chase map markers, there’s Ubisoft for that.

They could have scrapped the Chadley intel gameplay loop and made more side quests to flesh out the play time. It would have been less repetitive. Frankly, Chadley’s intel system is a massive drag, especially in later maps when traversing the region itself becomes incredibly frustrating. It kind of feels like they threw everything at this game without much thought as to how it all fits together.

What we ended up with is a fantastic core experience that’s so ridiculously bloated that it almost becomes a chore to play. So as much as I’m enjoying the game overall, the open world elements and the avalanche of mini-games really pull the experience down.

By reader Brian

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