Final Fantasy VII Rebirth review

This game was interesting. People are all over the place with their opinions on it. I liked the combat here more than I did in Lightning Returns as an example. However, surprisingly enough the game doesn't offer much combat experience. It's a lot of talking to people and playing minigames. I don't know why, but I suspect that most people that dislike the game are actually disliking it because there are not enough battles. Maybe they don't want to admit that they didn't get good quickly or something.

It took me 580 hours to complete all the regular combat challenges(as well as do everything else like play minigames and talking to characters, etc) including the hardest no checkpoint Chadley challenges. I also did that at party level 9, which means my characters were not as strong as they could possibly be. Why would I do it that way? Well, because I tried to master the minigames, but I was unable to. And those were keeping my battle progression under lock and key.

As with Remake, it follows the philosophy of requiring proficiency at a minigame to determine if you're worthy of unlocking stuff. Which is fine. Some people would like you to believe that they take it too far. But really, it's your choice to get good at one thing or another. And you can always quit if the difficulty feels beyond you. Sometimes I think players just do not want to blame themselves for being bad at video games. It was my fault that it took me 100 hours to complete the Cloud and Zack challenge. And I'm okay with that.

Not everyone can admit when they are miserable failures, and when a game exposes them to that reality, they react poorly and project their own failures onto the game developers. I'm 40 years old now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the battle system was bad. It's fine, it's better than what we got in the first game. I can only hope they improve upon it in the third game. I used Nanaki, Euphie, and Barret in both of the hardest brutal challenges to succeed, and even I think that perhaps in the third game, Red will gain access to aerial combat shortcuts, in other words, they are going to improve a character that I liked using is my current assumption. Aerith felt better to use in this game than she did previously, so I have no reason to assume they won't give Red(Nanaki) similar treatment here.

I'm not going to attach numbered ratings to or exhaustively discuss the various minigames here but I will say that the Fort Condor game and Queen's Blood were favorites of mine while Kid G's cactuars and Piano were my least favorites. I also hated the 3D brawler game but I think that has more to do with me feeling like they rushed it out rather than the overall concept being bad. I have a similar feeling towards the robots vs slimes strategy game but I still liked it more in general than the brawler game from the Gold Saucer.

There were a lot of moments where they messed things up with exploration, story, and progression, but for the most part, they did a pretty good job. I won't go into details about any of that stuff in particular, but trust me that I predict there are some moments where you will be incredibly annoyed or confused. But, the game is a grand scale game. So the amount of frustration or whatever negative emotion you may be feeling will be negligible comparatively... look at it this way. If a game is 10 hours long vs a 100 hours long game, how annoyed would you be if 4 hours in each game was just annoying fluff content that you have a really hard time appreciating? This is a difference between 4 percent bad content and 40 percent bad content. This game has a lot to like about it and while there are so many things to complain about, there are plenty of things to be pleased about as well.

I am not appreciative of them preferring to showcase foul language rather than violence, and for that plus many of the songs being horrifying to listen to, this game is suffering when it comes to the art category. I know the foul language thing is not stopping but there is a little hope yet for Cid because even though he may have a darker side to him, there hasn't been any indication that he talks 'like Barret does' even though that was essentially one of his dialogue gimmicks in the OG. So there's that to look forward to and speculate about in any case. And even if I'm skeptical about them improving upon the music massively in part 3, as long as they give us those volume bars from this game, then it should be fine I suppose, I can just turn it down or mute it completely.

One thing I really like about this game on Playstation 5 is that I can play it in Japanese! Very interesting to experience. One thing I'd like to say though, is I would love to be able to mix and match the various language options. Like imagine being able to for example make a character's voice lines in a certain language(Barret because he probably curses less is a great example), and then keep Cait Sith or Cid(voice changes drastically)'s usual voice instead of swapping over to the alternate language. But I can understand if that's too complicated to program, I'm just glad we have the option to switch back and forth pretty quickly(closing the game and reloading the save after changing the setting will set it up).

I know in Tekken, they had characters each speaking their own languages as if they understood the foreign languages but just didn't speak them, or there were invisible NPC interpreters helping them out with time skips and what I'm proposing might sound a little bit like that during battle, but anyway it's not a big deal for me if they don't make it happen. They have a huge amount of stuff they are expected to deliver that this is one of the least of my concerns. Mentioning that, I've thought about making a list of things I expect them to deliver in part 3 but I'm not sure if it's worth bothering to do.

One thing I definitely want to see though is some sort of Combat Simulator Checkpoint. Please Chadley, stop doing us dirty like this. It's fine if you want us to keep the same build for an entire run, but what's the point of making us start all over from the beginning if we then have to leave the simulator just to change our materia and equipment, etc? You're just coming up with additional ways to make us lose time. At least they made the Chadley dialogue after leaving the simulator skippable with a patch update...

Exploration: 4/5
Story: 4/5
Progression: 4/5
Art: 3/5
Battle: 5/5