One of the big moments of the original Final Fantasy VII, especially for those who were relatively new to the RPG genre, was when the party finally left Midgar. Up until that point, Midgar seemed big enough for the whole game to be set in. It was the entire world, as far as the player knew. Then you step out onto the world map for the first time and see just how small Midgar really is. Just one big little city on the map. The possibilities this suggested were remarkable, even if to some extent they were illusory. No other location in the world of Gaia was anywhere near as large or fleshed out as Midgar. But for a moment, you couldn’t help but wonder.
Trying to recapture this moment in the Remake Trilogy was likely a daunting task. Its Midgar is so much bigger, so much more alive than the one seen in the original. How can the player be made to feel that the rest of the planet is so much larger? What would need to be done to deliver that same sense of scale? That’s just the first hurdle that Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has to clear, and the way it does so is perhaps unfortunately predictable. If you guessed “extremely large open world with Ubisoft-style towers to climb, tons of side activities that vary wildly in quality, and too few genuine points of interest”, you win the No-Prize. Well, it’s not something that can’t work if it’s done well. I’m not sure it has been done well here, but I’ve seen it done worse.
The next big problem that Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has to deal with is being the middle chapter in a trilogy. You don’t get that exciting feeling of starting a new adventure here, and don’t even think of starting with this one. There’s a video that will summarize what happened in Final Fantasy VII Remake, but this is very much a game designed to be played by people who have at minimum finished that game. Truth be told, you should probably have finished most of the Final Fantasy VII-related media to get the most out of it, as it’s not afraid to hinge plot elements on and call back to even long-dead mobile games. Things get a little messy here in terms of balancing the faithful and the new, and while the train hasn’t fully derailed, I think it’s wobbling more than a little. That’s a problem for the third and final game to resolve, though.
That’s the other thing with being a middle chapter. You’re not only starting in the middle of the story, but you’re also ending in the middle of the story. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth doesn’t have a lot of big plot moments to itself, though it does get to cover one of the biggest ones. The way it does so is… interesting, I suppose. But things are very much still up in the air as the game ends, and I’d imagine most players will be more confused at that point than they were at the start. A lot of what was only hinted at in Remake is given a chance to more fully make itself present here, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. I’ll say this much: the third and final part of the Remake Trilogy has so much theoretical ground left to cover that I imagine it’s going to go a different way altogether.
Since it doesn’t have as many big plot moments to cook with as the first part and likely the conclusion, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth instead focuses on building up the characters and their relationships. This is probably the thing it does best in terms of its narrative. Sure, I think most of these characters have drifted pretty far away from their original forms over the last thirty years, but they’re well-realized, and all of the time we get with them in the course of this game helps us get to know these versions of them that much better. I’m still not sure the considerably larger scope of these Remake games was for the best, but it at least affords more time for characters and settings to breathe. Final Fantasy VII as a whole is nothing if not rich in drama, and Rebirth makes some hay with that.
As far as the gameplay goes, Final Fantasy Rebirth certainly builds on what we saw in Remake. The combat system adds in some parry-style counters to the already fairly robust mechanics seen in Intergrade. If you’ve got good timing, you can get your Limit Break meter filled that much quicker. If you don’t? You’ll survive. At least as far as the main story goes, it’s not going to kick you around too much. There are some optional fights where you’ll need to have mastered the battle system as best you can if you want to win. Sure, it’s all a bit mashy in most encounters, but there are plenty of opportunities for those who want to wrap things up quicker by using all their strategic options. Doesn’t hurt that the choreography of the fights looks really nice in action, especially when you start popping off synergy moves.
Exploration hasn’t changed too much from the previous game, but you’ll be doing a lot more of it due to the open nature of the world. You can get around faster by riding a chocobo, and we never hate riding chocobos. As you navigate the world, you’re going to stumble on a lot of mini-games. Too many for my liking, really. Some of them are quite fun, some are very annoying, and some are just boring. You don’t have to do all of them, but more of them are mandatory than I’d ideally prefer. Frankly, I sometimes felt like I was spending more time doing weird mini-games than anything else.
It’s a shame, too. I’ll admit that as someone who was dazzled by Final Fantasy VII back in 1997, seeing the world at this level of detail and in this scale was sometimes overwhelming. In a good way, mind. At times, Square Enix really does an excellent job of expanding what was a slightly abstract version of a world into something bigger and more detailed. It’s a nice place to just chill in and gawk at if you’ve got the right memories for it to hit properly. But those mini-games, along with some inserted characters that help bring them into the picture, sometimes feel like a constant gong show, distracting you from the quiet appreciation of those spaces.
As a game, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is still a fine enough action-RPG romp. It doesn’t drop the ball it was handed, but it doesn’t exactly pick up the pace with it either. There are a lot of things I think it could do better, and I liked it less than Final Fantasy Remake on the whole. A lot of that comes down to the open world being half-baked and uninspired, but I also think the game goes a little bit too far down the lore rabbit hole for its own good in its final hours. I suppose I won’t be able to fully judge the story of Rebirth until I play through the third game, but if we’re looking at it as its own thing, it suffers from many of the issues middle chapters of trilogies tend to. Some great moments, but without any proper beginning or ending, a story can only be so good.
There is one more thing to talk about, and that’s how the game performs on the Switch 2. Final Fantasy VII Remake came out fairly well, but that was also originally a PlayStation 4 game. Rebirth was built for more powerful hardware, and that certainly shows here. Dramatically, in fact. The game has an overall blurry look, sometimes surprisingly so, and the pop-in can be really bad at times. Like, sometimes you have a few seconds to wait for characters to spawn in. Load times can be quite lengthy, too, and at least once, I thought the game had locked up when it was just loading with a blank screen. The framerate is fine enough that it didn’t distract me, at least. The graphical sacrifices in this version are extremely obvious, even to the point of prebaked cutscenes cutting to real-time versions that are missing tons of details.
This is all more apparent if you’ve played Rebirth elsewhere before, but even compared to other challenging ports to the Switch 2, I think this comes up shorter than I expected it to. It’s not a terrible-looking game, or at least I didn’t think so, but those who are looking to play in handheld mode in particular should be ready for a game that only occasionally looks as cool as you might hope. It often looks worse than Remake, as it tries to do more and falls short. Still, as portable Rebirth options go, I suppose this will have to do. Those who have other options to play on their TV should investigate them, however. Fortunately, the game still sounds great. The music is especially fantastic. That’s what you want to hear in a Final Fantasy game.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth tries to do more than its predecessor in many ways, and it has the scraped knees to show for it. When it hits, it hits, but when it stumbles, it kicks up a real dust cloud. The story is engaging enough, but to its detriment, it’s caught between trying to pay homage to the original game and doing its own thing. It’s also a middle chapter, one where we don’t really know how things are going to wrap up. This Switch 2 port gets the job done, but you’ll never find yourself wondering how they managed to do it. No, it’s abundantly clear what had to be given up to squeeze this onto the console. Rebirth on the Switch 2 is big, messy, full of heart, and often unsure of itself. It’s enough. I just wish it were more than that.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch 2
Review Copy Provided by Square Enix
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