I Just Can't Seem to Gel with "Final Fantasy VII Rebirth"

    

    This blog contains heavy spoilers for Remake, Rebirth, and the original Final Fantasy VII. You have been warned.

    I actually really wanted to like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. No, really, I did. I did not particularly enjoy its predecessor, Final Fantasy VII Remake. And that was for many reasons. Sure, part of that was because I didn't think it was ever really necessary to remake Final Fantasy VII. Before the first installment in the remake project, all I'd ever really wanted was a retranslation of the original game. I'd felt like, with every time Square Enix re-released the 1997 original title on a newer platform, they missed the opportunity to clean up the original translation, which had been riddled with spelling errors, grammatical errors, and in some cases downright mistranslations entirely. For that reason, I've always been grateful to fans from years ago who had created a retranslation patch for the game and fixed some of these fairly blatant mistakes. I remember returning to Final Fantasy VII on PC before the remake came out to play the fan retranslation, and in some ways it gave me a deeper appreciation of the game because it was clearly better written than we even knew back in 1997 (if you didn't already speak Japanese). I'm someone who appreciates FFVII for its place in gaming history. I don't think it's the best Final Fantasy that's ever been made (I think that honor could easily go to either VI or IX), but I do think that it is a very good, very solid RPG, and to that extent, its place in history especially for the era it was released is warranted.

    But because Final Fantasy VII is placed so highly on pedestals by fans all over the world, there was no way that making a remake of this game was ever going to please everybody. No matter what kind of battle system you chose, what graphics, the manner in which you told the story, etc., it was never going to please 100% of audiences. I think that's why it took Square Enix as long as it did to finally commit to remaking the game. They knew it was their biggest money maker (now only surpassed by Final Fantasy XIV in total sales), so I think it only made business sense to make more, even if logically speaking a new version of the game doesn't actually need to exist that badly. For me, personally speaking, I would have been absolutely fine if they had simply chosen to update the graphics, give it a new translation, and add in voice acting. You'd have to do very little else aside from some quality-of-life updates to make the original FFVII into the perfect game. But you know it was never gonna be that.

 

    Final Fantasy VII Remake is almost a remake in name only. Sure, it's largely retreading territory found in the original 1997 PlayStation game, but it's also largely expanding on its story as well as making it very clear that Square Enix desperately wanted to take the plot in new, unexplored directions. That was always gonna be a risky decision. Straying from the original plot risks alienating the very fans who were clamoring for a remake of their favorite game in the first place. But I think that, as a developer, if there is a narrative decision you're trying to make, you need to embrace that decision head-on, regardless of what some people are going to think of that decision. At a certain point, surely it's clear that you can't possibly please everybody. And one of the largest problems I've found with these two installments of this Remake project is that SE is so desperately terrified of making the wrong decision that they made an entirely brand new wrong decision by not simply committing to the idea of changing things. It's true that I would have sometimes preferred if some things stayed the way that I knew them. Yeah, I'll admit, I'm comfortable with the original game the way it was. But at the end of the day, I'm not dumb--I know I still have that original game, and they're not going to take that original game away from me. So if they were going to make changes, it would have been better to just decide, "Well, guess what? We're going in a new direction now, and either get on board with it or don't." Because the resulting decisions that the narrative makes across both games is a confusing mess of, "Oh, we might change something, and you don't know what it is or when it's gonna happen!", which completely derails the fantastic original story. You'll be bouncing along to a well-written plot, only to be slapped in the face with the Whispers (or as I often insultingly call them, the Plot Ghosts) completely tearing up the pace and flow of what you were doing. I genuinely don't think they were ever well executed. If things were going to be different, then just let them happen differently. You don't have to use some bizarre additional plot development to give us a messy explanation that you shouldn't expect this to be a 1:1 recreation of a game from over 20 years prior. I already know it's not going to be the same because it's a game that's releasing three console generations later. Just commit to the change, man, because taunting people with how much you wanna change things is just making the writing worse.

I am not a huge fan of every expansive decision that was made in Remake, although some decisions were fine. Learning more about the other members of Avalanche, for example--Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie--was perfectly welcomed. Quite a bit of the rest of the game, however, feels like padding. It simply didn't need to be that big to tell this small section of the story. And most certainly in the last couple hours of the game, this is a large part of where the Whispers (Plot Ghosts) come in, with characters making really weird speeches about fighting destiny. Aerith ends up sounding like she was written by a completely different person who doesn't understand what she sounds like when she talks, and now for some inexplicable reason for this section she sounds like an alien. Fights with Sephiroth happen for seemingly no reason. Actually, that was a large problem throughout the game. Because Remake was self-contained but didn't cover the entire FFVII narrative, they felt like they had to keep peppering Sephiroth all throughout it, completely ruining the ominous mystery of who Sephiroth is. The ending of this first game goes ahead and throws shots reminiscent of the end of the entire original game at you, as if taunting old players. And Heaven help you if you're a new player, 'cause I can't even begin to imagine what you thought you were looking at. That had to have been confusing. Hell, it was confusing for old players, too. And on top of all that, now you've insinuated that there is some reality that exists wherein the characters that you love that you thought were supposed to be dead aren't actually dead at all. So, what, we've got an alternate universe now, maybe? Look, the plot to Final Fantasy VII isn't actually all that confusing, aside from the clever way the original game plays with the idea of Cloud being an unreliable narrator before finally clearing it up around mid/late game. But suddenly with Remake, Square Enix has decided they needed to make this plot needlessly much more complicated, both narratively and visually, and I'm not sure whether or not they thought they were being clever, or they were just doing whatever nonsense hoping to throw you off balance. Which, I mean, I guess to their credit, it worked. I am definitely thrown off by now, but I'm not sure it's in the way they were hoping for.

    So, anyway, about Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

    I think it would actually be best if I talked about some of the stuff I genuinely liked first. It might make me seem at least a little bit like slightly less of a hater than I really am.

    Upon early trailers for Rebirth, I actually genuinely thought that the game looked like an improvement over Remake. I liked the general look of the world, how lots of locations looked like perfect recreations of their 1997 counterparts, and certain plot beats looked well-executed. And even just from playing the first demo for the game released by Square Enix, I was very impressed with the recreation of the Nibelheim flashback scene. To me, that was perfect. The town looked great. The plot beats were well covered, well executed, well-written. I thought it was a great transition from a stationary camera to a fully-realized 3D environment. I was pretty impressed with little things, like Cloud visiting his childhood home and talking to his mom. His erratic memories in the original game showed flashes of white as Cloud's mom hopped around the screen chatting on and on about her thoughts with Cloud, and it was lovingly recreated in a very cinematic and jarring way. In that moment, I was thrilled. 

    There are lots of good moments like that smattered throughout the game. For instance, I think Barret's personal story is one of the best written ones for a character in the entire original game, and that continues to shine here in Rebirth. Seeing him return to Corel, how the people of his hometown treat him, and seeing the flashback sequences that show why they treat him this way really make you feel for him. And now that it's fully realized in a much more realistic way with some fantastic acting to boot, I'm not gonna lie, I didn't get out of Barret's story beats without crying. I mean, genuinely, what a great guy. What a well-written character. You feel for him so hard. I love Barret to tears.

    A good chunk of the rearrangements of Nobuo Uematsu's original soundtrack are done pretty well, too. I think I gelled with at least 90% of those arrangements. That's partly because Uematsu's original compositions are just already that good, but even most of these new arrangements by other composers mostly understood the assignment. The tone and placement were largely just right. There were a few that I didn't think quite lined up, but that was fairly rare. And although I thought the inclusion of Gilgamesh in this game was kinda strange since he's from a different Final Fantasy entirely (though given who he is I guess it's only so weird), the arrangements of Battle at the Big Bridge were actually pretty incredible. You can kinda hear moments where they've clearly taken inspiration from The Black Mages (Uematsu's rock band) arrangement of the song. There are a few brand new musical tracks from new composers that are okay, I guess. I largely don't see myself returning to the new songs introduced in this game, although there is one track that shows up during two side quests where you have to follow somebody's pet dog across a map that for whatever reason is really catchy despite it's dumb "Bow-wow-wow, bow-wow-wow" lyrics.

    When it comes to the battle mechanics, look, I'm just going to admit that the battle system was not designed with me in mind. I think it's fair to say that me not totally enjoying battles is not necessarily a flaw of the game designers, and that I genuinely just don't prefer hectic, frantic action mechanics. I'm confessing that this is totally a me thing, not a flaw of the game. But genuinely, I only got so far in the game on Normal mode, then found myself really not having fun with it at all, and taking it back down to Easy. Actually, if I'm to be honest, the jump from Easy to Normal feels like too big of a jump. Easy was way too easy, even for me. But my brain just won't let me do Normal. So, well, Easy it is, I guess. And yeah, it was pretty easy. It was too easy to ever die hardly, for the rest of the game. Of course, I did try my best to do as many things as possible throughout the course of the game, and I was often over-leveled for what the game expected me to do. So I'm not sure if it was due to fighting everything put in front of me putting me over in levels, or if it was simply because I'd switched over to Easy mode, but even I can admit that Easy is too Easy. It's just that Normal wasn't fun to me at all. To anybody saying this is clearly just a skill issue, get good bro... well, you're probably right, honestly. I don't see myself docking points on the game because I'm not good enough to play on Normal. I'm glad that Easy mode existed, but I wish there had been something slightly harder than the Easy they provided, or slightly easier than the Normal they provided.

    The world is vast and very pretty to look at. It's one of the things you come to expect out of Square Enix at this point. It would be weird of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth didn't look as incredible as it does. There are lots of opportunities to enjoy what you're looking at, although shockingly I don't feel like the tower locations are one of those places. The towers--which open up more locations for points of interest on the map once you interact with them--kinda feel more like busy work than a place with nice views. But, hey, there are definitely some other good places. One NPC, for example, will have you travel across the world to get photos of pretty scenery, and other side quests make you go looking for neat things to take pictures of, too, really making you look at all the hard work Square Enix put into making this world a real place. To that extent, they did a good job. But visuals don't make an entire game. The game otherwise has to be fun, and when it comes to Final Fantasy, for me the narrative is equally as important. If these other things falter, there isn't a pretty enough video game that could make me fall in love with it. 

    And that's unfortunately how I ended up feeling overwhelmingly negative about this game, despite how beautiful the world is.

    There is way too much that I do not like about Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

    Why is traversing the map kinda clunky? Why is it that sometimes Cloud can do these crazy Advent Children jumps from place to place, but if I walk him over to a moderately-sized rock he gets nervous and won't walk down it? Same with chocobos getting spooked because of a meager bush on the side of the road. In both these instances you have to do some weird maneuvers to wiggle around and find the exact perfect route that won't scare our Ex-SOLDIER main character too much. Even then, if simply stumbling over rocks on the world map was the worst thing about the game, I probably could have lived with it. Unfortunately, that's not all.

    Look, at what point do we say we need to slow down on minigames? How many minigames is too many minigames? Because I dare say that we have gone well past the point of too many minigames, to the point where it's absurd. It feels like every half hour or so while progressing the mainline story, you're forced into playing a new minigame. And if these minigames were purely optional, I might not have had a problem with it. But often, they are mandatory. And I get it, a lot of players really do like a lot of the minigames, but you know what? Couldn't be me. The majority of them simply aren't fun enough. I understand that there are people who will now go down swinging in defense of Queen's Blood, Rebirth's new in-game card game, but I gotta say, I don't understand why. It's not nearly as fun to me as it is to the die-hard fans of it. And that's okay, I guess, but somebody please explain to me why it is that I absolutely have to play it to forward the narrative.

    Actually, you know what's crazy about Queen's Blood? There's a part of the game where you get on a boat to get to the next destination in the story, and during the trip by boat you participate in a Queen's Blood tournament (hosted by an MC who sounds like a knock-off Liam Neeson). I gave that tournament the ol' college try and hated it. After playing against three players, I decided I wasn't having fun and it wasn't worth it, and I actually voluntarily dropped out of the tournament all together to get past it. But even that couldn't get me out of Queen's Blood hell, because as the tournament is ending, here walks in Red XIII moonwalking like Michael Jackson for some inexplicable reason (boy, did I ever hate that) and demanding to be allowed to participate in the tournament, and he insists on battling Cloud for the trophy. But why, though? I've already dropped out of the tournament. Having a card battle with me is completely meaningless. But fine, I have this Queen's Blood match with Red XIII, and I lose anyway, 'cause at this point I genuinely do not care if I win this game or not. And despite the fact that I am not a member of the tournament, and the fact that I lost against Red XIII, the game still gave me the trophy for winning the entire tournament.

    What?

    Why?

    Why did that happen?

    So, cool, even against my will, I am a Queen's Blood champion, I guess. And then there's quests that can't be finished without doing Queen's Blood, either.

    Then there's other minigames, like this moment where your party is separated and only Cait Sith can get you through a particular dungeon. You control Cait Sith, picking up boxes and throwing them at certain places or getting them onto certain platforms. And for one thing, the controls are kinda wonky. It's not impossible, but it's not super intuitive. Like, you have to press one button to pick up a box, then use the left joystick to pull back and get ready to throw the box, then press a completely separate button to actually throw the box, rather than just releasing the joystick to have him throw the box. It's completely counter-intuitive. And what's worse than that is that it totally grinds the forward momentum of the narrative to a screeching halt. The padding in this game is just so wildly obvious and blatant, and it's upsetting that it feels like they have deliberately put barriers between me and progressing the story like this.

    Dolphin minigame, not the worst but not super fun. Moogle-catching minigame, an absolute nightmare to me. Chocobo racing in the Gold Saucer may actually genuinely be the one minigame I was kind of enjoying in the early stages, though the Gold Cup was so unforgiving that the associated quest was literally the only one in the entire game that I never finished. Like, some of these minigames aren't even necessarily what I'd call bad, but they're so mid that I feel like they could have removed it from the game and it wouldn't have impacted anything. In fact, not having them there would have at least made the game feel less bloated.

    And I get it. Final Fantasy VII was known for its minigames. Remember the motorcycle stuff? Remember snowboarding? Remember all the cute games in the Gold Saucer, like that short visual novel about the moogle named Mog, or the interactive roller coaster? Yeah, VII had a handful of minigames, most of which were not requirements to progress the story. It's like Square Enix took a look at that and said, "What if we did that, but did it infinitely harder than the original game did? What if we just went in so hard that all anybody will want to do is play the minigames?" That sounds good in theory, and I know that people will die on a hill defending these minigames, but surely there has to be some stopping point, right? Like, where do we finally stop? Mind you, the Yakuza-slash-Like A Dragon franchise has been knocking it out of the park with their own minigames, too. By comparison, I think those minigames are rather good, and in most cases playing them is not a requirement to further the narrative. But I don't think Final Fantasy VII Rebirth needs the minigames just because the original FFVII or other RPGs from other companies are doing them.

    And then there's certain character portrayals whose new direction I simply do not understand.

    I don't even know who Cid Highwind is anymore.

    

    No, really, who are you? I get the sense that the third Remake installment will very likely finally go into Cid's backstory a bit, but without seeing that here, the way we meet Cid is entirely different. The way we get his plane, the Tiny Bronco, is entirely different. His personality is entirely different. Who even are you, bro? You are an entirely new character, as far as I'm concerned. This is gonna be a moment where staunch defenders are going to say that I'm simply allergic to change. I mean, maybe? I'm not gonna completely say that's not what's happening here. But there are subtle changes to almost every character in this game, or little additions here and there that have provided more depth and growth to these characters, and I haven't had any issue with Square Enix making those decisions. And hey, I can see why in a modern age people might have a problem with Cid's original characterization. 1997 Cid is bitter, angry, curses unceasingly, and is fairly abusive. So I wholly expected them to tone down his character. If they'd done that, I would have 100% been on board with it, because it's hard to want to empathize with a dude who's abusive to women. But I did not expect them to completely rewrite who he is and how we even meet him or acquire his services in the first place. Are we ever gonna go to Rocket Town in the third game? Are we gonna see how Shinra had a cancelled space program and that the reason why Cid became so bitter is that his dreams of being an astronaut were ripped out from under him? I mean, maybe. There's still a third game. There's still room to grow here. But without seeing that, I just see a wholly different person. This Cid is entirely too kind. Just a really nice dude. And as nice as it is to meet yet another nice dude to add to your main cast of characters (even if he's unplayable for now), I feel like I still have yet to meet the Cid that I'd long been looking forward to meeting.

    I'm gonna get torn apart for not liking things Square Enix did with Red XIII.

    

    What are we doing here? For half of the game, Red XIII is pretty on point. He's serious except for the parts where it's funny to be in an unserious situation. Unfortunately, when it comes to the part where you cross the ocean on a boat (which is a luxury cruise now instead of a cargo ship), Red XIII now has a completely different reason for wanting to appear human, so that he can participate in a card game tournament. Okay, fine, we're shoehorning this card game into everything now. But rather than Red XIII just being funny because he's a cat-dog dressed up in a human Shinra military uniform desperately trying to pass as a human, suddenly he's now so good at being a human being that he apparently knows who Michael Jackson was and can moonwalk across the deck of the ship to his card game opponents. Haha, isn't it funny that Red XIII knows this extremely specific pop culture reference? Fine, somebody out there genuinely thinks this is funny. To me, though, this was peak cringe. I guess you and I are just gonna disagree on this one.

    But now, not only that, but things for his character go way off kilter by the time you reach his hometown of Cosmo Canyon. It's partly understandable, but I feel like they've just pushed it entirely too far. See, Red XIII suddenly stops speaking seriously entirely, and has now completely changed his voice and his demeanor and sounds like a 15-year-old boy because he's happy to be home meeting back up with all of his friends, and he tells the party that his serious voice was just an act the entire time to get everybody to take him seriously. Look, I do understand that now that he's home, he's much happier and can be more like himself. It's even still the same that Bugenhagen tells you that although Nanaki (Red XIII's real name) seems fairly old by human standards, he's actually fairly young for his race. That having been said, I'd always interpreted Red XIII as trying to seem wise because he genuinely wishes he was and definitely wants to be, not because he's scared of what people are going to think of him. Never once throughout either the original game, nor even up until halfway through Rebirth, did I ever get the sense that Red XIII was being anything other than what he genuinely thought of himself. Now, not only did his voice go up two octaves, but now he's using totally different vocabulary, too. This just isn't the direction I would have taken this. I think things still could have worked if he sounded the same, but occasionally let a childish thought or two slip now that he's in the comfort of his own home. Now, the air is totally different, and frankly, it's kinda grating. Mind you, I've had some people tell me that they love everything about this interpretation of Red XIII. This is a Your Mileage May Vary moment, I guess. And boy, for me, did it ever vary.

    In fact, it wasn't even consistent. Once you visit Cosmo Canyon, Red XIII's voice is supposed to change and then stay that way for the rest of the game. However, there were parts of the game, including some side content, that I hadn't quite finished before visiting Cosmo Canyon and had to go back later to complete. And there were two or three moments where the game seemingly completely forgot which Red XIII we were playing with, and gave me his old voice for a line or two, then for some inexplicable reason it went back to his new youthful voice. Maybe the game wouldn't have had this consistency problem if they hadn't tried to do something goofy with his voice in the first place.

    Also, what's up with the running joke where everybody thinks Red XIII is a dog? When did we all decide he was definitely a dog? This whole time over the last 25+ years, I always thought he was more like a cat than he was a dog. You could maybe argue that he's his own unique thing, something between a cat and a dog, right? But everybody just looks at him and upon first glance decides, "Yep, I'm definitely seeing a dog." I'm not feelin' this one.

    Aerith's importance is so highly elevated that I can't even connect with her on a normal human emotional level anymore.

    

    Look, Aerith is obviously an extremely important character, even within the confines of the original Final Fantasy VII. Now, in that game from 1997, she was fun and likable with a strong motivation to do what she knew she needed to do, and suddenly in the middle of the game before you know it and with little to no warning, she's killed before your very eyes and then you're forced to go on through the rest of the game entirely without her.

    While that description still holds true in Rebirth, they have also decided to remind you at every single possible twist and turn that there was every single possibility in the world that Aerith was eventually going to die. They weren't coy about it. They didn't try to hide it. It was this cruel teasing and taunting the entire time. Hell, from scene one, where we're seeing what seems to be some alternate universe where Zack finds her barely clinging onto life, you're basically told right up front, "Hey, you'd better expect the very real possibility that she's gonna die at the end of this game." Then throughout the game you get scenes like alt-universe Marlene telling Zack that she's probably gonna die, you get prime-universe Aerith pretty much predicting her own death way ahead of when she thought it was probably gonna happen in the original game, and it just goes on and on and on. Every single player knew from the beginning of this damn game that she was probably gonna die, and if she didn't, then you needed to expect that somebody would (granted, it does basically end up being her. Mostly. Kinda.).

    We get that scene where you get to go on a date with somebody at the Gold Saucer. The whole time I was aiming for Barret, but I still screwed up and ended up with Aerith anyway. I mean, that's fine, that's more canon anyway. So you get to the part of the date where you're supposed to go participate in the little fantasy play that was featured in the original game. In 1997 it was kinda cute, very tongue-in-cheek, and you could make really funny things happen. Here in Rebirth, they've combined that play in the Gold Saucer with the now completely overblown production of Loveless. Look, I hate how somebody looked at the one billboard in the background of the opening shots of Final Fantasy VII, saw the poster for Loveless, then decided that single stupid picture needed to be elevated into its own entire backstory of fiction across several video games. But fine, now the fantasy play at the Gold Saucer is also Loveless. We're here now, I guess.

    Now, I love me some new Nobuo Uematsu music. The Loveless performance features a musical number that is the one brand new Uematsu composition unique to this game, titled No Promises to Keep. It's a solid enough composition, although despite my huge love for Uematsu as a composer, as a song it feels a little paint-by-numbers for him. After songs like Eyes On Me, Melodies of Life, and Kiss Me Good-Bye, this new Uematsu track suddenly doesn't sound all that much different from his previous power ballads. It doesn't make the song bad in any way. It just definitely sounds like an Uematsu power ballad.

    Having Aerith be this musical closing act for Loveless as she performs No Promises to Keep is meant to be this knock-out moment in the game where you're just supposed to have all these powerful feelings and remember how much you love the shit out of Aerith Gainsborough before you never get to see her again. Because, remember, they are reminding you at every feasible moment that you are going to lose her. Hell, the lyrics of the song are practically screaming, "Hey, I'm gonna be gone soon! You better love me! I mean, maybe we'll see each other again, but who knows, lol!" I mean, sure, the song is great. But the levels to which we are deifying Aerith even before she truly becomes that important genuinely lessen my emotions when it comes to knowing we're gonna lose her. If you are taunting me for literally the course of the entire game that she's gonna be gone, then how the hell do you expect me to be surprised when you get to the end of the game and you basically didn't really change much of anything? Her death isn't sudden. It isn't surprising. Not only did old fans of the game see it coming, but you told us for the entire length of the game that it was coming. Why did you do that? There's no shock here at all. We were overwhelmingly beat over the head with the information the entire time. It was absolutely exhausting how much you couldn't just let it happen naturally.

    The Gi are aliens now, I guess.

   

     Remember how Red XIII's tribe and the Gi tribe in Final Fantasy VII were just two tribes fighting each other, with little other backstory, and they've just kinda both been wiped out by the time we learn more about either one of them? Sure, elaborating on the Gi tribe isn't a terrible idea, considering we knew literally nothing about them. But you know where I absolutely did not expect them to go? Aliens. Definitely was not expecting aliens. The description of them is kind of dodgy. Their souls apparently cannot return to the planet because they are not "of" the planet. So here I am questioning as soon as I hear that, "So... so you're aliens?" And it would seem, if the description of them inside the Temple of the Ancients is correct that, yep, they are very probably aliens. Now I have way more questions than I did before I learned more about the Gi. How the hell did this happen? How did they get here? Now, you might be saying, "But hey, Jenova is also totally an alien, why are you so confused?" Look, you are trying to get me on board with the idea that we have multiple different kinds of aliens living on this planet now. This whole time I just thought we were dealing with one singular crazy-ass anomaly. Now this whole tribe--who has been here the entire time--is also aliens? I think I need to lie down.

    Why is every town jam packed with tourists?

    I have seen people praise Rebirth for feeling not only bigger, but more filled and lived-in, thus making it more realistic. But frankly, nearly every single town you visit seems less filled with people who live in those places, and more filled with tourists from Midgar or elsewhere. There are a couple of exceptions, of course, such as Corel. That's clearly a dusty town that most people don't particularly care to visit still, so, that's good. And there's a couple places where you would obviously expect there to be a bunch of tourists, such as Costa del Sol and Gold Saucer. But then there are towns that were packed with tourists that didn't even make sense to me. Cosmo Canyon I think was the worst one. It felt like the only people who actually lived there were the guards smattered throughout the town, and maybe the people running shops and the inn. Everybody else there was trying to get in touch with the feelings of the planet and traveled from some far away place to visit there. Which, yes, Cosmo Canyon was always something of a pilgrimage spot, even in the 1997 original. But now it is so overrun with pilgrims that I dare call it a tourist trap now. Kalm was pretty bad, too. This once sleepy, quiet little town is now super loud and bustling and has a ton of Midgar and Shinra people in it.

    Actually, the rebuilt Nibelheim was pretty jarring, too. In the 1997 game, Nibelheim being rebuilt piece-by-piece from the ground up is an incredibly visually striking experience. It's supposed to be weird and unsettling. It's a fake, standing there to fool passers by into thinking nothing horrific ever actually happened to that town. Now, in Rebirth, Nibelheim has been rebuilt, but now it serves some weird purpose as a place where the robed test subject dudes can be carefully watched over and cared for. And now they're pretty blatantly open with you about it, and somehow they've made it less weird, and your party is slightly less shaken up about it than it feels like they should be. And you guessed it, the town is full of tourists. What are they even doing there? Why did a bunch of people come to visit this place, anyway? What is even here for them to visit?

    This game's pacing is abysmal.

    I spent a pretty substantial amount of time doing side content, just so that I could say that I did it and that I knew exactly what it was that I was going to be complaining about. Under normal circumstances, yes, I would agree with the idea that if you're not having a good time, don't play. There's a bunch of side content that you technically do not need to do in any way. But completing certain aspects of the game is admittedly a very satisfying experience, on top of giving you rewards of gear, materials, or summons. But because of this, my brain would flip flop between being satisfied in knocking out tasks like finding towers and lifesprings and completing monster fights, and then feeling aggravated that it felt like completing all these tasks was nothing more than busy work. I mean, in the end I got myself that Gilgamesh summon, so I guess that's pretty cool. Except I literally only used him once and he didn't even get to complete his entire length of the summon before the enemy was defeated so I never saw him complete his final attack animation. I used summons so rarely because, being on Easy mode, I was often beating enemies long before I ever needed to summon anything. I did every side quest (except for just one, screw the Gold Cup in the chocobo races at the Gold Saucer), I did all of Chadley's little VR fights up until the extra hard optional ones opened up, I found all the Protorelics and did all of Gilgamesh's story to get him as a summon, and I did all of the points of interest in every single area on the world map to get Chadley to praise me for doing literally all of his research for him. Aside from just flat out giving up on Queen's Blood early in the game, I did literally everything there was to do in a singular playthrough. So I feel fairly qualified to talk about why I did or did not like a number of the things I did.

    Anyway, you can do a bunch of the side content, and sure, that's mostly a personal choice to waste time away from the main story. In that sense, I have nobody to blame but myself for feeling like I poured that much time into a bunch of side content that often felt more like a job than like a fun video game.

    Unfortunately, the main story line also feels like this, too. I mentioned earlier in this post that I felt like Final Fantasy VII Remake felt really padded out to make the game feel bigger and longer (that's what she said) than it needed to be. If Remake felt burdened with padding, let me tell you, Rebirth is quite possibly ten times worse about it.

    Dungeons are often unbearably long and repetitive. Just when you think that a dungeon is close to hitting its logical conclusion, it turns out you're wrong, and there's way more traversing to do. There are many times where even the characters are complaining about it. Barret was often the voice of reason here. "Man, you mean we still have to do more of this?" I'm with you, Barret. I'm with you.

    The game is obsessed with separating the party on a frequent basis. It makes dungeons extra long to force you to play with characters other than Cloud and use new gameplay mechanics, like having Barret shoot things down from high places, having Yuffie throw her pinwheel shuriken at stuff or grappling hook swing from things, or have Red XIII find climbable walls, etc. I don't dislike having different party members being tasked with being able to do different things in different situations, but did we really need to separate the party to do this and thereby extend the length of these dungeons? I'd heard another person say they thought it would have been a better idea if you could swap out the leader of your party at will in order to climb walls or swing from places or shoot things down, and I gotta say that sounds like a pretty solid idea. I definitely wish that had been done instead.

    There are times where the game will have you run all over a given area in what feels like an attempt to stretch out a game longer than it needs to be. It felt like I spent entirely too much time in Costa del Sol just waiting for the plot to move forward. They really wanted me to be excited to have a vacation, and dammit, they were gonna force me to enjoy my vacation whether I wanted to or not. This happens so often in so many places, and in some instances it's so that the game has the chance to elaborate on character development and world-building. So, once in a while, it's okay. But sometimes, no sir, it definitely was just to keep you inside the game longer than feels necessary.

    And there is no part of the game more guilty of that than the Temple of the Ancients.

    Okay, this is an opinion that I don't think a lot of people are going to fight me on. It seems that even among people who have a lot of praises to sing for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, even they largely think very little of the final two chapters of the game. As many others have pointed out to me, the original version of the Temple of the Ancients from 1997 wasn't exactly fun, either, and I will absolutely agree with those people 100%. But while the old school Temple of the Ancients could be frustrating, I would not consider it to be nearly as unfathomably long and padded as its appearance in Rebirth.

    By comparison, Rebirth's version of the Temple is fairly straightforward and simple. Even the puzzles to rotate the temple and go to new places are more linear than you might think at first glance, so in the end I can't say that I think this new Temple is especially difficult. But just because it's less difficult doesn't mean I want to spend more time in there than I have to. Here I was in this temple for hours on end, just walking, and walking, and walking. Sometimes fighting, sometimes finding treasure, sometimes pushing some things around, and then just walking and walking and walking. Then the party gets separated, because of course they do. Then you have to do separate tasks as two separate party members. And it makes you go back and forth between the two, even jumping back in time to show what the other party was doing for the last seven hours... Seven hours! Even in the in-game universe, the game believes that your party has been stuck in this dungeon for at least seven hours! I repeat, this part of the game isn't hard! It's just unnecessarily long!

    Even after your party eventually meets back up together, there's still more walking to do! Still more mini bosses to fight! There were at least two spots in the game where I was like, "Okay, this is definitely the room where the Black Materia is supposed to be hidden." But nope! You'd go into a room and then they'd expect you to do some new task! They eventually split the party up into individual members and force each party member to relive the absolute worst day of their lives for seemingly no reason. I understand that it's supposed to be this moment that draws me as the audience in closer to the experiences of the characters, but by this point the Temple of the Ancients was taking so damn long that sitting through these horror stories felt like yet another obstacle between me and the end of the game. I genuinely could not believe it took as long as it did to get through this dungeon. A dungeon, by the way, where Cloud is behaving increasingly like a jackass (and honestly because Cloud has got some stuff going on in his head he's occasionally been a jackass against his will for almost the whole game), and this whole time nobody is checking Cloud on his clearly deranged behavior, just sort of letting him get away with all kinds of nonsense until he's almost totally lost all control entirely.

    Finishing everything in the Temple was nothing short of the biggest relief of my life. But now we start doing some extra confusing nonsense. Stuff like this has been happening on and off throughout the entire game, but by the end of chapter 13 it has become full-blown visual noise. It's difficult not to compare many visuals from this point on to Advent Children, and I mean that in the most derogatory way possible. The plot ghosts? They're back. Jumping around and doing mad crazy stuff? It's here, too. Well, at least one thing I was grateful for was that they simply went with Cloud being the most horror movie villain ever and spooking Aerith half to death rather than beating the ever-loving crap out of her like in the 1997 original.

    What was absolutely infuriating to me, however, was that I had spent that exorbitant amount of time inside the Temple of the Ancients, only to reach chapter 14 and get speed rushed along to the Forgotten Capital. When I realized this is what the game had done, my jaw was on the floor. What, no traveling around to look for Aerith? No searching for that harp in an archaeological dig to open up the forest so you don't get lost in there? And then once you get to the City, you just... zip straight up to the end? You don't have to look around for where Aerith might be? Literally no hunting for your lost companion? Now you're just pushing through these plot ghosts that are here for... some reason? Also, wow, in both these last two locations, the Cetra really had their own old school fantasy vending machines built in these places, huh? Crazy.

    This ending feels like it's trying entirely too hard to confuse you just for the sake of confusing you, hoping you'll get tripped up and want to know what really happens later. Is it good writing? I dare say it isn't. It's rapid flashes of light and cuts between camera angles. Aerith is alive! Aerith is dead! Aerith is alive! Aerith is dead! You fight Jenova, which is fine, that's what you're supposed to do here. But then Sephiroth is an extensive fight, too! And for some reason Bizarro Sephiroth is here! Yeah! Remember Bizarro Sephiroth? The second to last form Sephiroth has at the end of the original game? Yeah, that's a thing you gotta fight now! You're doing end game fights! Right now! In stages not too dissimilar to that original fight, too! Also, Zack is here! Why? Who gives a damn?! Multiple universes, baby! Zack and Cloud are teaming up! We're doing that individual fight with a normal-looking Sephiroth! Again! Like the end of the original game! And the end of the last game! So obviously we have to do it again! Oh, but Zack's gotta go. What are you gonna do now? Oh, it's Aerith! She's here now! Which is really weird considering she's maybe dead but maybe not dead. 

    So now it's all over! Multiverse theory is real! Aerith is very probably dead, but you never saw her burial, so... that sucks! And now Cloud is maybe hallucinating conversations with her? Or maybe he's really in touch with her ghost? Is there even a meteor to worry about anymore? Who the hell knows?! Time to get into the Tiny Bronco and fly off to the third game without her, bye!

    Just... holy crap, man. What the hell. Honestly, what the hell. I get that there will be die hard fans going to bat for this, but man, you and I absolutely do not see eye to eye on this one. This isn't good writing. This is a company that knew that whatever decisions they made, whether they let Aerith live or die, nobody was going to be happy. And rather than making bold choices, the choice they made was to be confusing and make absolutely no fully committed choices at all. The real answer is whatever you damn well want it to be. The developers have said they wanted this to be up to interpretation. But this isn't the intelligent writing of somebody good at leaving things up to interpretation. This is being confusing deliberately so they don't have to make the brave decision to make any particular camp too upset. And the end result is something way more infuriating than they could have possibly anticipated.

    

    I need to reiterate, Final Fantasy VII is absolutely not a confusing video game. There is a period of time where Cloud has to realize, "Oh, no, I remembered almost everything correctly, it's just that I thought I was the guy standing next to me the whole time, that's all." And once he remembered that then absolutely everything else about the game made sense. VII is not a deep and confusing game. It can be thought-provoking when it comes to having conversations about doing what it takes to preserve life on the planet we all live on, and in its approach to life, death, grief, and the permanence of loss and not being able to get somebody back. Past that, you don't have to be a great literary analyst to understand the plot beats of Final Fantasy VII.

    But now Rebirth comes along and thinks it's clever for adding new writing that adds in the concept of multiple universes, all crashing into each other, where things both are and aren't at the same time, new plot elements are written so that the characters sound like they came from outer space (even the ones that definitely do not come from outer space). People speak completely differently from the rest of the writing in the game. Gee, almost like the original game was already well-written before, and now we're having to jam new, weird things onto it to try to make it different. It's not helping it. It's not fixing it. It's trying too hard to be clever and completely falling on its face in the process.

    This is on top of my personal opinion that the cinematic editing for both Remake and Rebirth have been absolutely insane, with a madman as the storyboarder. Even for some of the most normal, down-to-earth conversations between people, the camera hops, bounces, cuts, zooms, pans, and tilts all over the place, and some of the motion capture is so over the top it looks like the suit actors for a tokusatsu hero show a la Super Sentai or Power Rangers. Sometimes I just want to tell the camera man to calm the hell down. But as Barret says, "But you gotta understand that there ain't no gettin' offa this train we're on, till we get to the end of the line." By that I mean, I'm stuck with what they've given me. It's too late to tell them to do anything differently now.

    In conclusion, I am beyond baffled at what I've just experienced.

    Like I said at the top of this blog, I thought I as actually going to enjoy Final Fantasy Rebirth a great deal more than I did Remake. I genuinely had high hopes and anticipations for this game. Parts of it looked like it was going to be such a big improvement for my tastes. And in the end, I am left way more unhappy with it than I was with the first installment.

    This is not to say that there isn't anything worth seeing or doing in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. There are quite a few enjoyable moments. But the stuff I didn't enjoy about the game were so numerous and so very unenjoyable that I wonder how it is that I've come away from this video game that's getting these insane 11-out-of-ten scores from all these players and news outlets and I don't feel anywhere near the sense of elation that these other players felt. What the hell am I doing wrong here? Is it me? I mean, surely it's me. Right? Like, if there's so many people crying tears of joy for this game, then why did every few hours have me grumbling about some new thing that I didn't find to be nearly as enjoyable as I was expecting? Were my expectations too high? Should I have tempered them? Lowered them? By no means did I think this was going to be the exact game I wanted, but I simply cannot believe it ended up being so much of a game I definitely did not want.

    I spent 90 hours in this game.

    What the hell do I do with my life now?

    I mean... look, now I've played these first two entries in the Rebirth series, so I'm practically required to be committed to seeing it all the way through to the third game. But, damn, man, I... I don't know how my brain is going to tolerate doing this a third time. Like, I have to spend the next three or four years building up an ironclad tolerance for absolute nonsense, dodging people who will be very angry and offended that I did not fall utterly in love with this game in the same way they did. Hell, bro, I'm not even trying to take your joy away from you. You go do you, man. Go relive Loveless a few more times and enjoy yourself, dude. I'm not here to yuck your yum. But I did feel like my soul was gonna burst if I didn't write out exactly how this game made me feel. And now I've vomited all this vitriol out there onto the internet, so I have to solidify my martial arts stance and be ready to take some reactionary blowback to the gut now.

    Anyway, maybe I'll go back and play that fan retranslation again. After all, once again, I'm not pretending that this Remake project completely erased the existence of the original Final Fantasy VII. It still exists, and it's still a pretty damn decent RPG.