I say all of this because you can jump into Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth with fresh eyes, having never before played Final Fantasy VII or any of the Final Fantasy games, and enjoy it like none other. I say all of this because Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth has earned the titanic quantity of praise and accolades from gaming outlets and players alike. I say all of this because Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth is an outstanding example of a modern RPG and tantamount for any PC players with limited experience in Square Enix’s portfolio.
Up until this past month, I’ve been blissfully unaware of Final Fantasy VII’s significance in the personal sense. I’ve never played it, as I was not an original PlayStation owner. I understand its significance in the broader sense thanks to my watching Let’s Plays and such, but in no way do I have the same familiarity with Cloud Strife and Sephiroth as many other players. To that end, I don’t own a pair of rose-colored glasses when approaching the remade Final Fantasy VII trilogy.
Knowing all of this, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is an impressive piece of work. Despite being the second entry of a nearly thirty-year-old game that originally spanned three discs, Square Enix succeeded in pulling on my heartstrings. It’s no wonder why fellow Chumps writer Ben Sheene considers it a “new miracle of execution, one that will be talked about until those missing pieces finally fall into place.”
From an outsider’s perspective, I’ve struggled with trying to understand the decision behind remaking Final Fantasy VII into three separate games. What if someone, like me, has little familiarity with FFVII writ large and is compelled to play another example of Square’s gorgeous RPGs full of emotional cutscenes, seemingly endless sidequests, and deep customization? What if they opt into jumping into 2024’s Rebirth without playing 2020’s Remake?
After nearly 20 hours of Rebirth, I was able to see parallels between the FFVII trilogy and the Horizon trilogy. While there’s an overarching narrative spread out over multiple games, each individual title can stand on its own feet and offer players satisfaction. Each title catches players up with the story so far and setting them on the journey without burdening them with required reading or mandatory cutscenes to figure out the who’s who and what’s what. If new PS5 owners could play Horizon: Forbidden West and love it without ever playing Horizon: Zero Dawn, then you can start Rebirth without needing to play Remake or even the original Final Fantasy VII.
Rebirth caught me up with the story so far very quickly, giving me the rundown of the events of Final Fantasy VII: Remake. The pinnacle moment of Sephiroth’s heel turn in setting Nibelheim ablaze after learning of his true origins is replayed in the first two hours of Rebirth, but from Cloud Strife’s eyes. In retelling how Sephiroth destroyed everything and killed everyone, Cloud and the player are set on a revenge odyssey spanning gorgeous open worlds that only Square could design and refine with modern tools.
Those first few hours in Nibelheim and Kalm introduced me to just enough of Rebirth’s combat depth while keeping me glued to major plot points that ultimately mattered further in the story. After escaping Kalm and emerging into the grasslands, the first open-world vista, a familiar gameplay loop emerged. Rebirth’s open world was massive, but it contained a little of everything rather than pockets of meaning dispersed throughout an empty plane of existence.
Rebirth is compelling it how it offered me so much to do and explore all the while I could slay monsters. I lost two solid evenings mucking about just so that I could clear things off my map. Sure, I was slaying enemies in a good chunk of these activities, but I was pushed toward seeing what else I could find and complete on its massive map. In behaving like an open-world game, Rebirth masks the typical RPG grindiness that artificially inflates playtime.
It was at the eight-hour mark where I figured out that Rebirth, despite being the second remade FFVII title, shared much in common with Final Fantasy XVI’s gameplay loop. While Clive’s story is more action-oriented in a darker medieval setting, Rebirth overlaps in the form of fluidly transitioning from action-combat reminiscent of Devil May Cry to the traditional party management RPG players expect on the strategic combat side of things.
As much as Rebirth is an action-RPG, I spent a near-equal amount of time exploring, completing side-questy-fetch-quests, crafting materials, and marveling at the multitude of points of interest that were constantly added to my map when I interacted with Remnawave towers and assisting Chadley (an Android-NPC fascinated by knowledge). In roaming the lands, I was continuously on the hunt to restore each and every Chocobo Stop just so I could give the baby Chocobo a squishy pat on its head.
As I mentioned earlier in this review, Rebirth’s combat is heavily action focused and had me controlling a single character. I had the option of issuing commands to my other two party members, occasionally utilizing them in “Synergy Attacks,” which helped me out when I had my hands full with larger groups of enemies. If my preferred character was pinned-down or incapacitated, a quick button press let me control a teammate. The swapping of characters felt natural while also deepening the combat beyond solely relying on Cloud to do the heavy lifting against mobs of Orcs, gigantic snakes, and other baddies.
The Materia system is Rebirth’s method of character-building and combat customization. In the equipment menu, I could select Materia and slot them into my characters’ weapons and armor. In doing so, I could cast additional spells in combat beyond the character-specific abilities. For instance, equipping Cloud with the Cure Materia made it so that I could cast Cure in battle; after using it enough times, I could Cast Cura. The Materia system made spell selection and character-building flexible, but I couldn’t help but miss having class-specific and/or permanently unlocked spells. Then again, seeing as my party was constantly in flux throughout the story, the Materia system granted me flexibility to ensure that I had all of my bases covered.
[[combat assessment]] Coming from Final Fantasy XVI and its Eikonic-ability-infused frenetic combat, I appreciated the action of Rebirth. Even though spamming melee attacks overshadowed the few abilities and spells I could cast (as I had to build charges from melee attacking) in Rebirth, I missed the fluid combo chains and satisfying blocking/dodging/parrying of FFXVI. Yes, dodging and blocking exist in Rebirth, but they feel clunkier and less satisfying. Beyond that, though, Rebirth’s action-packed combat keeps the game fresh and less of a grind.
And now comes the fateful assessment of Rebirth’s stability on my PC. I tested Rebirth on a PC with an NVIDIA 2070 SUPER GPU, an i7-9700K CPU, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD (with plenty of space to spare). This puts me squarely in the “Recommended Spec” territory and translates to “Medium” graphical settings in-game. My first few hours of my playthrough were frustrating, as I was playing an unstable build that would get hung up in-between and during cutscenes (requiring a force close), environments unable to render in their entirety (resulting in jagged polygons and empty spaces), and deformed NPCs lacking textures altogether. While an update that was pushed to my device a few days ago solved a handful of these issues, I was constantly fiddling in the settings to smooth out framerate skips and the occasional hiccup. I also had to retrace my steps several times after force-closing the game from the random hangup. I’m familiar with buggy launches of PC-ports, as are many players, but this is in a better state than other AAA-PS5-exclusives I’ve reviewed as of late.
I’m sure that there will be additional stability and graphical quality improvement patches made in the short term, especially knowing the landscape of PC players’ configurations. However, it’s still in a state that is not only playable, but enough to enjoy the beauty that PS5 owners have come to expect over the past few years. Expect some bumpiness for now.
Before I end this review, I want to recognize and reiterate that I may have hampered my appreciation of Rebirth by not playing the original FFVII (be it on PlayStation or otherwise). I’ve seen endless Redditors and fans of FFVII attempt to convince other players that they should drop everything and play the original first before stepping foot into the remade trilogy. I will not say that you should or should not follow those fans’ advice. Instead, I’ll leave you with this: The fact remains that 2024 alone featured some exceptional RPGs, ranging from Dragon’s Dogma II to Unicorn Overlord to Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth to Metaphor: ReFantazio to Persona 3: Reload. All of these games require anywhere from 20 to over 100 hours to complete. Knowing that the original FFVII can take another 40 hours or so just for the main story, it would be foolish to expect the average player to want to invest that much time in older games.
I say all of this because you can jump into Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth with fresh eyes, having never before played Final Fantasy VII or any of the Final Fantasy games, and enjoy it like none other. I say all of this because Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth has earned the titanic quantity of praise and accolades from gaming outlets and players alike. I say all of this because Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth is an outstanding example of a modern RPG and tantamount for any PC players with limited experience in Square Enix’s portfolio.
