Completed this game on PS5 on Release.
It really ♥♥♥♥♥ up the Horror Science Fiction Thriller vibe of the original. This one feels more like a Multiverse Action Musical. Once again the strongest case against Rebirth is not one bad scene; it is that the game’s structure keeps sabotaging its own tragedy.
1. The pacing damages the tragedy
The main plot is supposed to be a pursuit story: Cloud’s party is chasing Sephiroth while Shinra, Jenova, the Planet, and Cloud’s unstable mind all close in.
But Rebirth constantly diverts that pursuit into minigames, regional checklisting, odd jobs, Queen’s Blood, towers, protorelic episodes, comedy bits, and relationship events. Reviewers argued that minigames and side quests gradually become obstacles to the plot, causing the Cloud-vs-Sephiroth-Jenova thread to get lost in a huge world. That is the central pacing failure: the game says “the world is doomed,” then behaves like the party is on a deluxe vacation package.
2. The tone becomes theme-park FF7, not tragic FF7
The original FF7 had comedy too. It had Gold Saucer, cross-dressing, slapstick, weird NPCs, chocobos, and minigames. But those moments were usually quick tonal spikes inside a larger mood of decay, corporate horror, identity breakdown, and grief. Rebirth extends comic relief Scenes and Musicals into gameplay pillars that can be so cringe it will scare away all but the Modernist of audiences. So the issue is not “FF7 should be grim all the time.” The issue is proportion. Rebirth lets the carnival swallow the nightmare of chasing a Cosmic Planet devouring monster like Jenova around the planet.
3. Hey guys it's Sephiroth again.
So the original Sephiroth works because he is distant, eerie, and legendary myth for a long stretch. You mostly see aftermath: corpses, fire, Jenova traces, stories, fear. He is like a ghost that haunt the narrative, When Sephiroth is Close you think he is gonna Fire 3 All Materia you and one shot your entire party like he does to Nibelhiem. The scare factor is Completely gone because you already beat his ass in physical Combat in the first game removing all mystique of what he is capable of.
Rebirth uses him constantly as a recurring psychological jump-scare, trailer villain, dream intruder, timeline manipulator, and endgame boss presence. That gives him spectacle, but it reduces dread. Sephiroth is less scary and less special. He comes off like a Scooby Doo Villain where I am gonna rip off his face and it was Jenova the entire time. (Which is accurate but Jenova was a lot more scary and murdery in the original scripts.) Sephiroth stopped being something to be afraid of and more of a Brand Mascot. I don't get a sense of dread when Sephiroth appears he feels like Loki in Marvel movies. He's a joke you defeated before and will defeat again so its hard to take seriously because the game doesn't take him seriously.
Just one deep dive into a Criticism of Barrets story if you want to indulge some spoilers.
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Barrets Scene: The original version of Barret’s backstory is harsh because it is about guilt, betrayal, poverty, corporate destruction, and the way a devastated community turns on someone after tragedy. Corel was not merely inconvenienced. It was burned to the ground, its people were slaughtered, and the survivors had every reason to see Barret as someone whose choices helped lead them into ruin.
That is why *Rebirth’s* handling feels so bizarre. The scene should carry the weight of mass death, displacement, and communal trauma. Instead, parts of it play like a Disney Channel bullying scene. Barret gets treated less like a man carrying responsibility for a massacre and more like a kid being mocked on the playground. Then Yuffie shouting at everyone to stop bullying him makes the moment feel like a 1990s PSA.
The tone is completely wrong for the material. These people should not sound like Barret stole their marbles. They should sound like survivors confronting a man they believe helped get their families executed. By softening that anger into cartoonish public shaming, *Rebirth* takes one of Barret’s darkest emotional wounds and makes it feel childish, shallow, and completely unserious.
This problem becomes even worse when you compare how Corel itself is treated. In the original, Barret’s hometown feels like a dead place. It is a scar on the map. The ruins, the survivors, Dyne, and Barret’s guilt all point back to the same tragedy: Shinra destroyed a poor mining town, and Barret has to live with the fact that he helped invite that destruction in.
*Rebirth* replaces too much of that weight with spectacle and nonsense. Instead of letting Corel feel like a place hollowed out by corporate violence, the game fills the area with goofy NPC side quests, silly dancing, Mr. Coates antics, and tonal clutter that makes the tragedy feel distant. The town’s identity as Barret’s wound gets blurred. It stops feeling like the remains of a massacre and starts feeling like another quirky hub designed to entertain the player.
Dyne suffers even more. In the original, Dyne is terrifying because he is not just “crazy.” He is a grieving man who has been spiritually destroyed. He lost his home, his wife, his arm, his future, and his sanity. He blames Barret because Barret supported the reactor deal, and that accusation matters because Barret also blames himself. Dyne is not merely an obstacle. He is what Barret could have become if his grief had curdled into pure hatred.
That is what makes the Marlene reveal so brutal. When Dyne learns that Marlene is alive, he cannot simply become a father again. He is too far gone. He attacks Barret because the existence of Marlene forces him to confront what he has become. He realizes he is no longer fit to return to her. His suicide is horrific because it is his final act of agency: a broken man recognizing that he has become a monster and removing himself from the world.
*Rebirth* weakens that completely. Dyne is played too broadly, almost like a cartoon madman. His grief is drowned under exaggerated insanity, and because he becomes so unstable and theatrical, he is harder to take seriously as Barret’s tragic mirror. Instead of feeling like an angry, mournful man who lost everything, he feels like a spectacle the game wants the player to react to from a distance.
The ending of his scene is even worse. Having Dyne get gunned down by faceless Shinra soldiers redirects the guilt away from Barret. The original confrontation is powerful because Barret cannot cleanly externalize the tragedy. Dyne’s pain is tied directly to Barret’s choices, and Barret has to carry that. In *Rebirth*, the emotional responsibility gets shifted back onto Shinra soldiers who appear to remove Dyne from the scene like a rabid animal. It is louder, but dramatically weaker.
That change absolves Barret too much. It turns a scene about personal guilt, moral responsibility, grief, and self-destruction into another scene where Shinra is simply the obvious villain. Shinra should be the larger evil, yes, but the original understood that Barret’s pain came from the fact that he was not innocent in his own mind. *Rebirth* keeps softening that edge, and by doing so, it makes Barret’s backstory less tragic, less uncomfortable, and far less powerful.
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It's Re trilogies abbility to ruin what was originally such powerful narratives like this that I give this game a Thumbs down..
TLDR: The Gameplays fine the combats good, I don't like Open world Slop. The quest writing sucks, Character moments are ruined by writers immaturity,
Don't ♥♥♥♥ up Revelations Square. >:[
