I was really excited for this game after playing remake + intermission (still have to play crisis core) and to be blunt, it's been a while since I've been this disappointed. Remake had such a winning formula with its courage to stray from the original story as a remake, deep characterizations, awesome environments and doing justice to the character designs. Even the sidequests felt good, fleshing out the world and getting more in touch with the setting and the people in it.
Alas, this isn't a review of Remake, this is about Rebirth.
To start off, it's extremely poorly optimized and keeps freezing even in pre-rendered cutscenes. My specs are admittedly not top of the line but good enough to run most contemporary games without issue, except this one.
The story so far is good, obviously; it is FF7 after all but it keeps being interrupted by some of the most infuriating mandatory minigames I've ever had to deal with. A minigame here or there would not warrant a complaint from me but they are constant and they are often evidently unfinished and not well thought-through. A lot of the controls are really clunky and they don't really add anything other than padded playtime. When I initiate a main story quest, I foolishly expect to progress the story, have interesting character moments, see what happens next, but instead the tension and momentum keeps being broken up by these minigames.
The world is an open world and it feels like it is such for the sake of being one, not because they had a cool concept for it. There's a ton of chores that repeat and repeat and repeat and as if that wasn't grindy enough, they also keep getting interrupted by chadley, who not once has said something that actually added anything so far. I liked chadley in remake, but rebirth is making me despise his presence. Every time I finish one of the knockoff ubisoft open world chores (even ubisoft makes them more intresting), chadley facetimes me to let me know something to the effect of "wow, you did that" and it is infuriating. But wait, there's more! Navigating the world is also quite awkward, where you can either deal with clunky context buttons on foot or bump into every pebble with your chocobo, and every time you bump into something, you get a fun animation in which your chocobo bounces back and shakes it off, which was cute at first but after the 50th time, it just eats up time when I'm just trying to get to the next place. You can also go faster on your chocobo but when you do, there's almost no steering, so you just bump into even more and it doesn't speed you up at all in the end.
The side quests are also a big disappointment. As I mentioned above, in Remake, they were fleshing out the world and the people in it and now...it's mainly a collection of mid at best minigames and every now and then, you get a cute line from one of your party members because for some reason every side quest is now tied to a party member who gains affection when you finish it. Why is the affection system here? Beats me. It just makes side quests feel more hollow and less like helping people because it feels good to do and more to impress one of your friends as if it was a dating sim of sorts.
All in all, they should've left the game in the oven for another year or two, optimize it, flesh out the world, rethink side systems, ask whether all these minigames and interruptions are really necessary and what the players would enjoy. All the prolonged animations, mini-cutscenes in the middle of chores, side quests feeling like chores are things that just make me feel like this game does not respect my time and that's really disappointing after how genuinely great the first game of the remake trilogy was.
I hope they rein it in and get their stuff together for the third game at least because it truly is a tragedy to see this much potential and a winning concept to just go to waste for reasons I could not hope to understand.
