The original Final Fantasy VII from 1997 was my favourite game of all time. It's the game that was the reason I got a PlayStation. I have done multiple 100% playthroughs of the original game over the past nearly 30 years.
This remake had so much potential. There are moments of legitimate wonder, like coming over that first hill and seeing the Grasslands around Kalm for the first time. It's moments like those that led me to believe Rebirth could be not only a good adaptation of the 1997 original, but one of the best videogames I've ever played.
Unfortunately, 160+ hours later, I'm nearly at the end of my playthrough but completely at the end of my patience with this game's mechanics.
The minigames in FF7 Rebirth are some of the most rage-inducing experiences I’ve had in 40+ years of gaming. They are not fair. They are not fun. And they take a game that was easily aiming for my top 10 of all time out of that contention. Way out.
I have spent most of my free time over the past several weeks screaming 100+ decibel profanities at my TV because of these minigames. I have not thrown my controller, but man have I come close to it.
Here’s a perfect example of how terrible these minigames are.
in the 1997 version of Final Fantasy 7, so long as you were smart about chocobo breeding, you could eventually get to a point where you’d dominate every chocobo race you entered. How good you were at chocobo racing was entirely down to your own strategy and skill.
In FF7 Rebirth, you’re instead racing on courses littered with obstacles, and while you can do your best to avoid most of them, in the end it’s up to the game’s RNG how successful you’ll be at avoiding some of them, or the other racers. And you can’t mess up even once, because the computer-controlled racers definitely won’t. Collide with one of the RNG-dependent Cactuar gates just seconds before you would have crossed the finish line at last? Too bad. Start the whole five-minute race over again. For the fifteenth time.
I do not understand at all the JRPG game designer obsession with punishing players for anything less than perfection. I know in their culture it’s all about overcoming the challenges and earning your victories or something like that, but I do not enjoy spending two hours repeating a task that would take five minutes if the game design only allowed for something less than 100% perfect play.
Like, if I wanted to face that kind of challenge, I’d play games against other humans. But I manifestly DO NOT enjoy those kinds of challenges — that is why I gravitate to RPGs instead of shooters or sports games — so don’t clog up my experience with all this aneurysm-inducing nonsense.
And yeah, I know the minigames are “optional” in this game, except they’re kind of really not “optional” if significant chunks of game lore and the best in-game gear are all gated behind these story-halting execrable experiences.
It's not just the minigames, either. I hope you like your battles to range between "tedious five-minute slugfest" and "completely unfair game mechanics that will have you resisting with all your might the urge to hurl your controller through your screen". I have just rage-quit the final battle of the game because, after an hourlong chain of five battles in a row with varying degrees of player-hating game design and built-in unfairness, the final battle simply exhausted any remaining patience I had left for this experience. I was literally seconds away from beating the final boss and watching the credits roll when yet another "kill the entire party in one hit"attack triggered before I could heal, so game over it was. At this point I realiesd I am not enjoying this game. I am enduring it.
Again, the battle mechanics of the original game meant you didn't have to have twitch-shooter reflexes in order to succeed. With sufficient planning, adequate resources, and patience, you could beat any challenge in the 1997 version. In this version, if you don't have split-second reflexes, good luck to you. And it's not like I need to "get good" or whatever; I've played Cyberpunk 2077 on Very Hard without issue. Cyberpunk is a good example of a game that manages to *challenge* a player without *punishing* the player. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is just non-stop punishment at every turn.
I hope they pare back on the worst aspects of this game for the next one, but I have a bad feeling that they’re going to double down instead. I’ll be close to 50 years old when the next game comes out, so this is how I die: on my 4K TV, a dejected chocobo repeatedly does post-race consolation laps after getting second place, and there I am slumped in my chair, bloody foam running from my mouth and down my jawline, having suffered a massive stroke after hurling a 120-decibel four-letter word toward the TV for the 20th time that evening.
This game's visuals are a 10 out of 10. The characters are mostly faithful to their original incarnations. The locations trigger waves of nostalgia. The materia system is as intricate and involving as ever. The story is quite a lot more obtuse and meandering than the original was. The sidequests and Chadley content are not something I really enjoyed much and probably won't do again.
In fact, unlike the 1997 version, it's unlikely I'll ever replay this one. I might not even "legitimately" finish this one on normal difficulty, because the thought of slogging through that hour of battles again has me wanting to uninstall the game instead. I will likely swallow my pride and turn on all the "convenience" features to make my characters invincible so I can cruise past these terribly-designed final battles and finally see the end of this game I've been playing for nearly a month straight.
As for replayability - that's a big no from me. I won't even attempt playing this game on hard mode; that does not sound like a remotely fun experience to me.
I wanted to love this game. It had so many of the right ingredients for one of my favourite games of all time. Instead, slowly but steadily, hour by hour, I came to hate it. I don't think it's the insult to the original or complete travesty that internet keyboard warriors like to paint it as, but neither do I think this game truly does itself justice. Above all else, it's the gameplay experience that lets this game down. After several dozen hours of playing Rebirth, it started feeling less like something I enjoyed and more like a second job, and one that's somehow even more irritating than the job I actually get paid to do.
Having played both FF7 Remake and Rebirth now, I honestly don't know if I'll play the third instalment. If the gameplay in the next one is anything like what I've just spent weeks suffering through in Rebirth, I might just give the next one a miss and replay the 1997 version for the 40th time instead.
