First of all, I've never written a Steam review before, but after playing Rebirth I genuinely felt that I should leave a review simply because someone might actually be helped by knowing what they are getting into.
Rebirth had the potential to be a genuinely good game, but a series of bad design choices in almost every aspect (although, to be honest, they feel less like choices and more like a lack of competence and painfully outdated sensibilities) ultimately turned it into a rather pathetic game.
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1. Mini-games are not the real problem
Everyone complains about the mini-games, but that is almost giving Rebirth too much credit. The real problem is the complete absence of restraint.
Mini-games, forced sequences, forced interactions, extra modes, repeated challenges, the game keeps introducing things that would be perfectly acceptable in moderation, then proceeds to give you absolutely no moderation whatsoever.
The combat, while it does look like something from a Chinese mobile game made in 2017 with the excessive air combo ♥♥♥♥, is decent enough to carry an RPG by itself, which makes it particularly impressive that Square Enix managed to bury it under all this other stuff.
2. Exploration is bizarrely miserable
The open world is enormous and beautiful, and apparently the developers decided the best way to make you enjoy it was to make moving through it as irritating as possible.
Each zone is basically one giant puzzle. Paths twist around for no reason, obvious routes are blocked by invisible walls, and you constantly reach places that look accessible only to discover that, no, apparently Cloud is incapable of stepping over that particular piece of geometry.
Mounts are painstakingly badly designed. You ride along and constantly bump into one of the 8000 pebbles that the dev put in for no reason, and the bird does its little flapping animation and locks you up for two full seconds. This happens constantly. It genuinely stops you from pressing the G key and rather run everywhere.
For a AAA game released in 2024, this genuinely feels embarrassing.
3. The game constantly gets in its own way
One of the most frustrating things about Rebirth is how often it refuses to simply let you keep playing.
You finish a quest and have to sit through the completion animation. You trigger something and suddenly the game takes control away from you for another little sequence (there's this kid called chadley that'll make you want to quit the game). You pick something up, open something, interact with something, and there is another unnecessary animation, notification, transition or dialogue before you can move again.
The game is so desperate to try and show stuff that they think is cool (but of course the opposite) that it frequently kills its own pacing.
4. The writing and direction feel painfully dated
It feels less like natural writing/characterization and more like watching a group of executives in their 60s enthusiastically recreate what they remember young people enjoying.
The character models are 'somewhat' detailed and the presentation is expensive, but the dialogue, gestures, character animation and so-called comedies feel like someone's idea of “cool” from forty years ago (Yuffie is probably the worst offender)
I hate the word cringe and I think the word hurts a lot of things, but sadly it's the only word that's able to explain the game. The game keeps insisting that these characters are cute, funny, sexy, badass or emotionally devastating, but somehow they managed to make it worse than the original game.
5. An empty world
The world looks like an enormous amount of effort went into it, which makes it even more sad for the devs that almost all of that effort ends up feeling pointless.
NPCs aren't Cs (characters), they are props. People just stand in their designated spots and you can't meaningfully interact with them at all. In fact, they're somehow worse than invisible objects because they're collidable 'pillars' making you wish they weren't there.
The same goes for the environments. There are countless detailed buildings and rooms you can enter, but once you're inside, there is essentially nothing to do. You can't interact with anything, you can't sit down, you can't do anything that makes the place feel lived-in.
And the funniest part is that even something as basic as sitting down on a couch apparently wasn't worth implementing. Cloud already has the sitting animation and assets (for benches), so this wasn't even a development effort they couldn't afford.
They put an absurd amount of effort into making the world look detailed, only to make it completely meaningless through unbelievably shallow interaction design.
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Overall, it genuinely feels like the devs worked incredibly hard to make a good game, then spent the rest of the development cycle finding new ways to make sure it wasn't one. At this point, I honestly have to admire the consistency.
Sad game for everyone. Sad for original fans, sad for new fans, sad for devs.
