The resistance group Avalanche has been fighting a desperate war with Shinra, the ruthless corporation that rules the city of Midgar and its surrounding regions with an iron fist. However, the return of Shinra's ex-special forces operative Sephiroth, now with his own agenda that may imperil the entire world, has caused a rethink of priorities. The Avalanche splinter cell led by Barret Wallace has joined forces with Cloud Strife, Sephiroth's former protege, and set out in pursuit of the ruthless soldier. His aims remain murky, and may extend far beyond this one world...
So here we are again. Five years ago, Square released Remake, which took the opening 5-7 hours or so of the original Final Fantasy VII and expanded it into a 35-hour long epic JRPG, complete with gorgeous (if often interminable) cutscenes, spectacular battle sequences and enhanced scenes of world and character-building. When it worked, it was brilliant, adding texture and depth to the great, but occasionally sparse, original. When it faltered, you abruptly realised you were wading waist-high through sometimes repetitive and often tedious filler which, due to the game's relentless linearity, you had no choice but to engage with.
Rebirth picks up the story immediately after the events of Remake and adapts the middle 20 hours or so of the original game into a staggering 100-odd hour odyssey. Rebirth is a lot of game, hurling so many stories, characters, quests, side-quests, minigames and cutscenes at the player that it sometimes feels genuinely overwhelming. But it also has a huge strength over Remake: this time most of the filler stuff is easily identifiable and can be avoided to focus on the main storyline.
Rebirth also opens brilliantly, with our heroes taking refuge in the town of Kalm after their flight from Midgar at the end of the first part. During this sojourn, Cloud regales his team with the story of his visit to his home town of Nibelheim with Sephiroth five years earlier, culminating in the destruction of the town and the slaughter of most of its citizens after Sephiroth discovered the secrets of his own origin, hidden from him by the merciless Shinra Corporation. This flashback sequence - fully playable as it was in 1997 - serves as a new tutorial section and reacquaints the player with the controls and combat from Remake.
From there the players can explore the town of Kalm, picking up side-quests and learning to play Queen's Blood, a popular card game. Having as much interest in digital card minigames as a capybara has in nuclear physics (New Vegas' Caravan and The Witcher III's Gwent both left me cold), I was prepared to play the required one game to advance the main quest and then forget it even existed, only instead to find the best card minigame ever put in a video game. Queen's Blood is brilliant and, to my eternal shame, I spent a nontrivial amount of Rebirth's run time enhancing my deck and defeating every player I came across. More bemusingly, Queen's Blood turns out to have an entire questline dedicated to the dark secret of its creation and the fate of its creator which brings in at least one other iconic Final Fantasy VII character and ended up being very compelling despite an abruptly anticlimactic ending, making me wonder if the final game in the trilogy will revisit it. This turns out to be a recurring theme in the game, which puts what appears to be filler candyfloss in front of you which you think you can ignore but then turns out to be unexpectedly great.
From Kalm you can venture into the first of six open world zones, each one of which replicates a distinct biome or area from the original Final Fantasy VII world map. The main difference between Remake and Rebirth is the open-world approach of the latter, with a main quest marker leading you to the next chunk of the main narrative, but a whole ton of secondary icons leading you to other objectives. Seasoned Ubiclone veterans may be surprised to see the unexpected return of that old open world standby, the Radio Tower which lights up the surrounding part of the map like it's still 2013. Each one of the zones has a distinctly similar array of side-options, including finding Mako crystal formations to scan, altars to various powerful monsters to gain the insight needed to summon them on the battlefield, and Moogle traders to convince to sell stuff to you (by collecting their wayward itinerant children; by the end of the game you really want to report the Moogle parents to some sort of safeguarding authority for cute Japanese fantasy creatures, they are really terrible parents).
None of the zones apart from Corel are truly massive and are helped by different traversal options, starting with your feet but then expanding to the chicken-like chocobos, and then later a desert buggy and an aircraft that is forcibly converted into a boat. But they are absolutely packed with stuff to see and do, which can be thoroughly enjoyable but then start leaning towards the exhausting. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth often put me in mind of Baldur's Gate III for its sheer, unrelenting assault on the player's free time and focus. Arguably Rebirth suffers a bit more from this, as its story is somewhat simpler (in the original you're basically chasing Sephiroth through these zones to a showdown at an ancient temple, with Shinra occasionally showing up to throw curveballs at you) and wholly unchangeable, without the multiple endings BG3 offered. Its side-quests are also much more of a mixed bag than BG3's mostly great side-offerings, though some of them (like Barrett and Red XIII helping a Gongaga local write a children's book based on their adventures) are very charming.
Some of these side-activities are very repetitive (scanning Mako formations or doing limited Quick-Time Events to get more Summoning intel gets boring around the third time you do them, out of forty-plus times you have to do it in the whole game) and are made worse in that they are foisted on you by disturbing boy-android Chadley, whose "man in the van" role in the first game was tolerable by a relatively limited amount of screen-time but here he is an almost constant presence, constantly yelling at you through largely unskippable cutscenes to scan things or fight things for his intel purposes. Apparently he has more dialogue in the game than any of your party members, which is ludicrous. Ignoring side-missions in favour of the main quest does mean reducing your interactions with Chadley to a bare minimum, which is a strong argument in itself for that approach.
The game is at its best when it refocuses on the very things that made Final Fantasy VII so incredibly iconic: the central narrative, with its three-sided battle between Avalanche, Shinra and Sephiroth; and the superb cast of characters. Remake focused on Cloud, Barret, Aerith and Tifa, not to mention Yuffie in the Intergrade DLC (Rebirth integrates Yuffie into the main team, but takes its sweet time about it). Rebirth furthers their stories but also focuses on Red XIII (introduced at the end of Remake but here expanded to main character status) and Cait Sith. Cait Sith is easily Rebirth's biggest success over the original game, with the fairly flat original cartoon character here enhanced into a deeper and more interesting character with an endearing Scottish accent and far more useful combat utility.
But all the characters get their time in the sun: we visit Barret's home town and uncover more of his personal history and what happened to Marlene's biological parents; Tifa gets to relive the events in Nibelheim and later makes a special connection with the planet itself; Aerith uncovers more information about her ancestors and her role in the events to come; and Cloud himself uncovers more information about his past, and his muddled memories. These aspects, all highlights of the original game, are given much greater depth here and represents the remake project at its best, enriching the original to make something better.
Combat is another aspect that Rebirth has improved on. The combat system from Remake was broadly similar to the original but, instead of your characters standing around like lemons whilst their time gauges slowly filled up, they could launch basic attacks and block, filling up their time bars faster. When the time bars filled up, they could unleash special attacks or use magic or items. That system is still the same here, but now enhanced by synergy abilities, where your party members can cooperate in carrying out attack moves in concert. Combat is certainly more complex here, as you can reach a much higher level than in Remake with access to a much vaster array of Materia and weapons, but not overwhelmingly so, with a nice array of tactical options and the game almost urging you to find broken and overpowered builds. Combat can look insane and random in videos, but when you're in the thick of them they can be surprisingly deep and tactical. That said, some boss fights (like the final one of the game) do go massively overboard in how long and gruelling they can be.
Environments are impressive, with a nicely evolving sense of locations as the game continues. You start in the medieval throwback town of Kalm and then cross the vast Grasslands to the swamps and mountains, beyond which lies the rocky coastlands around Junon. Then it's across the ocean to the balmy seaside resort of Costa del Sol and then the Corel Region, with its mixture of desert badlands and temperate woods (plus the gleaming techno-paradise of the Gold Saucer, this world's Las Vegas but only somehow more garish, fake and tiresome). South lies the thick jungles of Gongaga, whilst the vast Cosmo Canyon lies to the west. To the north lies Nibelheim and its mountains and islands rearing out of the ocean. A final journey sees you crossing the Meridian Ocean in search of pirate treasure and the fabled Gilgamesh Island (site of the game's most insane, but fortunately ignorable, battle challenges). These environments are all well-realised, and the best thing about Remake - taking those grainy 2D backgrounds from the original game and turning them into amazing 4K locations, fully explorable - is turned up to eleven here. Iconic locations like Junon Harbour, the Gold Saucer and the Temple of the Ancients are realised here on a scale and in a fidelity utterly unthinkable in 1997.
Graphically, though, the game can be a little of a mixed bag. The character models, especially of the main cast, are all incredible, with amazing detail, skin textures and hair. But the environments can sometimes feel a bit undercooked, with weirdly low-res textures on mountains, rockfaces and roads even with everything turned up to eleven. The game's graphical options are also limited (particularly annoyingly trying to turn frame generation on even if your hardware is good enough not to need it). The PC version of the game still does look amazingly beautiful at times, but Final Fantasy VII Rebirth definitely isn't quite challenging recent games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, Alan Wake 2 or Baldur's Gate III in terms of consistent visual quality.
Like Remake before it, though, the soundtrack cannot be faulted. OG Final Fantasy VII has one of the best soundtracks of all time and both Remake and Rebirth faithfully recreate the original soundtrack and then enhance it with stunning and far more epic new arrangements of the classic songs, as well as wholly new tracks. The amount of music in the game will cause your brain to start melting at a certain point, especially when you realise Rebirth's most random new mission type - escort missions for certain types of cats and dogs (!) - has its own dedicated set of songs.
Rebirth does eventually come to an end, and like Remake before it, the ending is a bit too smart-arse for its own good. The remake trilogy is not just retelling the original Final Fantasy VII story but expanding it with some kind of parallel universe/alternate timeline gubbins. Some of this new material is great - a chance to play as perennial FF7 also-ran character Zack in an alternate version of Midgar in brief interstitial storyline moments is surprisingly enjoyable - but it's a ton of complicated new material on top of a game that already famously has a dense, complex storyline complete with fake memories, plot twists and intricate politics. Rebirth's endgame is even more interminable than Remake's and the crowning emotional moment of the entire FF7 narrative (you know the bit if you know) is left a bit swamped by vagueness in its retelling here.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (****) is a vast amount of video game, with a colossal amount of story, characters and gameplay. Fans of the original game with its much tighter focus and story may find the constant interruptions from new side-activities in this remake extremely frustrating, but at least this time around you can mostly ignore that material. But some of that stuff is great, and genuinely worth a look for how it enhances the original story and character arcs. There is so much in this game that I've barely scratched the surface here. I haven't even mentioned the Gold Saucer opera that you get to take part in, or the full-blown J-pop number that greets you on your arrival there, or Cloud's potential new careers as a professional photographer or Segway advertiser, or the stuff related to late-arriving party members Cid and Vincent or...you get the idea.
The game is overstuffed, sometimes too silly, sometimes too grimdark and sometimes too disrespectful of your time, but it's also heartfelt, funny, touching, action-packed and epic in a way too few video games genuinely are. It's also a major improvement over Remake, and leaves the decks clear for the third and final game in the trilogy to end things (hopefully more concisely) in style.
