Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth Review

Game: Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth

Developer: Square Enix Creative, Business Unit I

Genre: Action JRPG

Release Date: February 29th, 2024

Completed: March 2025 on PC

Sephiroth. Picture by The Gamer

Overall Impression

I played the first remake of this trilogy during lockdown (twice) and long yearned for Rebirth. After many moons of waiting, it was announced that the game would become available on PC, and atlas, my no-PS5-having-self was granted access. I thoroughly enjoyed Remake, specifically the combat and art on all fronts. So I was hoping for a longer game, and boy was I given that. The game is truly so cinematic and all artistic efforts have very clear attention to detail. Rebirth is an awesome, well-rounded and multifaceted action JRPG experience.

Gameplay Mechanics & Performance

Rebirth, like its predecessor, has many strengths as an RPG, specifically I note the combat style and menu gameplay. The combat is such a cool balance between real-time and semi-turn-based movement. Characters are highly customizable as players collect a variety of Materia for spells and other enhancements. As an Atlus player, I found it difficult to understand or locate the guide for each status ailment icon or understanding spells beyond the classic elemental and obvious spell names like “Barrier”. I think I launched an icon guide one time by accident but didn’t really try to find it again because my party was strong enough that I didn’t bother to look this up. 

There is a lot of replayability for this game as each party member have very different fighting styles. My most common rotation was Cloud/Aerith/Barret but sometimes it was Cloud/Tifa/Yuffie. Never Cait Sith. I found Yuffie very confusing at first, but quickly figured out her flow and actually found myself enjoying her aerial-born ninja ways. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realize that synergy skills ≠ synergy abilities. Bosses became difficult when I was party locked to only one character but it forced me to actually block, which is crazy as a mostly berserker style player. As I age, I value blocking and guarding more. It’s called maturing.

Aside from combat, the game has a plethora of things to do in the open-world style map. Each region has a series of completionist-style tasks, including BOTW looking towers, demon challenges, and side quests. As players progress, there is such a strong sense of exploration as the party traverses and returns to previous locations, encountering characters from other regions in new sites. As well, players are given the chance to have intimate conversations with each party member in certain towns. I’m not really sure what this Persona-style confidant mechanic did (besides who your “date” was in the Gold Saucer show), but I still tried to deepen my party relationships when it became available. 

Guiding you on your journey is the extremely annoying guide Chadley and his companion Mai. It's really hard for JRPGs to make a guide who is not annoying because their job is ultimately to interrupt you to teach you about the game's intricacies, while not being over-bearing. One of the only guides I can think of in a JRPG that I didn’t find super annoying is Gallica in Metaphor Re:Fantazio and second to that would be Morgana from Persona 5, but I am strongly saying second to that because he is kind of annoying too, but no one holds a candle to Chadley’s relentless, monotonous and extended banter.

On the journey, some regions are stronger than others, specifically Corel is annoying and clunky (I hated the buggy, longest mounting/dismounting animation ever) and I found myself getting lost in Gongaga with the multi-level dimensionality of the space. Similarly, I found the Gold Saucer too big to navigate even with the teleport, and I don’t like party-style minigames. Despite this, I still completed every region intel, only neglecting the final protorelic in the Meridian Ocean, as I was ready to end the game and didn’t want to level up to 65. 

On the same note, near what I thought was the end of the game, more side quests become available in every region once more. This was weird pacing and I found that the quality of quests declined in the late-game. Lots of filler, especially requiring MORE completion of the Gold Saucer Minigames, my own personal hell, as well as weird locating-style quests like that underground beast in Cosmo Canyon. 

Finally, deserving of its own paragraph, is the final boss fight in Rebirth. After many slight encounters with Sephiroth and him poisoning Cloud’s brain, the party sets off to fight him in an hour-long feat. This is a super cool final boss with so many bangers and phases. The late phase of Sephiroth reborn (my party was locked as Red XIII, Yuffie and Tifa) is the only phase I found actually annoying and not fun. Players are tasked to defeat the boss’s wings, but they null all physical damage, can only be beaten with elemental damage, and their weaknesses rotate. This was so annoying especially because the wings were in the sky a lot and the locked party members didn’t have amazing aerial range for the janky physics the developers gave to these wings. If I were to do it again, I would charge ATB by doing blocked damage to the core and then spam elemental spells. It wasn’t really clear if there is a pattern or timing to the weakness’ changing, but we powered through.

The true star of the final boss is Sephiroth proper. This was an insane battle. My heart was racing like I was a kid again! I tried this final phase initially about 6 times and then it became my bed time, so I sealed my fate to restart the entire hour-long boss the next day. I actually slept so badly and angrily that I couldn’t beat it. Fear not, because the next day I beat the whole thing on the first try. It is such an epic boss fight with cool mechanics and features the alternate timeline homie, Zack. Fighting with Zack and Cloud together is neat. 

Below I’ve made a venn-diagram about some of my gameplay experiences. It kind of came together during my note taking process. I’m pretty hyped about it, see below:

Story and Characters

The story of Rebirth and FFVII overall is semi-convoluted like any other long-form JRPG. This is my first time playing FFVII in any regard and I don’t really know how it ends (do not tell me). Rebirth offers way more story than the initial remake and dives deeply into character development, backstory and world building. There is such a strong sense of traversal and adventure as side quests draw you to recounter old friends in new places. The characters in your party have extremely distinct personalities and unique relationship dynamics to each other, with one emo boy at the heart of it all. Their shared vision for liberations and to protect the planet unites them against the beautiful and villainous Sephiroth, one of the most legendary antagonists in video games probably ever. 

As someone engaging with this story for the first time, learning the Cloud and Sephiroth background was so fitting. It may seem obvious now, especially since this game’s story is well over 25 years old, but it was cool and I guess kind of surprising to learn they started off similar both as SOLDIERS, except Sephiroth was renowned “war hero”. What did he do though? I hope this becomes clear. I understand that discovering he is birthed (?) of Jenova makes sense for his cause of rebuilding the planet from scratch but I feel like something else must have gone down to make him so freaky. I guess Jenova is such a powerful being that that could be enough to cause his freak. Maybe I’ll see later, but I think Sephiroth is such an epic character and villain and I don’t care if that could be considered “basic”. There is a reason “basic” is often so wildly enjoyed.

I did feel positively and strongly about other characters but more so in the ways their dynamics and backstory affects the party. I could feel the tension of the obvious love triangle Cloud finds himself in. It's clever and effective to have somewhat opposing personalities create a kind of tug-of-war feeling between Cloud and these women. The triangle features Tifa, your childhood friend/crush, with an unwavering sense of justice and Aerith, the whimsical and offbeat magical lady who is being targeted by Shinra and seemingly most other bad guys for her Ancient bloodline. However, we all know that Tifa and Aerith belong together, as they even go on a date in Costa Del Sol. 

Barret’s backstory had me a bit emotional. It was cool that they actually explain how he gets the gun arm and his adopted child. This was well articulated and the resulting battle with old bestie Dyne is a really cohesive and simultaneously sad way to wrap up that backstory. Barret is a cool character because he is objectively badass.

Overall, I felt the story and characters to be quite engaging. I don’t feel like a lot of plot happens at once, but rather in tiny spurts, with a lot happening at the end of the game. I don’t mind this, because I primarily play JRPGs for the gameplay first and the story second. I am looking forward to seeing how this story ends.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics and visuals in this game seemed to improve in terms of level of detail from the first remake. Many things seemed more refined, such as more human-like speech animations for the characters, a heavily expanded (and QoL upgrades, especially to the SP allocation system) menu and world map. There is also a plethora of additional elements specifically in battle like supplementary synergy skills including animations, summons and monsters (with an index). The game runs decently well despite being over 100GB and I only had the game crash twice, and why this happened is still unclear to me. It wasn’t devastating since the game has auto-save functions, just annoying. 

Besides the party, I was semi-pleased (not entirely satisfied) with the representations of different races and abilities by side characters in this game, for example the game features a deaf person doing Final Fantasy ASL of some kind who players can battle in Queen’s Blood. There was some hair texture type diversity as well, but many body types are the same skinny render. Many women are still sexualized unnecessarily, which is always disappointing but unsurprising. Coming from Atlus games, I did see more diversity in human renders in general which was cool. Of course it is an impossible task to represent everyone, but I was happy to see some clear efforts, especially from a homogeneous society like Japan.

As a die hard Atlus and SMT fan, it's impossible for me not to notice overlap and similarities between JRPGs outside of Megaten in comparison to those of the Megaten canon. I noted (images to follow below) some overlap in some characters from FFVII:Rebirth to a variety of Atlus IPs. There isn’t a point to this, I just thought it was fun. I will note that I understand that Odin is of Norse mythology as a renowned god of wisdom and war, so it is expected that many different media, even beyond JRPGs, would create representations of him or other mythical creatures. It's honestly cool to see both Square Enix and Atlus include overlapping real life histories. 

In terms of music, at first I was bummed that Rebirth won The Game Award for best score and music over Metaphor, but then I played the game and changed my mind. I have been listening to the soundtrack non-stop since beating the game. The music is incredibly well orchestrated. FFVII features some of the most iconic melodies in video game history, so I can imagine it was a daunting task to reimagine these songs in a modernized remake. Composers Masashi Hamauzu and Mitsuto Suzuki were clearly so thoughtful in their process. Many songs synthesize multiple themes from different points of the game together. Synergizing themes of different characters into battle or cinematic themes is a powerful narrative device. I particularly enjoy how some characters’ themes are set in a minor key to double-down on sad moments. The first time the battle theme Fighting plays got me so excited! This game's soundtrack had incredible range, and as a lover of orchestral music, it hit hard for me. 

Comparisons, Final Thoughts, Conclusions

This game is epic and fun. It is a lot longer than I expected and I clocked in about 105 hours by the time I finished. The end game kinda drags on, and as mentioned the quality of side quests declined greatly so I didn’t end up completing everything because of burnout, but I did come close! This is a fairly well-rounded action JRPG experience, and I would definitely recommend it. I identify as a fan of this franchise now. I am excited for the final third of this epic trilogy, but I think I’ll be waiting at least 2 years. Maybe Persona 6 will be announced while I wait…

Overall Arbitrary Rating:

8/10 spoopies