Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Review — A GOTY Worthy RPG
Despite dated fluff, poor performance, and questionable visuals, Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth is one of the best modern RPGs you can play.
I wouldn’t be far off the mark if I said that Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth is probably the biggest new game coming out in 2024. Sure, games like Call of Duty and FIFA may sell more, but the second entry in Square Enix’s trilogy remake of the beloved 1997 original had a fervour behind it that’s quite unlike a lot of modern releases. Final Fantasy fans are some of the most dedicated, and often some of the most critical, and while 2020’s Remake was well received it wasn’t beyond criticism.
Overly linear for most of the 30–40 hour runtime, occasionally painful padding born out of the expansion of the original game, and the severely backloaded story beats all come to mind. Well, fear not, because Rebirth picks up immediately where Remake left you in 2020, and goes some lengths to make those issues less apparent, if not erase them entirely.
Thing is — I’m not a Final Fantasy fan. The only game I’ve played in the series is FF7 Remake, and I finished that… in February, just before Rebirth came out. This positions me rather uniquely as someone who not only hasn’t played the original game (I know, I know, blasphemy) but also hasn’t played any other mainline Final Fantasy game. So, with nothing to compare Rebirth to — aside from other non-Final Fantasy open world RPGs — where have I landed on it?
Well it’s really, really good. I’m about 20 hours in, in Chapter 5, which puts me at around a third of the way through the main story if I was to push past all of the optional side stuff. Obviously, speaking carefully, that means I can’t speak to how Rebirth handles the larger story beats of the original game. At least not yet. But I can say with some certainty that Rebirth is a really impressive open world RPG. One that will probably — bar some kind of shock release later down the line — win The Game Awards’ GOTY.
The game starts with Cloud, Tifa, Aerith, Barret, and Red journeying away from Midgar, escaping the wrath of corporate overlords Shinra after the events of the first game. From there you’ll journey across the lands in pursuit of Sephiroth, to stop the impending destruction of the planet that he plans to usher in, along with understanding the reason for it. It’s a simple pitch, and follows the motives that were laid all the way back in the original.
But this is not the Final Fantasy 7 of your childhood. Evoking feelings similar to Fallout 3’s vault escape, or Bioshock’s underwater unveiling, Rebirth unleashes you in a fully open world that laughs in the face of the Remake’s linear design, and will blow the minds of those who have only played the original. Worryingly, at least at first, there’s a hint of the open world map clutter that Ubisoft popularised in the 2000s and that has since plagued open worlds of every size and regard since.
For example, the lovable/ hateable android Chadley has Cloud locating and climbing radio towers to scan the map and unlock points of interest to go and explore, half a dozen times per new open world area. It’s tiresome at this point, and I’m surprised (and a little disappointed) to see Square Enix lean on a mechanic that, influential though it may be, is more than a little tired in 2024.
But in defence of Rebirth’s general open world systems, the game provides ample reason to go and explore the areas that these towers highlight. Encounters with rarer monsters — called ‘Fiend Intel’ — challenge the player to use Rebirth’s excellent hybrid combat system in harder scenarios than you’ll find in most of the open world. ‘Protorelics’ tie into an absurdly entertaining set of side quests (and one intriguing overarching character) and are unique per area. There’s half a dozen more activities on top of these too.
What Rebirth does well is tying these into the overall progression loop. For example, Chadley will give you a new summon materia for every new area. By default, they’re a one star summon, and you have to beat them in a hard boss fight first to obtain them. But, by finding and completing that areas ‘Sanctuaries’, you will simultaneously make the summon stronger and the boss fight easier. Though you can still choose to fight the summon on the hardest difficulty, if you prefer. Either way, as long as you’ve found these Sanctuaries and completed their mini-games, that summon will now be four star. How nice.
Likewise, if you find and interact with all of the Lifesprings in an area, you’ll unlock a secret (and tough) boss fight that’s completely unique. Using your Chocobo to complete excavations may unlock new crafting recipes. Finding Chocobo stops gives you more fast travel points. You get it. What’s more, each of these activities award a currency that you can use to buy unique Materia from Chadley. Materia that is markedly more useful than the ones you’ll start the game with.
Square have done a brilliant job making these side activities rewarding, even if they’re not particularly interesting in and of themselves. The side effect is that, if you’re locked in on map clearing, Final Fantasy Rebirth is a staggeringly massive game. At my current rate I’ll be looking at a 70–80 hour save before I see the credits, which is more than double what I managed on Remake. I’m not even going for a completionist playthrough, and have so far only done about half of the optional stuff available to me.
Pacing is a concern for sure. I’d urge players to save that completionist run for their second or third play throughs, if only because proper narrative beats will otherwise come five to ten hours apart. It took me almost ten hours to leave the Grasslands, which is what essentially amounts to the game’s tutorial area. At that pace you’ll have likely forgotten what the main story quest wants you to do, or even what exactly the last beat was, which can feel a little off kilter when the main quest is basically ‘Stop Sephiroth Destroying The World’.
Quick, everyone chant ‘ludonarrative dissonance’ three times to appease the think piece gods.
So yeah, there’s a little fluff, and I can’t rightly say whether that will sit right with people expecting another leaner RPG. It’s incredibly easy to get lost in the world Square Enix have created, which is hardly a bad thing. But, in a different way to Remake’s pacing woes, the main story almost feels like a side character at times. Lean is the exact opposite of what Rebirth represents. If you’re anything like me, then you’ll find yourself wearily looking at yet another fog-of-war, icon covered map with tired eyes. But credit where it’s due, Square Enix have made a finer attempt than most at making it feel welcoming.
The major upside of all the extra side content? The chance to spend time with Rebirth’s combat system. To say it’s an improvement on Remake’s would be understating the situation, and it’s not like it was a slouch to begin with. Cloud now has a fully realised aerial capability, something that felt sorely missing in Remake. Where I’d often feel forced to camp as Barret or Aerith in the Remake, I’m now engaging in lite DMC-style juggling with Cloud’s oversized sword. It’s a small change in the grand scheme of things, but something that has transformed the way I approach fights.
In the same vein, Cloud’s sword now has the ability to fire off projectiles at a fair distance. You may have to suspend some narrative belief a bit to accept it on a canon level (like why could he not do this literally 12 hours ago in Midgar?) but in terms of sheer gameplay chops, it allows Cloud to play in the same field as the aforementioned Barret and Aerith, pinging off long range combos when you need to duck out of close combat or sit outside AoE range.
Throw in the new Synergy Limit Break attacks that combine two characters in flashy combos for huge damage, and Rebirth feels like a much more complete combat system than what most open world RPGs can offer, let alone a Final Fantasy game. It plays like a character action game at times, and most of the games in that genre can’t boast the scope or depth that Rebirth provides as well.
All of this is held together by a cast of characters that can stand up there with the best of them. I still find Cloud sullen to the point of annoyance, but with the cast around him providing the brevity that he lacks, he’s nowhere near as unbearably-edgy as it was in the Remake. There, Cloud had his fair share of solo moments and his lack of personality let those sections down. In Rebirth, you’re rarely without at least one or two of the core group, and the game handles both serious and silly ideas with an assuring hand.
A lot of the credit should be put in the hands of the cast, who bring to life these famous characters in a way that surprised me — not a Final Fantasy guy — to no end in Remake, and even more so here in Rebirth. They’re all equally lovable, with flaws and perks spread out amongst them. Side quests will often focus on Cloud’s relationship with a single character, and they’ll take part in conversations as if they were the main character, even going so far as to feature charming back and forth banter with Cloud during gameplay moments.
This in particular is nice, as it helps round out these larger-than-life characters beyond what Remake was able to bring to the table. Cloud is less of the reluctant mercenary in this, and more of a willing teammate, and combining that with the stellar voice cast and writing team makes for an entertaining time.
Whether you’re playing dress up in a parade, or listening to Barrett wax lyrical about his love for his daughter, or dealing with Cloud’s PTSD-driven visions of Sephiroth, Rebirth sways from the ridiculous to the deadly serious almost on a mission-by-mission basis. It’s something that the JRPG genre seems to have a grasp on more than any other; of how to toe that line between silly and serious. Rebirth hasn’t (yet) gone too far one way or another. Despite how cartoony it can get, it rarely falls out of tune with the rest of the game surrounding it.
That same consistency cannot be carried over to the visuals though, I’m sad to say. For a 2024 game, Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth sports a startling range of visual quality. Occasionally (like in the shot above) you’d be forgiven for thinking this is a last-generation RPG, with muddy, low res textures everywhere within eyesight. The environments around you aren’t reactive at all, which is hardly a dealbreaker most of the time, but it’s compounded by these irregularities. If the game looked beautiful at all times, I could forgive the painted on foliage or occasional lacklustre character models.
Instead, just about every NPC outside of your own squad look a generation behind, with incredibly poor lip syncing to match. Interior and exterior environments often look surprisingly low in detail, despite an art style that’s thankfully pretty stunning across the board. In other places (particularly in cutscenes and combat) Rebirth actually looks at least as good as the competition. There’s a polygonal minigame called Fort Condor which honestly looks beautiful, for instance.
But I’d be lying if I thought Rebirth looked anywhere near as good as even some games on the last generation, be that Red Dead Redemption 2, or fellow PlayStation exclusives Horizon Zero Dawn and Ghost of Tsushima. Rebirth’s direction and sense of scale is excellent though, it should be said. One vista that included multiple shipwrecks, cliff faces, and shores took my breath away. I had a similar reaction exploring the deck of a Shinra battle ship, with hovering docked ships filling up the view into the sky.
Square Enix have done a brilliant job filling these environments with beautiful things, but they’re often only beautiful at arms length. Pop-in is rampant across both performance modes on PS5, with shadows and foliage loading in mere steps ahead of Cloud and co. While I got used to it eventually, hopping between it and other more impressive new-gen games (like Horizon Forbidden West or God of War Ragnarok) makes for a startling jump in quality.
What’s more, the 60fps (ish) performance mode is a rough time. As reported by Digital Foundry, and since confirmed by many others, it actually makes the image quality seem blurry. I’m not sure what the root cause is — and Square Enix have confirmed they’re looking into it regardless — but for now I can’t recommend that those who are sensitive to image quality touch the performance mode with a barge pole. Which leaves the quality mode as the only option.
It looks the best in this mode by a country mile, but you’re capped at 30fps in an action game. This is far from ideal at the best of times, but the game seems to struggle to even maintain 30fps during combat and the accompanying visual effects. The additional lack of effective motion blur makes the image seem choppy when things are moving at a faster pace as well. This is not the same excellent 30fps experience you might find in Forza Horizon 5, for example. Hmm. Not really an ideal way to play it either then? Well, it’s better than the performance mode by a fair distance still, so it’s the lesser of two evils for now.
Thankfully, these complaints about the visuals/ technical shenanigans aren’t deal breakers by any means. For the last week, I’ve essentially played nothing else, sucked in by a lovable cast of characters and fleshed out world that elevates the original game much further than 2020’s Remake ever managed. Near best-in-class cutscenes and character models (for the main characters anyway) make living through the dramatic story moments a pleasure, and this is all capped off by a combat system that’s amongst the best you’ll find in a proper RPG.
Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth isn’t perfect. But it’s pretty damn great, and that’s coming from someone that doesn’t even like Final Fantasy that much. If you love the franchise? I’d wager this might become one of your favourite games of all time.
