Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: Basically Mario Party

I just finished playing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which is the second game in the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy, and FF7 Rebirth is undoubtedly a great video game with outstanding music, amazing character performances, and much-improved combat. However, FF7 Rebirth does have some flaws as well, and I will talk about all of that down below. 

Right off the bat, I want to say that the FF7 Rebirth soundtrack is simply incredible. It is probably my favourite soundtrack of any Final Fantasy game, and it is probably in my top five video game soundtracks of all time. There is everything from orchestral pieces in major cut-scenes to techno bangers as battle themes. There is something for everyone's tastes. There has also been a noticeable improvement in the combat system as well from FF7 Remake. I felt like there was a better mapping of the action buttons which made the player experience feel more intuitive. It felt easier for me to block, dodge, and switch between characters on the fly. The overall presentation and visuals are solid with a few performance hiccups, but the presentation did not wow me like FF7 Remake did.

In FF7 Rebirth, there is a huge emphasis on the characters themselves, more so than the story itself. With the character emphasis, there is an even greater emphasis on developing the relationships between the main party, and many of the side characters as well. Every character in the main party had their moments to shine, and the voice acting and dialogue was excellent. With that said, the overall story within FF7 Rebirth is not up to same high standard as the other praised aspects of the game. The story in FF7 Rebirth does not get interesting until you get to the Gold Saucer for the first time.

FF7 Rebirth goes the Ubisoft route of introducing big open-world sections with many different things to do to fill your time between progressing through the main story. I noticed while playing the game that the developers were trying to indirectly lead me through these points-of-interest on the way to the next point where the main story continues, but the open-world stuff still hurts the overall pacing of the game. If you only completed the main story, FF7 Rebirth would only take you around 30 hours to complete, but completing all the side activities would easily take you over 100 hours in the game.

FF7 Rebirth has a shocking number of mini-games in this game, and that is just the mini-games you must play in the main story. There are even more mini-games in the side content. I think you could genuinely make a Mario Party-typed game with all the mini-games in FF7 Rebirth. I have mixed opinions of these mini-games; some of these mini-games are fun while many more are a grind to get through.

Overall, I enjoyed my time playing FF7 Rebirth, but there were obvious signs that Square Enix were trying to pad the length of the game with content. I still think FF7 Remake is the better game out of the two because Remake felt like a tighter, more focused experience, and it took place in a better section of the FF7 story. FF7 Rebirth felt like a true Square Enix game with some Ubisoft execution, to its detriment. FF7 Rebirth is still a lot of fun to play, and the thing I will remember the most is the music, and the character development of Cloud and the other party members.