an open world of opportunities

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is in a bit of a strange position. Usually, when four years pass between one chapter and another, you would expect the new episode to make significant changes to distance itself from its predecessor but, given that it was born as a remake of a single game, this series needs to be more cohesive and coherent. And that means changes and additions can’t be that dramatic.

Rebirth takes a step back and approaches the problem from a new angle, using the original tale to its advantage. The game is no longer so linear, leaving Midgar and exploring the wider world, and offers large open spaces to explore. It is not an open world, however: similar to Final Fantasy XVI, when it is time for the story to move forward, the path will resemble a corridor more than a sandbox.

And there’s a fair amount of stuff to do, even if not right away. After a linear section in the village of Kalm, the gang makes their way into a lush open area with green fields and little oddities stretching as far as the eye can see. After all the open worlds we’ve seen over the years, we know that this kind of landscape wants you to get off the main path and explore a bit, leaving the main quest in a corner for a while.

How the open world works —

After wandering around empty and aimless landmarks, however, we realized that the game wanted us to walk to the opposite side of this open area to activate a section of the main story before the open world activities triggered. Revealing them in this way seemed like a truly bizarre choice, if we consider that the beauty of open areas full of activity is the thrill of discovery: arriving at a destination and discovering what mini-adventure awaits you, seeing something beyond the horizon and running towards her, completely unaware of what she might have in store for you.

On the contrary, by the time these activities are unlocked, that thrill of discovery will be long gone, because we already had a certain familiarity with the area, acquired after having run around it far and wide. Such a seemingly small decision really takes away a lot from the appeal of having open world style areas in a game like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

That said, once unlocked, the activities are quite fun. If you’ve played any of the open world games of the last decade, you won’t find anything particularly surprising about them, yet it’s still nice to have some combat challenges or puzzle platforming sections in a series like this. The hunting challenges in particular are fun, as they ask you to achieve certain objectives such as staging the prey instead of just killing it.

Rogue Nostalgia —

Plus, some include little stories, and that’s where FF7 has always shined: they’re often just minor encounters, but their charm and personality plays to the game’s biggest strength, something that’s often forgotten in open-ended design world.

The story sequences are as strong as ever in Rebirth and, while we only played a limited portion of the early game, it’s clear that the game hasn’t lost a single iota of the careful craftsmanship that characterized the Remake and, more importantly, importantly, it is clear that the plot of the saga was planned in detail in advance.

It may sound obvious, but given that this is the second of three parts from what was originally a single game, there was always the possibility that this middle chapter would feel a little flat compared to the first and last acts. We won’t be 100% sure how things will end until we see the epilogue, of course, but the opening story segments in Rebirth show that certain revelations, certain details, and even some of the original’s most beloved scenes they were kept warm just for this second episode to make sure it was as nostalgic as the first.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the verdict (for now) —

Combat hasn’t changed, for the most part, in Rebirth. The hybrid solution between real-time and ATB is the same as the first chapter, with the only noteworthy addition represented by the combo attacks, in which two characters launch a rapid duo move. As you’d expect, some of these moves deal massive damage, while others inflict buffs or debuffs that can help out in battle – plus, there’s a new skill tree that focuses on powering up these special attacks.

These first few hours show that Final Fantasy VII Rebirth can strike the right balance between the need to move forward and not feel too different from the first chapter. Things like the combat and narrative approach have remained largely the same, but the world design and story pacing have been tweaked to better fit this central portion of the story, which should, hopefully, set the tone for a climactic ending when everything comes to an end.

Written by Ryan Woodrow for GLHF