malvasia bianca

I was very much looking forward to playing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Its predecessor, Final Fantasy VII Remake, was probably my favorite game I played that year; and the parts that I liked the most about it were wandering around town with my party members and interacting with them while helping townspeople, I wish the game had gone on longer and I’d had more of that! So for all I know I’d quite like an open world game with the same characters, where I’d spend more time doing random stuff.

And, as it turns out: I did enjoy that! Not quite as much as I hoped: wandering around the world with my party was fun, but the checklists got a little long, and I’m not great at only doing some of the items on a checklist. So, personally, I wish that the open world had been maybe half as large as they had been?

Your party is still great. It was good to learn more about them; the bits around Cloud’s and Tifa’s past were well done, a genuinely interesting dialog with mental illness, I think. (Not sure how much of that is new to this game and how much was in the original, it’s been a couple of decades since I’ve played it.) And I still don’t know what all is going on with the alternate timeline stuff, I’m looking forward to how that plays out in the third game.

Though also I think maybe I underestimated how much I enjoy the series’s antagonists? They’re not all great (but, with the expanded party in this game compared to the original, the characters in your party aren’t all top tier either), but the parade in Junon and the bits surround it were absolutely one of my favorite parts in the game. And, later on, when I was starting to feel that it was time for the game to end, I ran into the My Friend guy again; what a wonderful character he is, 100% pure joy. So actually it turns out that my initial feeling going in was probably wrong, the antagonist interactions are quite important to me too.

Also, I want to give a shout out to chocobos. Usually, when wandering around game worlds, I prefer to go on foot: I like to stick my nose in things and grab random stuff in the environment. But Rebirth doesn’t just let you do most of that from the back of a chocobo, it frequently does it in an adorable way (I love having my chocobo repair the sign for broken down rest stops), and picking up crafting items from the environment is actually more efficient on a chocobo than on foot. So yay to the game for their solution to that design problem: they didn’t give you with a tradoff between a more pleasant way to travel versus a more pleasant way to interact with the environment, and they didn’t even solve that by making the interaction experience on foot the same as the interaction experience on the back of your vehicle: they make it so it’s actually more pleasant to interact with the environment while you’re on the faster mode of travel.

A very good game. Not quite as good as its predecessor: it went on a bit long, and its predecessor was helped by the more compact setting. But still, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it, and I’m looking forward to the final part of the trilogy.