From Pixels to Perfection: A Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Review

After playing through Final Fantasy 7 Remake for the first time last month and absolutely adoring it, I started counting down the hours till I could get my hands on its sequel.

On Feb. 29th, I took my lunch break right at noon so I could go line up in front of my local GameStop and pick up my copy. The line's collective feeling of excitement was something that I hadn't felt in ages, since standing outside of my old mall's GameStop back in 2012 for Pokemon Black 2, or waiting in the cold outside of Target for the Nintendo Switch in 2017. It was nostalgic, it was refreshing, it was... A great experience.

I drove home from the store wearing Rebirth's pre-order bonus trucker hat, feeling both excited and slightly concerned. Remake had set such a high bar in my head that would be hard to meet on a good day. Additionally, recent big-box launches had tempered my expectations to prepare for an incomplete buggy mess that would only mature months or years after launch. When I got home, I swallowed my concerns, put the first disc into my PS5, then went upstairs to finish my shift.

That afternoon, I sat down on my couch and began my journey through one of the grandest RPGs I've ever played. Where do I even begin?

This game is long. I genuinely cannot remember the last time a AAA game broke my $1/hr value metric so effortlessly, which is really impressive considering its MSRP of $70. At the time of writing, I'm still not done with the game, but I feel I have to start typing something now otherwise this post won't be ready by Friday. By the time I'm done editing this and the post launches, I expect I will be complete with a play-time of around 76 hours. I'll add an edit below if this changes.

Total tangent for a second, but I wanted to say how exceptionally glad I am that Square Enix is one of the few companies that still knows how to do big-box launches well. I only saw one or two minor visual bugs during my entire experience; it was fluid and stunning the entire way through.

This is also the second time that I've become totally and utterly enthralled with one of their works due to a demo they released a few weeks before launch. Even if demos are technically expensive, they still work. My obsessions with FFXVI and Remake/Rebirth are certainly testaments to that.

If Remake was the prologue that explained how the party got together, Rebirth is the start of the actual adventure. Your party of five (eventually joined by Yuffie & Cait Sith) set out to explore the reaches of the planet and learn about the mystery of Shinra's black robed men. Throughout the story you meet a wide variety of peoples whose lives have been impacted by Shinra, and try to figure out the company's plans now that it's operating under new management.

Remake was extremely story-driven and always locked in on whatever the current story beat was, minus a few comedic bits here or there. In contrast, Rebirth takes on a much more aloof feeling, which is fitting for its new adventure game status. Yuffie brings an immature comedic relief to a party made of very serious people while Tifa and Red keep everyone focused. Aerith is almost always poking fun at Cloud, and Barret acts as the chaperone of it all. The dumb banter and jokes that you listen to throughout your journey make the group feel more like a proper family of circumstance.

As the game progresses, you not only learn more about the mysteries behind Sephiroth and Shinra, but also about each of your party members and their motivations. It starts in right in chapter one with the Nibelheim flashback, and continues later on with homecoming arcs for several of your party members. These story beats were well-written, well-directed, extremely impactful, and proved to be some of my favorite parts of the entire game.

Honestly, one of the reasons the narrative hit so hard was because of the exceptional voice acting that brought Rebirth's characters to life. Everyone did a great job in Remake, but most of them deserve awards for their work here. One specific act that really impacted me was John Eric Bentley's performance in Chapter 8. If he's not nominated for best supporting actor at the Game Awards this year, I'll be really pissed.

In terms of visuals, Rebirth looks astounding. This is one of the first games where I've seriously been floored at how good it looks. But it wasn't because of the typical flashy graphics that next-gen consoles promise all the time, but rather the insane amount of visual detail that was put into the characters.

I can't help but gush about the animations and facial rigging. The character animations in Rebirth are genuinely next level, with body– and more specifically facial– performances detailed enough to add a whole new layer of nuance to the game. Slight gaze diversion in menus, minuscule facial movements for smirks and scoffs, even down to pupil dilation in some cutscenes. Genuinely astounding.

Every other visual is just icing on the cake to me. The characters still have their amazing designs and outfits, the combat effects and animations are total eye candy, the environments are breathtaking, etc. Rebirth's cutscenes were directed in a way that they felt properly embedded and cinematic, not just cutaways to add extra narrative. I honestly came to like all of the real-time cutscenes way better than the pre-rendered ones. Beautiful art direction here, everyone who worked on this game should really pat themselves on the back.

As for gameplay, I feel it's best I go ahead and address the elephant in the room. I've seen people say that they love the new open-world design and emphasis on exploration, and I've seen people say that it can be tedious at times. In my mind, this design change is very much a "Is the glass half full or half empty?" situation, and I can understand both arguments.

On the one hand, if you look at Rebirth as a standalone open-world game, you'll probably be unimpressed with its offerings. But if you instead prefer to look at it as supplementary content for a linear action game, then it becomes pretty damn appealing.

I started in the first camp, but eventually found myself leaning towards the second. The more I played, the more I appreciated the open-world as a break from the game's combat-focused story. Whenever I got tired, I'd go exploring or play some of Rebirth's countless minigames. Once I had gotten my fill and hungered for more narrative, I'd go back to story. This back-and-forth allowed me to set my own pace, which is something I wouldn't have been able to do if the game were much more linear.

As for the World Intel objectives spread throughout the open world areas:

• Towers in each region reveal nearby world intel objectives once you activate them. However, they don't reveal the actual map, incentivizing you to still explore.
• Lifesprings reveal the location of challenging foes and more chips for your Item Transmuter, allowing you to craft more items as you proceed through the game.
• Completing combat assignments will unlock extra trials in Chadley's combat sim that you can to unlock more powerful materia.
• Scanning summon crystals power up the summoning materia you earn throughout the game.
• And each region has its own unique protorelic quest-line, which each surround a novel mechanic or minigame. (i.e. The return of Fort Condor, Gears and Gambits, etc.)

Each region has its own fair share of stuff to do. One of the reasons it's taken me so long to beat the game was because I felt motivated enough to go and 100% each of the game's regions as I played. The entire time, I was telling myself how much this reminded me of Horizon Zero Dawn, another game that I'm a very big fan of.

The combat in Rebirth builds upon the foundation laid in Remake, and is even more satisfying to execute. Synergy abilities add a new layer of planning and strategy to the combat, and the buffs from them allow you to use more powerful moves or spells. Admittedly, it took me a bit to get used to the fact that aerial combat is no longer automatically initiated and you now have to use moves that launch you airborne, but once I got the hang of it, it felt pretty natural.

Rebirth also has a multitude of more materia that they've introduced, in addition to the ones that were already present in Remake. There are now combination Fire/Ice and Wind/Lightning materia, HP and MP absorption materia, the comet materia, and more. My personal favorite gimmick materia is the HP⇔MP materia which swaps your HP and MP values, giving you a character with ~60 health but several thousand MP. No idea how I'll build around it, but I will certainly try.

The new summons they added are amazing: Titan, Phoenix, Alexander, Kujata, Bahamut, and Odin. Their endgame quest-line really put me on my ass and was a ton of fun to complete. (Honestly, I'm just stoked that they added my son into the game.) Additionally, if your PS5 has save data for Remake and/or Intermission you're given the original Ifrit, Ramuh, Chocobo & Moogle, and Leviathan summons to use in Rebirth. The whole gang's here!

Weapon Upgrades have transformed, now ditching the old planetary models and replacing them with a new materia-like perk system instead. In Rebirth, your weapons automatically gain perks as they level up, and you can equip anywhere from one to three of them at a time.

SP is now spent on a more traditional ability tree– known as a folio– instead of on each weapon. Each character has their own folio, which contains several types of nodes that you can unlock. The perks from these nodes include new weapon/synergy abilities, the intrinsic perks weapons used to have in Remake, and even new limit breaks.

I personally think that Remake's weapons upgrade system was more novel and interesting, but considering Rebirth's new adventure format and synergy abilities, I do think folios work as a better power-scaling solution.

Where Rebirth truly shines is in its minigames. There are so many various minigames across the game's multitude of destinations; I was always kept on the tip of my toes. Rebirth honestly gives the Yakuza franchise a run for its money.

Most of Remake's minigames make a remastered return, now accompanied with several welcome new additions. Alongside world intel, It's nice to have breaks from the story to do something else for a little bit, whether it be playing Rebirth's new card game, shooting targets in Costa del Sol, or racing chocobos at the Gold Saucer. There's always something new just around the corner, which is a major part of the game's appeal.

Speaking of new card games, Queen's Blood is a great addition to Square Enix's lineup of card-based minigames. Going in, I was partial to FF8/FF14's Triple Triad, but the more I played Queen's Blood, the more I came to enjoy it. It's a challenging lane-based card game where I've found that victory and loss are always one card away. You have to think two or three turns ahead in every match, lest you accidentally give up ground with no way to reclaim it. It's honestly a new favorite of mine, and I would 100% buy a multiplayer spin-off game if it came out.

One last thing: there's a side quest that you're able to finish towards the end of chapter 8 which I won't spoil, but the outcome unlocks an area that acts as a really neat collectable showcase. As you play through the game and unlock achievements or complete certain challenges, these reflect in-game as mementos on the shelves in this area. Being able to visually see your progress towards completionist status, alongside seeing reminders of your past work is really cool. But that's not even the neatest part!

In this area, each of your characters gets their own room. Walking into Cloud's room, I realized that all of Cloud's old swords from Remake were on the wall. I thought it was a neat touch, but it wasn't until I entered Barret's room and noticed the a cannon conspicuously missing from the wall that I figured something was up. Tifa was also missing a glove and Yuffie missing a Shuriken. It wasn't until then that it clicked: I never collected those weapons in Remake. The game was reading my Remake save data and acting as a showcase for that game as well.

This attention to detail perfectly encapsulates why Rebirth is as good as it is. There are so many small details throughout the entire game that the devs didn't have to add in, but did anyways because they wanted to make the game as good as it could be. The story, the quests, the open world, the acting, the minigames, the easter eggs, all of it. This game truly is a love letter to the RPG genre, and it shows.

FF7 Rebirth is a 9.8/10, and an instant classic.

There's not much to complain about in this game. From start to end, it's one hell of a ride that I've found extremely thrilling. I totally agree with Washington Post's Gene Park when he said "I would buy the console for this." I think the only bad thing about the game was the Moogle model they chose.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth absolutely lives up to the hype, and I'll be singing this series's praises till the day I die. This is one of these games where I am so exceptionally glad that I bought a physical version so that I can replay it over and over and over again, even after the PlayStation servers go down.

Now it's time for me to take a break for a few days, touch some grass for a bit, catch back up on work and Balatro, then dive back in to beat all the minigames.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is a timed PlayStation exclusive available for $70 via the PlayStation Store or many retailers. This game was reviewed on my PS5 and Steam Deck via Chiaki4Deck. For more info on how I rate games, click here.