I’ve never played the OG FF7 but I loved Remake. Beautiful environments, great music, story, and characters. I rarely pick games back up after finishing them, but I finished remake twice.
I was really excited to play Rebirth, especially after seeing the all the great reviews, and wow what a let down. The graphics are downgraded, the story is filled with Ubisoft style open world bloat, loaded with pointless minigames. It felt like SE tried to pad out the game with as much time wasting garbage as possible. I put the game down shortly after reaching the second area and haven’t felt compelled to come back.
Does the game improve at all later? Is it worth pushing through?
I’ll admit, it’s probably not disingenuous to the original for it to be crammed with minigames, whether or not they changed it up with new ones. When the original was one game, leaving Midgar was very much a moment of freedom they wanted to capitalize on, so it was the perfect checkpoint to start giving the player optional activities.
That said, the “Towers” subject in particular (what I believe prompted the “Ubisoft style” comment) is something I feel like gamers need to cool down on. As much as people habitually throw shade on Ubisoft for starting them, they make sense, and can be done in an interesting way. If you have an open world environment, you want players to rely on the ugly minimap as little as possible; that often means both a focus on vertical movement that allows you chances to see the space in front of you, as well as tall buildings that encourage distant exploration. I really think towers get unfair criticism, even if a few games have done them in less fun ways (I could be biased - I think even in their initial appearances in Far Cry 3, they were actually fun to climb)
Yeah your understanding about the towers is correct. I don’t think it’s inherently bad, I’ve even enjoyed it in some of the AC games, but in rebirth it just feels like a bad chore list. Some of the combat challenges can be interesting but the ones with the summon stones (I forget the name, but they reduce the power of summon fights and do other things) and scanning the life springs are just terrible imo.
I feel like this game is Squeenix’s love letter to the OG FF7. They took the original open world section, which wasn’t the most exciting either (I remember spending a lot of time grinding mobs) and reimagined it. Is clearing every tower and side quest the most exciting gameplay? Probably not, but as a longtime fan I enjoy the little things like seeing the Fort Condor mini game reimagined and learning about the lore of the world. As others have said you CAN skip a lot of the side quests and it does get more linear in parts (Chapter 3 and backend of Chapter 4 comes to mind).
I agree, if you took out the side quests and mini games you’d get another FF16 which was an absolute slog by the end of it because of how monotonous it was with lack of variety
FF16 only ever became a slog due to its side content and the difficulty of such once you were levelled last a certain point. Story content was always great, even for the side stuff. But the gameplay for the side stuff got very tedious after the third half. I also ended up doing everything too. So I know how boring it can be. Still loved the game as a whole though. Mostly due to the story and characters.
You don’t have to do any of the open world “bloat” if it’s not your thing. I prefer linear games but I don’t mind it here cause it’s allowing a lot of “quiet moments” which I think this game does way better than the original.
Is there enough gear/experience to just skip the open world stuff? It wasn’t clear to me when playing if I would hit a wall and needed to grind on the open world to progress.
Yes, I know a lot of people who barely touched the open world content and have just been blitzing the story.
I guess my take is that this is all a big step up from the older standard of grinding enemies outside of town for hours just to level up your materia, so I don’t mind the large volume of side objectives to do. Variety is always nice.
That’s an interesting take I hadn’t realised. It’s a different kind of grind, but I think I prefer this kind over just mindlessly fighting over and over.
I feel like if you have the difficulty on easy or normal you could skip most side stuff if not all cause the dynamic difficulty is made more specifically for those that want to do everything and not have it become too easy by the time you’ve done so much side content. But also dynamic might even lower the difficulty too if you’re finding it hard maybe? Don’t know about that though.
I guess I don’t mind it. The side quests aren’t the most exciting of activities, but they lead to a lot of great things. Like extra transmuter options, and party level increases for synergy abilities. unique accessories, and unique conversations with party members you wouldn’t see otherwise. Plus some of the best materia is only accessible from chadley. So I haven’t been minding it all that much. As you unlock life springs, you unlock more info about the environments you’re in. For me the rewards outweigh the monotony.
It sounds like how you feel about Rebirth is pretty similar to how I felt about Remake having played the original several times. Not going to say you couldn’t or shouldn’t have enjoyed it, but there were a ton of story bits and minigames that frustrated the hell out of me.
Haven’t played rebirth yet, but played original many times. IGN did a play through review vid: https://youtu.be/5jvBmusBMzo?si=O3qFNeb__PaF7sHl which makes it look both a lot like and very unique from the original at the same time. I dunno how many hours you put in so far, but it looks like there’s easily 35-100 hours worth of content, which is in line with the original. The video I linked makes it look fun, but I’ll reserve judgement until I get a chance to play it!
I’m not even half way and I’m at about 25+ hours at the moment. It’s great. I think I overall prefer the more linearity of remake but I’m still having fun and the all of the towns being as open as they are is the best part of this open world aspect.
loaded with pointless minigames
You should play the original! 😂
After playing the game more, it feels like the side content is better paced after the first section. So far the first area “Grasslands” is the only one to fully open up to you immediately with the next story quest being “get out of here”.
The rest have story quests that break up the potential monotony. I was about to burn out on the side content on the third area. But pushed through cause I was enjoying the game as a whole anyway and all of a sudden I had done everything I could do in the area at this point pretty quickly (because I couldn’t get fully explore it all before continuing the story) and I ended up enjoying it this time too which I hadn’t expected. I just got to this area and immediately thought “ugh more of the same” but it wasn’t completely the case.
The type of terrain and level design of these big areas are a big factor in the content in them feeling varied I feel, and they do change a lot. The actual side quests get better too, some resulting in you doing a few optional linear dungeons which is nice.
The big enemies you unlock to fight like mini bosses are really fun too, so if you like the combat, getting them unlocked might just end up being worth it to you too.
I’ll be honest Op, you’ve clearly already set your mind on hating this game. oh well, less fun things for you.
no
