I’ve been eagerly awaiting Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and it actually arrived at my house a couple of days early! As such, I’ve been playing it for the last couple of evenings, and wanted to share a few initial thoughts.

I’m not going to spoil anything about the plot in this piece, because I’m not very far into said plot, and there are seemingly some very interesting things going on. We’ll talk about all that another time; today I wanted to focus particularly on the gameplay that unfolds after about two or three hours: the point at which the game properly “opens up”.

And yes, in a marked contrast from its predecessor Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth really does open up. So let’s take a closer look at that.

Gamers of a certain age will vividly remember some key moments of “awe” from gaming history — moments that really gave you the impression that you were part of something special. One of the most commonly cited is the point in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion where you emerge from the “tutorial dungeon” and are exposed to the open world for the first time, and indeed that remains one of the best examples to this day, even with Oblivion’s relatively dated tech.

But the original Final Fantasy VII had a moment like that, too. After finishing the Midgar section and playing through the G-Bike arcade sequence, you and the party found yourselves at the boundary of Midgar. Stepping out through the gate, you were presented not with a prompt to switch to Disc 2, as I’m sure many of us expected at the time, but rather with a polygonal 3D world map that immediately made it clear we had a lot more adventuring ahead of us.

Of course, Final Fantasy VII’s world map is incredibly primitive by modern standards, and acted in the same way as world map screens on earlier 2D RPGs: it was a scaled-down version of the world that represented you travelling long distances. There wasn’t a lot you could actually do on the world map itself: it was mostly an opportunity for the game to throw a few random battles at you as you made your way from one place to another — though there were a few secrets to discover later in the game if you knew where to look and how to traverse obstacles that were impassable when you first encountered them.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth picks up, effectively, at this point in the Final Fantasy VII narrative, though it handles things slightly differently. Rather than unfolding right from where the party leave Midgar, it instead picks up from them having already arrived at Kalm, a small settlement near Midgar. After an initial sequence that incorporates the flashback to main villain Sephiroth’s background, you’re given the opportunity to explore Kalm and do a few things, before the narrative demands that you leave in a hurry.

This initial section has a couple of purposes: firstly, it allows you to get used to the way things work in the game in a relatively enclosed environment that still nonetheless has some freedom to let you explore. Secondly, it provides a means of funnelling you down a specific route so it can provide you with “the big reveal” of the open world. And, in the grand tradition of post-Oblivion RPGs, this involves following a narrow, cramped passageway that ends with a large door: a door that opens to reveal blinding sunlight and a lush, green landscape.

It’s at this point that Final Fantasy VII Rebirth starts to distinguish itself from its predecessor. While there were a couple of sequences in Final Fantasy VII Remake where you had a certain degree of freedom to pursue sidequests and suchlike, the vast majority of the game was a linear run through the main story. This worked well for the structure of the narrative.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth takes pretty much the opposite approach once you get out into the “Grasslands” zone outside of Kalm: while you’re presented with some initial “Main Scenario” objectives, you’re actually free to set off in any direction you want and just start exploring. It is, however, worth noting that you should make a little progress in the main scenario before doing so; specifically, you should play until you meet Chadley, the young Shinra defector seen in the previous game, as he effectively unlocks the main incentives to explore the world — and conveniently, around the same time, you unlock the ability to summon and ride a chocobo for faster movement.

While you could make a beeline straight for the Main Scenario objective marker at this point, most players will almost certainly want to start investigating the “World Intel” assignment that Chadley gives them. This invites you to seek out various things around the game world, which in turn unlocks things like new materia (which provides characters with new spells and abilities) and new Combat Simulator programmes, which all offer significant rewards for completing.

What’s nice about the World Intel system is that it doesn’t just immediately litter the map with icons to run in a straight line towards. There are a few of those, but upon arriving at your destination you’ll generally have something more interesting to do than “clear out an enemy camp then steal all their loot”.

The most interesting parts of the World Intel system are the things that aren’t initially marked on the map, because these highlight how Final Fantasy VII Rebirth makes excellent use of the open-world formula.

My favourite example of this so far is when I happened to see a vividly coloured bird flying around, and when I approached it, it looked like it was trying to lead me somewhere — though its behaviour was just erratic enough to make me wonder whether it was just a generic critter, and it wasn’t really taking me anywhere. I persisted, though, and was rewarded with the discovery of a natural Lifestream spring. It was only at this point that the game actually told me what had just happened, which was a really nice touch: it let me discover the game element for myself, then explained it once I had experienced it.

Elsewhere, the game does point out other things beforehand where it makes sense to do so. For example, you might not think to smash unusual-looking rocks unless you had been told to do so — because you generally only really smash crates for items — but doing so causes a glowing light to emerge which will lead you to another discovery. Once you’ve seen it once, you know what to look out for next time.

It’s probably worth highlighting that the game’s incredible visuals go a long way in making all this work, too. Because the draw distance on the game is so vast, it’s a genuine example of being able to see something off in the distance and actually being able to go there to investigate — and, more often than not, there’s something actually interesting to do once you arrive.

One thing I like about all this is that it strikes a good balance between natural-feeling, immersive exploration and more structured “video game” activities. For example, in some areas of the map there are specific combat challenges that task you with defeating a set encounter of enemies while accomplishing three objectives. These objectives include things like Pressuring and Staggering the enemies, avoiding status effects or defeating the encounter within a set time limit, and will typically demand that you fight in a specific way or using a particular character. They’re a good means of encouraging you to use all the game’s available mechanics rather than just sticking with Cloud for the duration, and the fact you can immediately retry them if you completed them but missed an objective helps to minimise frustration.

The potential argument against all this sort of thing is that it slows the pace of the narrative down, and that is true, to a certain extent. But at the same time, part of the point of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is clearly to allow you to immerse yourself in the world of Final Fantasy VII in a way that has never been possible before. Instead of running around on a scaled-down world map with flat textures, now we’re actually in the world, seeing things up close at their actual scale, and developing a gradual understanding that the grotty old shithole that is Midgar was just one tiny corner of a huge and beautiful world — a Planet worth saving.

To put it another way, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s open-world nature is intended to help you understand Avalanche’s desire to save the Planet. In Final Fantasy VII Remake, it would have been easy to assume that the brown, ruined landscape was beyond help — but in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth it becomes clear that beyond the reach of Shinra’s influence, nature is thriving… for now, at least. And that is something worth protecting.

I’m having a delightful time with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth so far, and I can’t wait to see what else the game has to offer. But I have a lot still to do in the Grasslands, and I fully intend to do all of it before I move on!

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More about Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
More about Final Fantasy VII Remake

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