I finally beat Final Fantasy VII Rebirth! It took me a grand total of 101 hours, and while I didn’t do absolutely everything in the game, I did a significant proportion of all the available stuff.
I enjoyed it a lot, overall. It’s a well-crafted game that pays nice homage to the original while doing a lot of new things that are distinctively its own. And while I won’t spoil the ending in this introduction, it was an intriguing and thought-provoking conclusion that we’ll talk a little more about later in this piece in a clearly spoiler-demarcated section.
So let’s have a look back over the game as a whole, and see what’s what, shall we?
Firstly, I stand by my previous comments that Final Fantasy VII Rebirth works well precisely because it is a sprawling open-world game with a veritable boatload of things to do. But I also completely understand those who have criticised the game for the same reason. It is possible to go quite a long time without hitting major story beats if you’re the sort of person who likes to play in a “completionist” sort of way, and for some, that may cause the game to feel like it lacks the laser focus of Final Fantasy VII Remake.
I’m still in favour of it all though. As I’ve noted before, the whole point of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is to get you feeling involved in “The Planet” as a whole — both the parts populated by humans, and the untamed natural environments outside of inhabited areas. The game gives you plenty of reasons to explore, and while there technically is a “checklist” of things to do in each region in the form of the World Intel system, it never feels like a chore to explore, because there are plenty of interesting things to find and new bits of story to uncover along the way.
Outside of the World Intel system, the game is actually surprisingly sparing with sidequests, with only a few per region, none of which feel like they’re throwaway efforts that are there just for the sake of it. Each sidequest gives you the opportunity to get to know the area a bit better, or to grow a little closer to one of the incidental characters that you’d otherwise only spend a bit of time with during the main scenario. Pretty much all the sidequests are also associated with party members, too, so completing them helps your relationship with that specific party member.
I did find that towards the end of the game, some of the combat challenges in particular felt like they were dragging a bit; the final “Protorelic” sequence, which involves fighting your way through pairs of summons and then beating Gilgamesh, was the only part of the game where I got so frustrated I actually put the difficulty down to “Easy”, and even then it was no cakewalk.
But then, taking a step back from it all and thinking about it, this part was basically the equivalent of the “superbosses” from earlier Final Fantasy games — such as the Weapon fights in the original Final Fantasy VII — and therefore were supposed to be challenging, high-level fights. So I wasn’t too mad about them being difficult, and I was glad that the Easy mode provided a good balance between making me feel like I was still having some input and simply allowing me to see the conclusion of that narrative thread.
Same for what is probably the final sidequest you’ll encounter: a challenge that involves going around the Gold Saucer theme park and beating high scores or difficult challenges on all the major attractions. This is the only sidequest I didn’t bother completing, because it just felt a bit too much like work. It’s a shame, because the character associated with this quest is someone who crops up on a few occasions over the course of both Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth, and it was nice to see the “arc” he’d managed to take along the way. I’m not ruling out going back to complete it at some point in the future (perhaps on a Hard difficulty playthrough?), but not right now.
I was pleased that the game’s card game, Queen’s Blood, didn’t cross a line into “unreasonably difficult” by its conclusion, though, particularly as the running story thread that related to the game was intriguing. It was only really the final match that gave me a notable amount of difficulty with the deck I gradually built up over the course of the game — and it transpired that a suitable winning strategy was just a matter of swapping a few cards around to take advantage of things I knew the final opponent had. Certainly a far cry from the cheating Fort Condor opponents in Final Fantasy VII Remake’s Episode Intermission DLC!
On the whole, though, I felt like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth did a good job of making you feel like you were part of the overall world — and there were a few touches I liked that offered subtle commentary on the time that has elapsed between the original Final Fantasy VII and now. Probably my favourite example of this is when you reach the Costa del Sol resort, and all the NPCs there are talking in insufferable Gen Z lingo, while Cloud and company just seem a bit bewildered by everything that is going on. It’s like they were “out of their own time”, almost. Which perhaps brings us to spoiler territory.
Spoilers ahead!
Final Fantasy VII Remake made significant implications that things were going to diverge somewhat from the original Final Fantasy VII, with some new recurring enemies being literal embodiments of “destiny” and “fate”. Indeed, the finale sequence of Final Fantasy Remake involves battling against a huge abomination that is trying to ensure things continue to unfold as they are “supposed” to, suggesting that victory changes the overall destiny of both the group, and indeed the whole world.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth runs with this by featuring an initial sequence involving Cloud’s friend Zack, who stumbles across the seeming aftermath of the Whisper Harbinger’s attack, including all the members of Avalanche unconscious or possibly dead. And yet this cannot be, because we’ve also seen them safely outside Midgar in the town of Kalm, so what’s going on?
The game doesn’t actually make concrete explanations of this until pretty much right at the end, but most people will probably be able to work out that we’re in “parallel existences” territory. Specifically, the concept that diverging from the “destined” path creates new worlds where things unfold differently.
But there are interesting implications here, too; the conclusion of Final Fantasy VII Remake suggested that Cloud and company were defying destiny by stepping through the portal to this “other world”, and yet their journey follows many of the same beats as the original game. Meanwhile, their counterparts in the world they seemingly departed from are injured or killed, and later in the game it appears like that world is irreversibly doomed to destruction at the hands of Sephiroth’s Meteor spell.
Most of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth unfolds from the perspective of the Cloud and company who beat Whisper Harbinger and set about defining their own destiny, but there are occasional flashes back to the world Zack is in, and how he is tending to the comatose Cloud and Aerith. Barrett’s daughter Marlene says to Zack that if the Aerith in this world wakes up, she will die because “a bad man will kill her”, leading us to believe that this is the world where her death at the end of the original game’s Disc 1 is destined to happen.
But then, if she never goes on her journey in the first place because she’s comatose, will she still die? Isn’t it the fact that the crew appears to once again be following the line of destiny (literally represented in the game by a sparkling “lifestream” appearing and flowing off into the distance when you enter certain areas) in this “new” world that means Aerith will die there instead?
The conclusion to Final Fantasy VII Rebirth makes this part deliberately tricky to work out, because as the finale begins, we get an almost note-for-note recreation of the scene where Sephiroth kills Aerith, but it also looks like Cloud successfully blocks his attack, saving her. And yet, a moment later, she’s on the floor, bleeding and dying. But also, Cloud’s awareness seems to be “flicking” back and forth between an existence where she is safe, and one where she is fatally wounded.
The finale continues with the expected fight against Jenova, as in the original Final Fantasy VII, but continues on into a battle against Sephiroth in giant monster form, which, it transpires, is unfolding across dimensions, since Zack shows up to help. Just to confuse matters, the final phase of this battle involves Cloud fighting alongside Aerith, who is seemingly still alive. And yet when it’s all over and the dust settles, there’s seemingly little doubt that she’s dead. Everyone is depressed and sad, and reluctant to leave her behind.
Except for Cloud, who has shed his first tears over her apparent death (thereby defying the “destiny” Sephiroth was attempting to set out for him, defining him as an emotionless puppet), yet is still able to see and converse with her. So is she dead, or isn’t she? It’s difficult to draw completely concrete conclusions at this point, as we’re presented with something of a Schrödinger’s Aerith situation, where she is seemingly both alive and dead at once. What I suspect has occurred is Cloud’s intervention in Aerith’s “destined” death (and his defiance of the path Sephiroth had laid out for him) has gone and split the timelines again, with her being alive in one world and dead in another, and Cloud somehow straddling both worlds as the figure at the centre of it all.
The pair say as much during the ending sequence, where Cloud asks the Aerith only he can see if she’ll be “okay getting back”, before the crew leave her behind, standing alone in a field of flowers. This suggests the Aerith he can see and converse with doesn’t belong in the world we’re seeing as the “main” timeline, and somehow crossed boundaries in order to help him against Sephiroth, much as Zack was able to.
This definitely raises some interesting questions about how the final part of the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy is going to unfold. Will we be continuing on the assumption that Aerith is dead, as she is seemingly destined to be? Or will we instead look to an alternative worldline where things unfold a little differently to expected? Or — and this is perhaps the most likely option — will we continue to see things from multiple perspectives, perhaps with the final goal being to reunify the timelines in an optimal way for everyone, if that’s even possible?
A recurring theme in the latter-day Final Fantasy games is the idea of determinism and standing against fate. One of the most effective examples of this is, of course, Final Fantasy XIII, whose linear structure for much of its runtime is the mechanical embodiment of that theme, but several other Final Fantasy titles since have explored the idea from different angles, too. Somehow I suspect whatever the third part of the Final Fantasy VII Remake project ends up being won’t be as simple and straightforward as heading to the Northern Cave and beating up Sephiroth. In fact, at this point I feel like the only safe assumption is to expect the unexpected.
There are still a lot of hanging plot threads by the end of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth — including numerous that weren’t in the original game — and it will be intriguing to see how they end up resolved. While it is, of course, a shame that we’ll likely have to wait several years to find out the truth once and for all, I found Final Fantasy VII Rebirth to be a satisfying experience in its own right; the point they chose to end things was a good one, striking a good balance between a feeling of finality and a sense of hope for the future — and providing just the faintest glimmer of possibility that we might just see Aerith again in some way or another.
We shall see. For now, I’m happy. I had a great time, and I’m glad I played it through from start to finish. Now the waiting begins…!
More about Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
More about Final Fantasy VII Remake
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