Rebirth Is Final Fantasy's Breath Of The Wild Moment

I never expected to see a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy game like ever again. It rekindles the feeling of discovery we haven’t felt in the series since its 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:PlayStation golden era, where protagonists like Cloud, Squall, and Zida𓆉ne led us across gorgeous worlds with endless possibilities.

Final Fantasy 10 began to embrace the linear, a formula which would evolve to a standstill with 13 before 15 tried and failed to recapture the same magic. Now comes Rebirth, a fragmented reimagining of the 1997 classic𝓀 that also expands upon and recreates it♊s finest qualities, including its memorable open world.

The second entry within an ambitious trilogy, it is both a bold retelling and a fundamental re-examination of what it means to be a Final Fantasy🍸 game in the modern era. 🔜Taking us on a journey that ignites nostalgia as much as it inspires innovation, it uproots its very foundations in pursuit of something better. It’s a staggering achievement, and one that mirrors other greats.

Namely 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Breath of the Wild, which did something similar when it released in 2017. Nintendo looked at the landscape of open world games in the mid to late 2010s as well as how The Legend of Zelda had evolved over the years, and considered how both needed to change. Link appearing every few years with a new visual aesthetic and a handful of new dungeons just wasn’t enough🌺 anymore, while the overlong introductions and glaring tutorials that made up games previously heralded for freedom and adventure seemed out of place in a medium that had moved on.

Breath Of The Wall Market

The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild: Link looking at the landscape of Hyrule

We still loved these games, but Nintendo was entering a grim period of diminishing returns where it needed to change course. I still hold those classics close to my heart, but after the masterful brilliance of Breath of the Wild, we’d be fools to go back. It took the tenets established by 🀅Ubisoft, Rockstar, Sony, and countless other studios and created an open world where freedom, discovery, and exploration were paramount.

The end goal of defeating Calamity Ganonജ sat on the horizon for hundreds 🐈of hours, and it was up to the player when and why they decided to finally approach him. But despite what many perceive as a monumental change in the Zelda formula, Breath of the Wild is more true to its origins than any game before it. Link awakens in a new world and is tasked with saving the realm through any means necessary.

Skills come through both experience and the tools you stumble across along the way. Even if traditional dungeons themed around a specific item are nowhere to be seen, you still have access to a number of skills that grow into essential parts of your repertoire 🦩that Link can’t do without.

Tears Of The Kupo

Tifa, Barret, Cloud, Aerith, and Red 13 stand on the outskirts of Midgar

I love Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time, but Breath of the Wild is as quintessential as Zelda has ever been, and if my🔯 intuition serves me well in the years to come, ever will be. It captures the magic of why we love the series so much, while never being afraid to interrogate its core components.

Rebirth follows in those footsteps. After I finished Remake, I feared how Square Enix would depict the world outside Midgar. There was a tangible risk it would produce a bloated open world filled with content hardly worth your time, or butcher classic locations with tired gimmicks or a bizarre misunderstanding about what made them so special in the first place. It avoids all of these pitfalls, and feels like a PS1 game in PS5 clothing as it lets us roam free in a massive world, but is always curated and focused in a way that 168澳洲幸运5开⛦奖网:only the greatest of RPG𝔍s can lay claim to.

Each regio🅘n is large, but never too huge to feel superfluous or overreaching. A handful of side quests help flesh out characters and culture, while small items of interest on the map offer up substantial lore and reasons to explore. By the time the narrative kindly ushered Cloud towards his next destination, I didn’t want to leave, but the unfolding yarn was good enough that I didn’t mind. Besides, Rebirth does a brilliant job of encouraging revisits in its later hours with new quests and discoveries. Just like older Final Fantasy titles like 8, 9, and 10, plus the original 7, the world and characters who call it home continually grow alongside you.

The Future Of Final Fantasy

breath of the wild cover art in uk — via theverge.com

The🗹re are few static things about it, turning each biome into a living, breathing space where you can fight monsters and feel your heartstrings gently plucked at. The stunning production values certainly help, as does the original game Rebirth liberally draws from, but there’s also an evolution at its core that harkens back to the past yet pushes into a future without fear.

Funnily enough, the future looks an awful lot like the games I loved decades ago, but with a consideration for how the medium has grown in terms of narrative, technology, and tools we use to engage with such🌜 virtual experiences. Rebirth is Final Fantasy coming full circle.

In the past two decades, it has tried to recapture its golden era through experimentation and an uneven reliance on visual splendour over characters and mechanics, al▨ienating fans as it all strayed further and further from its initial greatness. Now we’ve come back around to honour where we started, and in turn embrace what’s to come. Rebirth is Breath of the Wild, in that it builds a new foundation I cannot wait to see expanded upon in the years that follow.

It’s a game I can’t stop thinking about, partially because it lays out🐠 the potential of what’s to come, and where Final Fantasy can go now it finally has a beating heart I can believe in.