Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Is Completely Different To Final Fantasy 7 Remake

All video games seem kind of the same to my wife. When I was playing 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur's Gate 3 last year, she remarked on how similar it was to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Horizon Zero Dawn (or more accurately, "the one with the robot dinosaurs"). When pressed on why, she answered "that one had a campfire too". She cares about games enough to pretend she cares when I tell her about them, and did 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:eventually try her hand at BG3, but she's by no means a specialist. However, when she watched me play 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, she told me it was very different to the last one. She 🌃was right.

She is not getting it confused with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 16, or some other RPG. She knows Cloud, Aerith, Tifa, Barret and "the cat" (that's Red XIII, not Cait Sith), and even remembers 'the rotting pizza'. She is well aware of which one 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7 Remake is. And the fact she was able to spot the differences between the games immediately is a credit to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Square Enix's decision to rebuild the game as a trilogy.

How Are Final Fantasy 7 Remake And Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Different?

The Remake portion of the remake, aside from being the most confusingly named, is confined almost entirely to the urban areas of Midgar. This gave the game a sense of claustrophobia and emphasised the industrialisation at the core of the game's themes, as well as giving increased personalities to the settings we explored. The fall of the Sector 7 plate wasn't just a devastating loss because of the numbers that perished, or even the few named characters who didn't make it out alive, but because the place itself was taken from us.

Rebirth is very different. Though I'm only at Chapter 4, I've already hit three distinct explorable settings - four if you count the starting city and the surrounding Grasslands as separate entities. These aren't just places where I can wander a little if I want to grind some extra combat encounters, they are rich open worlds with distinct side quests, biomes, and classic Ubisoft towers. Each place feels expansive, but without feeling oppressive. They are each small enough that exploring them in full before you move on seems not only feasible, but enjoyable. But they are big enough that they do feel like new territory to explore rather than just a side quest by the side of the road you can grab without ever changing momentum.

While Remake had its own adventures, they were often down alleyways or hidden in unexplored buildings, teaching you to seek out discoveries in every corner of the city. It helped you appreciate how bustling Midgar was, and to understand how many lives were being crushed under Shinra's weight. Neither approach is better or worse - Remake's was needed for Remake and Rebirth's is needed in Rebirth.

Rebirth Somehow Reduced Bloat By Adding Bloat

Queen's Blood image of Ranger card in FF7 Rebirth

Rebirth is less a welcome relief from Remake's structure and more an underlining of the differences between the two games. Remake didn't end where it did because that offered a dramatic conclusion, but because it marked an ending of Act 1. Where Remake is a tightly packed maze of consequences where we loop back on the paths we've taken time and time again, Rebirth is a far more linear journey. The nature of open world gameplay means fast travel and backtracking is part of it, but we move with purpose, always heading forward in search of answers, in search of freedom.

There are other elements to consider, too. Combat seems to put greater emphasis on Materia and understanding enemy weaknesses, while the ability to switch up the party more frequently encourages diverse builds to approach new situations. Rebirth is both more linear (in that we're constantly on the move) and more open (in that the maps are bigger), and that could have been a disaster, but it works. Partly, it works because it's prepared to be a very different game to Final Fantasy 7 Remake.

That's a bigger risk than it may seem in hindsight. The biggest problem many had with Remake was that it was a little too bloated and drawn out. Rebirth may have four fewer chapters than Remake, but typically adding 🍌several open world areas with side quests and minigames, plus adding a new card game that you level up with throughout the game, is not how you reduce a game's bloat. Rebirth makes the whole thing work, and it's in taking this risk that Rebirth is able to offer such a rich experience.

If, in reaction to criticism, Rebirth played safe and scaled everything back, we'd be left with a fairly shallow and uninspired experience that plays exactly like Remake but without the choking metropolis to give it any weight. Rebirth may be a continuation of Remake, and both may be following the path of the 1997 original, but despite all this it manages to be a completely different game in its own right. And it even has a campfire.