Postby Niku » Sun Mar 24, 2024 11:41 am
So I finished FF7 Rebirth a few days ago and I've been sort of spinning it in my head since then. I'm probably going to start up hard mode and start going for the platinum and all that next week, but after a 91 hour sprint from start to credits with doing almost all of the side content along the way that is available before postgame content, I wanted to take a breather from it.
I still think FF7 Remake and FF7 Rebirth have some of my favorite combat systems in an action RPG I've ever played. It's the absolute ideal version of what Kingdom Hearts was trying to do. Juggling three characters who all have distinct mechanics and feels, with unique abilities and timing and movement, on top of the customization of the materia system is like a too-many-cooks stew that somehow ends up really, really working for me. If I have a major complaint it's that there is so much STUFF going on in a lot of fights that trying to engage with the dodging, blocking, and parrying mechanics can be difficult, and the best fights that expect you to use those extensively are also the ones that take some WoW raid boss design into consideration with telegraphing the attacks visually or through incoming animations.
The summon fight to get Odin is a good example / test of this, since his entire gimmick is that if you get hit by him too much without doing enough damage in return, he essentially just decides you're not worth his time and party wipes you with a single attack. So he forces you to learn the timing on parrying or avoiding his attacks much more stringently than like, some random grasslands wolf enemy.
Anyway gameplay good. It gets pretty button mashy and "Get on with it" by the end, but after almost four fucking days of gameplay anything will.
now in a paragraph or two i'm gonna spoil the story of a game from 1997 that in 2021 said "we're gonna tell a new story". because yes, there is only one question that drives the entire story of FF7 Rebirth: is Aerith going to die again? The actual moment to moment plot of FF7 Rebirth is only two things, one from the original game, one sort of new. One: You are following the former SOLDIER subjects (the black robes) who are on a global pilgrimage. That's it. That's the tweet. Follow That Robe. And two: Shinra is now also following the black robes, but also in active pursuit of the escaped fugitives which means remixing and intensifying the encounters with Shinra and the Turks throughout this portion of the game and making them more active players in the story. This stuff is generally pretty good! But overall this entire section of the game is the meandering, hangout, coffee shop AU portion of FF7; I recommend ignoring any impulse you might have to "get on" with the plot and actually engage with the sidequests and the little character stories, because they are the heart of the game. Every full sidequest (the ones that are actually labeled quests, not the open world checklist stuff that litters this game) will have a party member who engages with it and you'll usually get a little more depth around them while also helping the Problem Of The Week NPC.
This game does a lot that I really, really like with Barrett. He gets a big fuckin' glow-up. Lot of stuff about his anxiety about being a parent, about the people he left behind, a genuinely moving subplot about his AVALANCHE crew that comes in during a particular sidequest series in the back third of the game. It's good stuff. Do his side quests if nothing else.
but okay. they said this game ends at disc one. you know where this game ends if you played ff7. it ends at The Scene. it ends at the City of the Ancients. the last 20% of the game, man, you will not stop hearing about how good and determined and cool aerith is and how much we all love aerith after spending the last 50% of the game postulating about whether or not the future is determined or if fate is real!!
so.
DOES. AERITH. DIE????
lol fuck you for caring. you want a yes or no answer? how about YNOES. fuck off multiverse means we don't gotta answer shit. congratulations you saved her from dying, but also simultaneously experienced her dying exactly how she did in the original, but also even though you saved her for some reason she still died, but also now she's a fucking force ghost who only cloud can see, and we don't even get the scene of her body being laid to rest because THAT would kill the bullshit ambiguity we are presenting right now, even though everyone is grieving, except cloud who is talking to her perky multiverse ghost, except fuck you lol, maybe we will have some ideas for the third game???
You made this entire game hinging around a single metatextual question and you did not answer it. Fuck all the way off. You suggested there would be potentially interesting narrative divergences with the wild swing at the end of Remake, teeing up this exactly expectation, and you threw up a giant middle finger. There is almost no way they could have made a more unsatisfactory conclusion to this exact setup than what ended up on screen. And it is so. Goddamn. Frustrating when they did so much fucking work to actually make me interested in and CARE about this iteration of the story and the characters. I think Aerith is supremely cool and likable in the Remake series so far so you know what?
When Cloud swings and knocks Masamune away before it can connect with Aerith, I fuckin' marked out. I was mostly curious up until the exact moment of "are they gonna do the thing?" but when it felt like they decided to commit and just this once Rose, everybody lives. You did it. You fucking saved Aerith from the inevitable, it felt fucking COOL.
And they immediately undercut it with the absolute wet fart of the screen doing a glitchy VHS hallucination effect again and you see Schroedinger's Spoiler get skewered all over again, followed up by cross cutting back and forth to reveal that you didn't even SAVE her in Remakeiverse for ... some fucking unclear reason that she is dying anyway??? And then you get thrown into an admittedly very fucking cool, in both conception and execution, final boss fight that nonetheless begs the question of what the christ are we doing at the end of FF7 Reunion if you keep giving me these giant Sephiroth fights at the end of Remake and Rebirth. (To wit, you still fight Jenova with Aerith's theme playing, but this is a multi-stage boss fight to end all multi-stage boss fights and soon enough we're getting big remixes of J-E-N-O-V-A and One Winged Angel and all that and sadly maybe the worst crime Rebirth understandably commits is that J-E-N-O-V-A is a much worst remix than the one from Remake which slaps so fucking hard.) I also think it is Very Cool conceptually, as you are switching between various party configurations to fight Sephiroth, that this Sephiroth is Kang the Conqueror and straddling multiple timelines and universes simultaneously and so when you're switching between party members in different settings and realities, you're still all fighting the same basic entity because he is present in all of them at once. Also that sounds cooler than it is because it's really just "all your existing party members and also Zack" but it's still cool.
oh and also FUCK YOU if you played ff7 and you stripped off all of Aerith's materia and equipment before the inevitable final boss fight since she isn't in your party and might be dead, because after a literally like FORTY FIVE MINUTE fucking GAUNTLET against various Jenova mutations and Sephiroth Angeling the fuck out, the final Sephiroth fight is only Cloud and Aerith and now she has no materia and equipment lololololol good luck, god, fuck this fucking final hour of the game so hard why do you have to Be Like This.
Okay those are the big spoilers. Here are some minor ones that I just think are cool and worth mentioning for people who are curious about how it adapts FF7 in general:
The Gi in Cosmo Canyon get a very cool glow-up too, and are much more integrated into the total story in a very interesting way that recontextualizes and informs a bit more about the Cetra. Really liked this detour.
The Temple of the Ancients does some very neat things conceptually and has more interesting stuff involving all of the characters despite having the second to worst mechanical moment in the game.
because see there are parts throughout the game where a new character becomes party leader other than cloud, and there is always a Gimmick, some of which is just like in Remake or Intergrade where Barrett or Yuffie can shoot stuff or knock down boxes with a shuriken and it's fine, but the temple of the ancients one is SO FUCKING SLOW AND TEDIOUS. and it would be the worst in the entire game if it weren't for The Cait Sith Situation which i will leave for anyone and everyone to discover for themselves because it's impossible to actually describe just how bad The Cait Sith Situation is despite Cait Sith being otherwise ridiculously charming and having interesting mechanics in this game.
Vincent and Cid are here but are not playable. Vincent is fucking hilarious. He's like the Spider-man Noir of this game. Or the Frank Drebin. Nobody takes him seriously except himself, least of all the game. Cid doesn't beat any women and thus is just charming as heck. Maybe they're saving that (and Rocket Town itself) for Reunion.
They add a literal, honest to god fully sung and choreographed Opera Scene to FF7 for absolutely no reason except to make me wish we could get this lavish mechanical and graphical update to FF6. This is distinct from but related to the goofy Gold Saucer play from the original.
If you do only one sidequest for some reason, make it the one about the chickens in Gongaga.
this game is SUPREMELY, HILARIOUSLY bad about shoehorning in every single new character they added in Remake to also have some reason to be in this part of the plot. hope you like kyrie and madame m and ?? leslie?? was that his name i guess??
Don Corneo returns and it is extremely funny that he has raised his own breed of Cactuars that have his shitty little moustache. It is even funnier that he has recruited Donberrys.
In general, this game is very fucking funny on purpose in a way that I wish more games were.
