Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Completely Upended The Most Tired Gaming Trend
Looking back to move forward.
The gaming industry is in a crisis. Amidst thousands of layoffs and studio closures, we’re seeing more companies lean on the idea of remakes — harnessing nostalgia and established IP to try and cash in on easy success, or guaranteed enthusiasm. There are plenty of great video game remakes out there, but at the same time, there are plenty that have a hard time justifying their existence. Even something as critically acclaimed as the Resident Evil 4 remake just doesn’t feel necessary when the original version still feels so definitive. That’s exactly why Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has left such an impression on me this year. It’s a game that doesn’t just re-imagine the seminal original, but feels like it pushes the entire Final Fantasy franchise forward, and provides an onboarding point for anyone new. In short, it’s everything a video game “remake” should be.
There is a bit of a caveat that needs to be mentioned with Rebirth, considering it’s the second game in a trilogy. While you could ostensibly jump right into Rebirth, it’s hard to not recommend anyone plays through Final Fantasy 7 Remake first, which luckily is readily available, considering it’s only a few years old. But in a lot of ways, Remake feels like a setup for Rebirth — the experimental first step that lays the groundwork for the definitive re-imagining that Rebirth provides.
Rebirth’s location feel familiar but fresh, like returning home after a long time away.
Rebirth adapts a portion of the original Final Fantasy 7, from when the party leaves Midgar, through to the events that decide Aerith’s fate at the Forgotten Capital. A section that lasts roughly 20-30 hours in the original game is blown up to a new 100-hour epic, embellished with marvelous detail that provides extra wrinkles to the world and narrative and makes already beloved characters feel even more complex.
What’s incredible about Rebirth is how it simultaneously manages to feel nostalgic and cutting edge, familiar but mysterious, reverential of the original game but not afraid to break from it. You don’t need to know what happened in the original Final Fantasy 7 to play the game, but if you do, your experience is so much richer. Sprinkled throughout the game are little changes and differences that leave longtime fans wondering if this story will play out the same, or what these new wrinkles could mean.
Every location you visit is somewhere you’ve been before, it feels familiar but realized in more vibrant detail than ever before. It’s like going back to your hometown that you haven’t visited in 20 years — that dirt road you traveled down on your bike still has the same shape, but now it's paved and there’s now a park filled with families! In that way, Rebirth manages to provide a sense of wonder and discovery, even for people who know the world of Final Fantasy 7 intimately.
Rebirth’s biggest achievement is the extra wrinkles it adds to character relationships, making the entire group feel closer than ever.
The same idea applies to the characters themselves, as Rebirth’s central theme is about bonds. That’s a vitally important idea, as Rebirth manages to fix one of the only real flaws with the original game — a lack of meaningful relationships between party members. In the original Final Fantasy 7, we mostly see party members’ development happen via their relationship with Cloud. Their growth is entirely based on their friendship with Cloud, and for most characters, they get a big moment and then kind of fade into the background of the main narrative. Cait Sith is the prime example of that, as he has his big betrayal moment, and is just kind of there for the rest of the game.
But Rebirth wants these characters to feel like a real group of friends — deeply flawed people who come to rely on one another. Tifa and Aerith’s relationship is the biggest example, as the two women become confidants for each other, able to talk about everything from the stupidity of boys to the traumas of their past. There are similar bonds that develop between Red XIII and Barret, and even Cloud and Yuffie.
But there are also extra wrinkles painstakingly put into the characters themselves, adding complex new layers that haven’t been present before. We learn about the hate Aerith feels for the people who put her through hell, and the deep simmering anger she keeps in check. We learn about the tough facade Red XIII constantly puts up, and the intense expectation he feels to make something of himself. Even with Cloud we see more of his inner turmoil and worry that he might be losing sight of who he actually is.
New mysteries and details are drip-fed throughout Rebirth to keep a permeating sense of mystery and wonder.
The entirety of Rebirth is filled to the brim with little embellishments and extra details, adding extra flavor to a time-worn story. But alongside all that Rebirth is striving for ambitious new heights with the very identity of a Final Fantasy game. Its open world takes inspiration from the likes of The Witcher 3 to craft living, breathing locations filled with side quests that meaningfully flesh out the lore. Its jaw-droppingly good combat is the perfect fusion of turn-based tactics and intense action, heightening the sense of party members’ bonds through dazzling team-up attacks. Its eclectic soundtrack features rock, bubblegum pop, rap, dubstep — and even has a dedicated song called “Bow Wow Wow,” simply for when you’re chasing dogs. This is the most ambitious Final Fantasy has been in decades, and it all comes together into something special.
That juxtaposition between bold ambition and reverence for the past is what makes Rebirth feel so unique, especially in the face of all the other remakes out there. Too often it feels like video game remakes are afraid to strike out in new directions or do things differently. Even just this year we’ve seen by-the-number remakes like Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD and Until Dawn — releases that simply don’t add anything of substance outside of a graphical update.
Rebirth has a reverence for the original game but integrally isn’t afraid to break away and do its own thing.
A fun question you hear a lot is people asking, “If you could play any video game again for the first time, what would it be?” For most people, it’s childhood classics or games that invariably change how they look at the medium as a whole. For me, it’s Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Rebirth.
It’s a bit hard to describe, but it feels like these games helped me discover a new emotion — something nestled between nostalgia and anticipation. Remake and Rebirth make me feel like a child again, discovering a wondrous world and characters that would shape my life in ways I couldn’t know. But I already know these characters, and there’s an almost indescribably complexity that gets layered in because of that
Other forms of entertainment have had defining remakes that push the entire medium forward, whether you’re looking at films like John Carpenter’s The Thing or Denis Villeneuve’s Dune — or even anime like the Rebuild of Evangelion series. With Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth it feels like video games finally have that moment — a definitive way we can not just look back at the impact of important games, but figure out how they can define our future as well.
