Game Theory: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth‘s first 4 hours made our jaws drop

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

In four hours with the sequel to 2019’s Final Fantasy VII Remake—and yes, we’re aware that the confluence of “remake” and “sequel” in the preceding sentence is an inherently irritating string of words—at a press event in Los Angeles last month, we could often sense that jaw drop coming. Rebirth wants to overwhelm its players, never moreso than at the start of its “wait until you get a load of this” second chapter, where it finally drops the rails and lets players out into the massive and verdant open world surrounding Midgar, the heavily industrialized city that served as the sole setting for Remake. Emerging into the light, your party—taciturn mercenary Cloud Strife and his roving crew of girlfriends, frenemies, and talking dogs—pauses for a moment to take it all in from atop a gloriously positioned vista. Sunlight. Rolling hills. Green plants. Freedom.

Then you go climb a tower to synchronize some map data, just like every other open world video game you’ve probably played over the last decade and change.

We kid Final Fantasy VII Rebirth—but not that much. The decision here, to replace a more traditional RPG “world map” with an Assassin’s Creed-esque open world like the one surrounding the game’s opening town of Kalm, is, undeniably, a huge step—but only within the confines of this particular franchise. It’s genuinely neat to run around on Chocobo-back, fighting specialized monsters, discovering mystical relics and secret grottos hopefully labeled with bright glowing markers on your map, and generally reveling in the fascination of “open world Final Fantasy.” But even in a few hours with this new take on a classic world, it’s easy to see that Rebirth doesn’t have anything new to say about the tropes of open-world design—even as its takes on Final Fantasy VII itself remain, well, jaw-dropping, in both their granularity of focus, and their ambition.

As with the demo now out this week, our Rebirth preview deployed a genuinely clever trick for its tutorial, setting it within the original game’s famous “Nibelheim” flashback, with Cloud laying out his complicated, stab-heavy relationship with the game’s primary antagonist, jumbo-sized sword owner Sephiroth. Here, as elsewhere in our four hours with Rebirth, the game benefited massively from the zoomed-in approach Square-Enix has applied to this entire Final Fantasy VII remake project: Getting to see Cloud’s puppy-dog enthusiasm up close in the flashback provides a pointed contrast to his far more stoic presentation in the modern day. (While also setting off the radars of players who are already in on the original game’s big narrative twist, of course.) Bringing Final Fantasy VII down to the ground level was a hugely beneficial change for Remake, making real characters out of a crew of blocky protagonists and RPG cliches, and it continues to pay dividends here. We might not entirely love the game’s open world, but walking through a surprisingly vibrant city like Kalm, full of alleyways and incident, is genuinely thrilling.

Ditto the game’s approach to combat, which is refined, but not massively overhauled, from the first game. (And oh, how happy we were, after the eventually-mindless action of last year’s Final Fantasy XVI, to get back to something that mixes some actual strategic rigor in with all the button mashing.) The blend of action—timed button presses to block attacks, dodging big enemy swings—and thinking (selecting how to spend you and your party’s precious “ATB bars” on healing, special moves, and buffs) continues to be both daunting and hugely enjoyable, especially in boss fights that refuse to pull punches on the player. A new system of “Synergy Skills,” special moves the work between party members and don’t burn ATB, help break up combat and contribute to a sense of party variety, all to the good—even if the chaos can occasionally overwhelm. (Learning or re-learning the quirks of each playable character, including the bestial Red XIII, is obviously going to be a major part of coming to terms with the game proper.) The fact is, Remake already had one of the best combat systems Final Fantasy has ever deployed, the modern evolution of turn-based combat that the franchise has been hunting for for years, and Rebirth seems to be building mightily on that structure.

The overwhelming vibe of our Rebirth preview, then, was one of excess: Four hours sounds like a lot, but not when you’re having to cram in flashbacks, party chats, battles, shopping, crafting, bird racing, card games, piano playing, character building, mountaineering, angst, and a few deeply irritating sequences where Cloud crawls around on the ground, dragging himself with laborious button press after button press while the world burns down around him. (Note to developers: It’s 2024, we can probably streamline the “playable helplessness to make the player feel the characters’ distress” process at this point, yeah?) It’s by no means perfect, but it is jaw-dropping, because, well, that’s how force-feeding works. The slice of game we got here was big, overwhelming, absolutely gorgeous. (Do you need us to tell you that the soundtrack, with beautiful updates and remasters of the original’s iconic tunes, is good? The soundtrack is extremely good.) It felt, at times, like Square-Enix was trying to shove all of modern gaming into this relatively tiny slab of territory, four-plus hours of content shoved into an original section that takes maybe 2 to play through in the original game. It takes up all the space in the room—we’re just waiting to see what, exactly, it can do with it, when the game proper arrives on February 29.