Summary

• FF7 Rebirth expands on its predecessor with customizable party formations, offering a depth that was lacking in FF16.
• The sequel has a more meaningful progression with clearer direction and potential for greater revelations in the story.
• Rebirth's open-world design allows for more gameplay opportunities, exploration, and variety, making it a smart follow-up to Remake's confined Midgar setting.

My cardinal gaming sin is that I’ve never played the original Final Fantasy 7, one of the medium’s most revered titles, but only a brief foray into Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has me convinced that the remake trilogy has the potential to reestablish the iconic story as a bona fide modern classic. I wasn’t quite two years old when FF7 was released in 1997, and I was mainly a Nintendo child. 2020’s FF7 Remake, however, began to show me the light.

For Screen Rant, I was recently given the chance to play FF7 Rebirth’s first two chapters. While it was made clear that this was a development build, and had certain experiential additions that won’t be in the final release (such as the ability to skip a segment from a previous FF7 Rebirth preview), the demo felt very close to release quality. The PlayStation 5 exclusive is out later this month, on February 29, and is shaping up to be just about everything a relative series newcomer could hope for.

FF7 Rebirth Is A Much-Needed Evolution Of Remake

Despite never experiencing the original, learning its major story beats through cultural osmosis is practically guaranteed due to its impact on gaming at large, and I went into Remake knowing it's not a one-to-one adaption. Being confined to Midgar makes Remake a fairly structured RPG, and in hindsight, it feels like a rather quaint prologue to a potentially more gratifying experience in Rebirth. The sequel seems to be expanding on its predecessor in ways that largely feel natural, and Rebirth's gameplay may help the remake project attain the uniform gravitas FF7 is beloved for in areas where Remake was unable to.

A major stepping stone in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth's development is the inclusion of customizable party formations. Remake leans heavily into its storytelling, and while character builds can certainly be specialized, there is a missing degree of macro party management. Rebirth keeps the party size of three, but by the second chapter, Cloud, Aerith, Tifa, Barrett, and Red XIII are all playable. Players can create three pre-set party configurations to swap between on the fly. Yuffie and Cait Sith are expected to the lineup as well, furthering the possible party compositions.

The free-flowing nature of the party helps Rebirth strike a balance between the classic, turn-based RPGs the series became famous for, and the more recent, action-oriented gameplay of titles like Final Fantasy 16. In fact, from my ittedly limited perspective on Final Fantasy, Rebirth has two facets which make it compelling. First, it builds ambitiously on Remake's foundation, and second, it offers a depth that I felt was lacking in FF16.

Remake and its Episode INTERmission expansion boast irable variety in combat, but feel constrained by their relative linearity. Perhaps it's just the desire to play beyond Rebirth's second chapter, but the prospect of developing separate synergies with different party combinations for express strategies in Rebirth feels like a welcome expansion in player agency after Remake's party configurations were determined largely by the narrative. Rebirth's inherited real-time with pause version of the Active Time Battle system keeps moment-to-moment combat similarly engaging, but having control over every character at all times results in more satisfying party management across encounters.

Final Fantasy 16 wasn't shy about being a dedicated action game, but it revels in progression through story rather than mechanics. Tinkering with FF7 Rebirth's seven characters, even in the game's earliest stages, has a refreshing sort of appeal after selecting Eikonic powers felt like little more than personal preference. A larger adventuring party and deeper RPG mechanics feel as though they'll make the intercontinental adventure in Rebirth fittingly involved. That scale may also help Rebirth feel like a more natural reimagining of the original FF7.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Is A True RPG Adventure

Even years after the project was announced, turning one classic game into a trilogy of remakes still seems dubious. While Remake was critically acclaimed upon its release, there are legitimate criticisms to be lobbied against its pacing, which turns what were effectively introductory chapters into a 30-hour experience. Seeing a mercenary an eco-terrorist splinter cell in an attempt to cripple an oppressive megacorporation is suitably entertaining, but Remake tends to feel like it languishes in its mysteries, being allowed very little narrative payoff with two sequels on the horizon.

Even from the outset, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has significantly more direction than its predecessor – more meaningful progress into learning Sephiroth's motives and the true ecological depravity of the Shinra Electric Power Company. The destination might not be entirely clear – the whole planet lays before our heroes after they evade Shinra's forces in Kalm – but there's a hint of greater potential revelations that accompanies finally reaching the bulk of the original FF7's story. A veritable roleplaying adventure awaits, rather than more successive, tailored encounters along a predetermined route.

FF7 Rebirth takes every advantage allowed by its open-world design for gameplay purposes as well. Ruins dotting the countryside divulge rewards for those who take the time to explore; slice-of-life locales like the Chocobo Farm serve as side quest hubs in addition to their main story contributions; scattered activities, including mini-games like the new collectible card game, Queen's Blood, provide the usual open-world fare. Crucially, a variety of Chocobos and vehicles help ease travel times, and near-instantaneous fast travel courtesy of the PS5's SSD prevents thorough exploration from becoming too much of a chore.

Rebirth's gameplay may help the remake project attain the uniform gravitas FF7 is beloved for in areas where Remake was unable to.

Rebirth (or its as yet untitled successor) may ultimately justify the remake project being multiple games, but at face value, and with only unprofessional knowledge of game development, it currently seems to at least be a smart use of resources. Rebirth unsurprisingly takes much of the first game's systems wholesale, and tweaks them for an open-world environment. For those frustrated by the confines of Midgar in Remake, despite its cinematic grandiosity, Rebirth may be the ideal follow-up.

Remake did a more than impressive job rendering Midgar for modern hardware, but Rebirth's greater scope is poised to more faithfully inherit the spirit of the original Final Fantasy 7. The stakes are higher, the gameplay has more depth, and there's more environmental variety. The opening chapter being the Nibelheim Incident flashback immediately plunges Rebirth into the trilogy's main conflict, and subsequently being set loose in the grasslands around Kalm hints at the globetrotting journey to come. There's still much unknown about Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, particularly regarding its expected further deviation from the original FF7's story, but its early moments are exceedingly promising for what appears to be an expansive RPG.