After setting off on your grand, world-spanning adventure in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the mystical flower girl, Aerith, sweeps her arms wide and marvels in her typically upbeat way at the natural beauty of the planet. “Just look at it all,” she says, “It’s so green! A living, breathing planet. …”
Up to this point, Aerith, along with the game’s other heroes — Cloud, Barret and Tifa — have been winding through cluttered slums, dark subway tunnels and soaring office megatowers in the dense, industrial city of Midgar. It’s a claustrophobic experience that reinforces the sense of being trapped under the watchful eye of the previous game’s main villain: the planet-destroying corporation Shinra.
Rebirth, on the other hand, is an open-world game in every sense of the term.
The second of three installments reinventing the beloved Final Fantasy VII, which was released in 1997, Rebirth is faithful to its part of the original story, at least in a geographical sense. After completing the events of Midgar — where the previous game, 2020’s Final Fantasy VII Remake, unfolded — you head out into the wider world in search of Sephiroth, a product of Shinra who is now independently evil and somehow even more threatening to the planet’s safety.
So though it makes sense that Aerith is stunned by the untrammeled natural bounty around her, it equally makes sense that Red XIII, the group’s talking animal companion, responds: “It may look that way. But in reality, it’s barely hanging on.”
The game must constantly remind us that the planet is, indeed, dying. Aerith, though she clearly knows more than she lets on, is cast here as slightly naïve and shortsighted, reacting to what she sees on the surface even though the danger has never been greater. An existential threat looms just over the horizon.
Her problem, and ours, is that Square Enix, the studio behind the game, has built a world that really is beautiful, filled with pleasurable diversions.
Square Enix took the low-resolution prerendered dioramas of the original game — gorgeous in their own right — and zoomed in, stratifying them with detail and depth, adding craggy peaks, dense jungles and sun-baked deserts. There are villages packed with life; a Zen retreat atop a windswept rocky bluff; and a seaside resort town, complete with fashionable swimwear and Day-Glo scooters.
The studio also added mini-games, lots and lots of mini-games. Beyond the returning sky-casino — the Golden Saucer, filled with hours of distractions — there are card games and shooting challenges, soccer-likes and top-down strategy simulators. You can dive deep into timed combat challenges, or race the ostrichlike Chocobos on Mario Kart-inspired tracks.
It’s the end of the world, sure. But this end of the world is as fun as any I have ever seen. Less apocalypse now than apocalypse later.
The contrast between the pleasure of playing the game and the dourness of its plot often ends up confusing things. Cloud, the game’s spiky-haired hero, is slowly losing his mind, witnessing the steady degeneration of others like him, and even lashing out in a confused haze at his closest friends. Many other characters have stories steeped in melodramatic heartbreak and deep personal trauma. Death follows them.
But the game’s light, toyetic presentation, its gorgeously lit, doll-like figures goofing around in hypercolor towns, beaches and casinos, undermines its core narratives about pain and sacrifice, about people tortured by their fates. We’re barely allowed to sit with Barret’s guilt for unintentionally causing his hometown’s downfall when he invited Shinra to build a reactor there before we are whisked off to the frivolity of the Golden Saucer.
In Remake’s downtrodden slums, it was impossible not to react to the harshness and brutality of the world. Characters struggled against something real and deeply grounded. They clashed swords with villains in business suits and mowed through jackbooted minions.
By opening up its world structurally, Rebirth also diffuses its own narrative. Its villains bear down on our heroes less. Although still ever-present, these villains serve more as lures and guideposts than threats.
When they appear, as Sephiroth often does, they glower and boast. But how can I feel threatened when there are card games to master, a Chocobo Cup to win? In many ways, Rebirth is closer to the kind of lighthearted, apolitical family games put out by Nintendo than the gritty steampunk vérité the original Final Fantasy VII sought to evoke.
Maybe all we want as an audience is a place to hang out with our favorite characters, suspended from any exigencies of time or plot. If we have to chase after Sephiroth’s black-robed minions on their world tour, it helps that there are plenty of entertaining rest stops. It would certainly grate to spend the game’s entirety in a driven, apocalyptic mode, like a Last of Us featuring J-pop stars.
In this theme park world, it’s difficult not to see things through the same ecstatic lens as Aerith. But there also is plenty of reinforcement that all of this frolicking may come at a steep price.
A fishing village falls under the literal shadow of a Shinra military base and massive gun emplacement, its fish long gone, its fishermen struggling to make a living. Beneath the Golden Saucer there’s a dust bowl, a result of the power plants installed to fuel its neon lights.
These moments of world building add to the already outrageous variety of Rebirth. Its topography and biome change drastically from chapter to chapter, bringing not only new vistas, but also new modes of exploration and unique gameplay mechanics. (The battle system is built on the same structure as Remake’s while adding techniques like Synergies, which allow your party members to combine their attacks in different ways.)
I was shocked to discover, midway through the game, a foraging challenge that required carefully easing a mushroom from its root lest I break the head from the stalk and spoil the flavor. This activity appeared only once, for an inconsequential side mission, never to be seen again.
In spite of all this, or perhaps because of it, I found myself missing the simplicity and efficiency of the previous installment, and the original game too. As a teenager playing Final Fantasy VII in my bedroom, I was in awe of the visuals, of the way it depicted a planet in crisis. It was a message that stuck with me, and an important one, considering the real planet I was set to inherit.
I feel implicated, as a player, participating in Rebirth’s fun-filled approach. It seems to recognize a certain truth: Much like in our own lives, there are far too many competing activities to focus on the end goal, no matter how important it may be.
I played more than 70 hours of Rebirth on natural-resource-depleting equipment, displaying the game on an energy-sucking screen while shut up in my climate-controlled home. But I didn’t come away feeling grounded in any of this context. Instead, I remember winning a card tournament, clobbering baddies with finesse, collecting enough Chocobo feathers to finally purchase that rare saddle.
It’s hard to imagine what the end of the world looks like, not until it’s right at your door. Until then, might as well enjoy the games set before us. To do as Barret says upon stepping into the Golden Saucer: “Live it up while you can. Future’s not promised to no one.”
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth will be released for the PlayStation 5 on Feb. 29.
This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds.