The as-yet-untitled Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth sequel is going to change things up a bit, as Hamaguchi vows to “rearrange things slightly”.
There sure were a lot of mini-games in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, huh? By my count, there are 21 different activities you can experience as Cloud and his company venture out from Kalm and across the planet.
Some are fantastic – Queen’s Blood probably rivals Final Fantasy 8’s Triple Triad in terms of being one of the series’ best additions – but some pale in comparison. Glide de Chocobo? 3D Brawler? Cactuar Crush? Crunch-off? It feels like a lot of them were just there as filler, with less thought and polish than the obvious, keystone diversions.
A cursory look online will show you that the proliferation of mini-games split the audience in two; some loved the variety, the challenge, the nonsense of it all, and some hated it. ‘Pfft, it’s just busywork,’ they cry, ‘needless time-wasting’. Well, it turns out Square Enix has been paying attention to all you loud-mouth malcontents, and for Final Fantasy Remake Project, Part 3, the developer is keen to do things slightly differently.
“Just talking about Rebirth, I think I’m very happy with the volume and the balance of mini-games we have in that game,” says Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director, Naoki Hamaguchi, in an exclusive interview with VG247. “And I think we very much achieved what we set out to do with the mini-games, as well. I’ll explain what that was.
“I play a lot of games, a lot of open world games, and something I feel whilst playing a lot of these games is that you’ve got the core mechanics – or their fighting systems – and most of the content you’ll encounter, most of the places you can go, most of what you’ll be doing, can get repetitive.
