Square Enix’s sequel to Final Fantasy 7 Remake, tackling the middle of the original game, features expanded gameplay and a balance of novelty and fan service.
A recent report by Bloomberg detailed some soul-searching and scapegoating at Square Enix after a drop in its share price and the perceived underperformance of Final Fantasy 16. Sources criticized disorganized management in a landscape of unruly “fiefdoms” led by single, powerful producers. That may be true, and I wouldn’t want to underplay the frustrations of developers working under those conditions. But there’s also something to be said for letting enormously experienced, creative, big personalities run things how they please (within reason). What they make may not hang together perfectly, but it never feels designed by committee. It feels bespoke, obsessive, extravagant, and weird.
That couldn’t be more true of the Final Fantasy 7 remake project, a sprawling, three-game reinterpretation and expansion of the 1997 classic, masterminded by producer (and director of the original) Yoshinori Kitase with an assist from creative director and Kingdom Hearts overlord Tetsuya Nomura. It’s indulgent fan service that’s somehow also willing to change the script; fans were shocked by the slick real-time combat and apparently metafictional twists of the first installment, 2020’s Final Fantasy 7 Remake, but no one could deny that Kitase’s team was really going for it.
Now we have Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, coming to PlayStation 5 on Feb. 29, 2024: a lavish, blockbuster restaging of the middle bit of an old video game. As suggested by the extremely lively latest trailer, this sequel will cut loose after all the scene-setting and moody iconography of Remake’s re-creation of the choked, dystopian city of Midgar. Rebirth follows Cloud Strife and company as they follow antagonist Sephiroth’s trail across the land, from desert to coast to gaudy pleasure park; confirmed locations include the military fortress city of Junon, the Gold Saucer theme park, and the Forgotten Capital. They explore! They hunt! They ride chocobos! They play minigames! They ride Segways!
At a recent hands-on session, I got to play two sections of the game: “The Fated Mt. Nibel Mission,” a flashback sequence in which Cloud and Sephiroth are playable together, and “The Open Wilds of Junon,” a taster for the more open exploration and hunting gameplay on offer in Rebirth, before the story took me to Under Junon, a fishing village struggling in the shadow of the oppressive metropolis.
