Naoki Hamaguchi thinks we « just have too much to do and too much to play ».
Final Fantasy 7 Remake took the first eight or so hours of Final Fantasy 7 and expanded them into a 30-hour prestige RPG that, while it contained some quite skippable sidequests, added to the story in ways that made it even more impactful. The additions deepened character relationships and made you feel more attached to the setting. By contrast, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth took the original’s second act and bloated it into 50+ hours of open world RPG filler.
It wasn’t just the optional tower-climbing and chocobo-stealthing stuff that made Rebirth feel stretched. Even if you stuck to the critical-path story you’d have to slog through Cait Sith throwing boxes around, an overlong final dungeon, and a plot you had to move through at a crawl—sometimes literally.
