Spoilers!

~ Estimated Reading Time: 10 min ~

I lamented that Remake would lose some of its sentimentality if its successors could not live up to flexing their originality's muscle, but here it is. A wholly unique game that couldn't have been made under any other circumstances: a game comprised entirely of middle. A behemoth in scale despite lacking in start or end, all feelings of anxiety must be bottled up for the whole trip, shaking and getting closer to popping.
But it'll never pop. Allergic to catharsis.

The already-infamous Dyne sequence is its modus operandi: about half of its creative decisions roll on raw impulse, trigger happy to commit blasphemy and stomp over an original scene's intentions. Its sensibilities for expansion, even if unsophisticated, are well aimed: it's gleeful to throw a bunch of garbage into the mix if it's able to shake something up, get a new feeling out of it. And it does! Because it so literally interrupts Barret and Dyne's send-off - removing the original's bittersweet closure - all that's left is the spiraling spite. So as Barret sat there, visibly shaken up, sitting out of place in the relentless flow of bubbly cutscenes, he had buckled himself into the rollercoaster ride before he could think, before he could mourn.

For a humongous, 70 hour scaling game, it captures such a unique definition of "Adventure" through its tone. Just the way the electric pacing barely lets its characters breathe, contrasting against the plot slowly unearthing everyone's darkness. We'll just have to stay silent about it for a bit longer; an emotionally stunted delivery for an emotionally stunted cast. I remember talking to some friends about how bonkers stupid (positive) the tonal contrast was - how it places its childish nonsense within arm's reach of scenes with unbelievable sadness in them. They ended up watching me play a random bit of the game out of context, and suddenly, I get hit with that part where the gag character, Roche, shows up while dying, cracks like 6 jokes, and then still reminds Cloud of his fragile mortality. Nobody knew how to react to this shit. The overall tone reminded me of playing Mother 3 as a kid; feeling like the game's willingness to mishmash such severe silliness and sadness made it feel alien to what I've been taught is "good writing"

And honestly, just like....as a video game??? It is so lovely. I couldn't tell if every combat adjustment rippled out to make the systems soar x10 higher than they did in Remake 1, or if I had actually underrated that game's battles, because holy shit. Still love running metal through monster's heads as Cloud, but just a fewww more stack-synergies-to-snowball mechanics makes the combat way more strategically juicy. This time around, I actually felt like I was playing something that, in terms of quality, could've been made in the same room as Kingdom Hearts!!
Sidequests still have some personality issues - a lot of minor characters that are like, kinda tryhard - but so many of them having unique songs rules. The soundtrack being so expressive is definitely not a little amount of why I love this game... Tons of varied Jazz, Big Band, and Funk tracks, hilariously gaudy pop music - mixing girly vocals and drum'n'bass in a billion different ways, frog chiptune, 80s hip hop, hardstyle EDM, this shit. The beating heart of Rebirth is in its identity as an Art Game - not in the youtuber essay-y sense, but rather when the expense is poured so heavily into the audiovisual, it feels best describable as one in the literal sense. (which only makes the awful dogshit box-art more out of place, how did that happen lol)
Unfortunate seeing people immediately pull the "Ubisoft" trigger, when the game maintains the classic "maintain your MP while you explore between checkpoints" tropes of older games more smoothly than like, the Xenoblade trilogy or something. We remember how many icons Ubisoft actually stuffs into those mini-maps, right? On the other hand, my absolute least fav thing about the game was a classic Final Fantasy trope - the card mini-game. Queen's Blood just kinda made me feel lonely playing against snoozer AI instead of people. I could tell the game was bloated to hell with trash; I remember my girlfriend saying "If you knew this was the last time you had to do this for the rest of the game, would you be happier", as she watched me do the Chocobo stealth and Moogle mini-games (lol). But I quickly figured out which parts to engage with, I was satisfied just leaving the game off with only a small scope of the whole open world. A perfect package when curated well; golden age PS2 game work stretched thinly across its surface.. So...why does it feel like they're more dissatisfied with the game than I am?

「 We're going to move onto the endgame, Remake & Rebirth spoilers territory now, so if you had read up to this point and realized you care about Rebirth midway thru, I suggest quitting now. I also wrote a companion piece on Remake's ending, if anything here doesn't make sense 」

When Final Fantasy VII Remake ended, and played that cutscene of Cloud - in metaphor for fighting against the corporate workflow of content, killing the concept Fate and saving the dead - it resonated with me. So, when Rebirth starts with a saved Zack watching everything around him die, it's hard not to get it. It should be obvious why this team is expressing ennui at their own fate. The Gold Saucer is the analogy here; Barret's big rants about how it's all unsustainable theme park-y spectacle begins to stop just being about a story, and start feeling like it's about the work itself. Did everyone working on this finally realize that they had locked themselves into a fifteen-year commitment of a fundamentally limited creative project, just to save the FFVII's dignity against anything that'd put less effort? Rebirth is upset that things ended up this way - its survivors of who diverged from the original plot left to feel survivor's guilt at the sheer meaninglessness of how the differences turned out. Its metatextual-depression weighed down on me, highlighting my own feelings - while driving around the coast of Costa Del Sol on a dumb segway, somewhere in my heart, I knew there was some truth there. I knew I wanted to be playing something new from these guys, I wished if even only for a second that this was Final Fantasy XVII or whatever. If we're gonna refer to this trilogy as direct sequels to Final Fantasy VII, rather than remakes, then we at least have to admit that these follow-ups have spent a lot of time repeating the message of their first entry. But is the artistic prowess that leads to such an obsessively dynamic cast and world even possible, if not pulled from existing source material the creatives have probably rotated in their heads for twenty five years? I don't know if there was ever any other way to reach these heights.

Rebirth reveals how fractured its goals are near the end - it wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to extend Tseng's death scene, but also keep him alive this time. It wants to be emotional and lore-driven at the same time. It spends so much screen-time extending and extending that ending to get more and more little teases for the future in - which only serves to obfuscate the actual meaning of those final scenes. It wants me to think about its future more than it wants me to think about its right now. And it definitely wants me to be thinking "what's gonna happen to Aerith????", like, all the time.
I really, really really loved Aerith in this entry. Her admittance to Cloud about how the dark, violent thoughts of revenge she harbored towards Hojo had been eating away at her, her own wishes for violence dehumanizing her view of herself. That small scene near the end of her telling Cloud about the envy she's been feeling about the home and childhood he can look back on (the irony... fuck nojima im crying). She's grown from being a (well executed playful subversion of one, but still an) archetype - literally of the "et cetera" race - to like, to having some genuinely good dialogue about displacement. So, I'm gonna let you in on a confession... A teeensy, tiny part of me wanted Aerith to live. It was my raw human emotion, even if it might be artless or stupid. Not so much that I wouldn't accept otherwise, obviously - I was ready to have a hearty, cathartic cry to her death, from the combination of years of built-up emotional attachment to the original, conjoined with the new stuff. But I'm greedy; I wanted to see what the highest act of blasphemy this team could do. Because Rebirth was never about "respecting the original", was it? It was about digging deeper, mercilessly pushing against the original's plot to find more room for depth. And they DID, and they could keep doing so, in that unknown future. Plus...I know the third game's script will be like, 30% worse than this one if she's gone. So maybe I was destined to not feel quite satisfied with the ending, as even now, I haven't made up my mind on what would've been most meaningful.
In the end, I didn't cry at all to the ending. It is so obsessed with exaggerating the mindfuck© of the expectations people had of that scene, that it lost its emotional core, its relatability. I didn't feel anything at all. And then I think back to the very real tears I shed during those scenes of Aerith just speaking about some small things, and realize that the strongest emotions I had towards Rebirth were driven by strings that lead nowhere.

All that's left to focus on - or at least, what it feels like it has directed me to think about - are lore deets to speculate and summarize on for four years. But Remake's most meaningful interpretations were largely in a bubble, as an individual work, so against Rebirth's directions, I found myself treating it the same. I think back to its unsustainable hugeness, to how it felt like it just wasn't going to end as I played it. And that unendingness defines the mood-piece I found myself absorbed in - all of its wandering emotions in endless hallways. And when I think about the future, I know that catharsis for each and every one of these character arcs might be in some script draft folder somewhere. Maybe the developers are so caught up in their grander narrative, they haven't been able to respect the simple heart-wrenching nature of their scenes, like Barret having to bubble up all this guilt he's felt for years with no release, and it staying unreleased 'till the end. The way Rebirth navigates both grief and joy so boxed up captured something I found true to life in spite of my own compulsive obsession with closure, of how much I've let it hurt me so pointlessly. I felt confronted by it, and then eventually learned how to feel comfort in it. Somewhere, somehow, in ways that I don't know if will make sense to anyone other than me, in this stupid game..I felt seen. I'll stay where the journey's known, but not continued