My thoughts about the final chapter.
- The camera work, voice acting, music and custscenes in general were all fantastic.
- The part where we enter the Forgotten Capital, it was initially very enjoyable, but then the Whispers and Sephiroth appeared, the music and vibe changed, after that it was still enjoyable, but less enjoyable.
- The walk toward Aeirth was particularly great. For once I actually liked the inclusion of Whispers, and how Cloud struggles to walk through them to get closer to Aeirth. I liked what they did with the music during this sequence too.
- It seemed odd not to show Aerith with a sword through her chest, that's probably the most iconic part of that entire iconic scene. Perhaps some kind of censorship law got in the way, which would suck. Its a bit like having Sephiroth walking through the fire during that iconic Nibelheim flashback scene, but not actually showing the fire, because it would burn our poor innocent eyes and that would be ever-so-terrible, so better censor that. Not sure if something similar happened here, but it struck me as a weird design choice either way.
- I like how Aeirth didn't appear to immediately die after being impaled and had some nice brief moments with Cloud as he was holding her - an example showing how subtle expansions of the original story can work well.
- Seeing bizarro Sephiroth was nice.
- I've mentioned this before but having a big epic finale in what is ultimately part way through the original overall FFVII story does feel somewhat out of place. It was like this in Remake too, but with this game, a lot of whatever was going on in this games conclusion distracted me from Aeriths death, which should have been the focal point, or at the very least more of a focal point than it ended up being as a result of what was going on.
- The Zack stuff was meh. The premise with Zack seemed more interesting to me at the end of Remake than what we were left with by the end of Rebirth. Effectively Zack is now a slider, hoping between dimensions or something? I was somewhat interested in Zacks world, the Cloud of his timeline, etc, but that world seems to have been discarded in favor of opening the door to multiple worlds. Unfortunately I haven't been given a reason to be interested in these other worlds as of yet. Often I find that pondering the answer to a mystery is more interesting than what the answer to said mystery ends up being, this may be an instance of that.
- I'm not convinced that this multiple world stuff is going anywhere interesting. It seems "reunion" now means a reunion of worlds, but to what end? So that Sephiroth gets more power? I guess we'll find out where this goes, hopefully nowhere too convoluted.
- I've seen a few theories about the ending cutscene, where Cloud can see the rift in the sky. Some say it's just a result of him being screwed up in the head, others say he's now more in tune with other realities, and can now see that his world is another one of those parallel dimensions doomed to die, and perhaps the OG FFVII is the "true reality".
I've described my thoughts about this game on this thread as I've been playing it over the months, and I've been quite vocal about my gripes. Despite that, overall I'd probably give the game an 8 out of 10. The primary issues I have are to do with the open world, the tediousness, the pacing and the minigames.
I had started to go back to do the side content that I had skipped, but I stopped a week or two ago because it was dull. There was some stupid goblin which wanted me to kill cactuar and I got bored. It's very unfortunate that certain materia, as well as Zack and Sephiroth VR missions are locked behind this open world and side content, if it wasn't for that design choice, I may have given the game a 9 or an 8.5.
