#24
Change YoY: NEW! My Rating: 9.3 / 10
By far my most anticipated game of this year, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth more than lived up to the hype as far as I'm concerned. I mentioned when I talked about FFVII Remake that I was cautiously optimistic about the game prior to its launch, and my feelings here were much the same, but for a different reason. This time it was a matter of picking up where the previous game had left off and carrying on without fumbling the ball, and while there are some minor issues to be found, Rebirth is an absolutely brilliant game, and is currently my GotY and the overall second best gaming experience I had this year with a new release, the other being an expansion to an older game.
From the moment you set out into the open world and start to slowly realize just how much content there is in this game, it hooked me and never once lost me. The battle system from Remake is back with some nice improvements, the visuals are just fantastic, and the soundtrack is my favourite of the whole year. Add to that an excellent story that follows many familiar beats from the original, but changes just enough to keep even fans of the original guessing what's going to happen next, and some brilliant character development that fleshes out the main cast even further from the original and adds details that make them wonderfully compelling to follow as the story progresses. Every member of the main cast gets a chance to be in the spotlight, and I never got tired of learning more about them. In addition, I loved the recreations of locations and scenes from the original, and the way the game kept the spirit of those things intact while expanding on many of them in various ways.
The biggest issues I have with the game are the excessive number of minigames for seemingly every occasion, which feel like the developers throwing every single thing they could come up with in the game and just hoping some of them will stick, and the very final section of the game, which I thought was way too overdone in terms of number of battles you needed to fight. The impact of the scene immediately preceding that series of fight was greatly diminished in my mind because you had to spend such a long time fighting one boss fight after another, not to mention if you happened to lose at any point and had to repeat any of them. I know in the original that same scene was followed by a boss battle, but there was only one, and the game made absolutely certain you could not forget what had just happened with its music choice while in Rebirth you just had to focus on far too many things to let the big moment really sink in. There are some other minor issues and strange choices that occasionally show up, but otherwise I enjoyed nearly all of my 100+ hours I spent playing this game. Admittedly, the game didn't need to be that long, but it didn't bother me too much in the end. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is an absolutely incredible game that I will go back and replay at some point, it's just one that has some blemishes on it as well.
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