Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth

[one-armed dwarf]

Well, by Gaia's blessing perhaps Sephiroth will shishkebab Chadley in the next game, the little micro-managing asshole

[one-armed dwarf]

Every day I load up nexus mods looking for an undo Chadley mod and all it is is ugly reshade modes, shorter skirts for Aerith and remove yellow paint

 

Back to the Chadley mines I suppose

 

edit I mean, look at this Remake mod. A mod which replaces Chadley with a chair. This is what we need, what we all yearn for: https://www.nexusmods.com/finalfantasy7remake/mods/221

 

Made a stab at Fort Condor's third fight the other day. It has a gimmick where the main boss does a 'death throes' attack which fucks up all the troops attacking with an AOE around its base. So you have to rethink your strat a bit and use ranged attacks, more green guys and ballistas. I was throwing a bunch of tank characters and Cloud up there which clearly wasn't going to work

 

My opinion on this game is in bizarro land on here I think cause it seems like a lot of people disliked it, but I really enjoy how challenging the minigames are in this. It becomes like this sort of mini-project that I can do whenever I want if the story becomes tedious or the combat content too much. It's like this game has a dozen versions of Blitzball or Triple Triad or something. It makes it feel like there's a reason to just hang out in its world rather than rush to the end, which is good cause the end parts suck anyway so I've zero intention of rushing to that rubbish so I can spend 7 hours in the worst final dungeon ever

 

I beat the dog soccer minigame last night, which was a diversion more challenging than I remember it being on PS5 where I beat it instantly. Here my dog soccer skills were put in dispute pretty quick, my possession all over the place. I would have played more of it, but there's only two variants of it in there. I also feel like the treasure hunter minigame is way easier cause you can use the mouse to shoot stuff instead of the controller

 

Thinking on it, this game reminds me of Spyro 2 a lot. I don't know exactly why but I recall that game having a similar sort of thing with lots of variety

[Maf]

Sounds like typical UE PC release where it is better in some ways but with a lot of annoying problems as well. Stuff like not being able to change resolution in certain windows modes is the type of stuff which is just like no way I can’t be assed with all that

 

The only clear win I think is the pop-in issue is much better. Which is what I thought I saw in the PC version trailer so that’s very good. But settings not workings, stutter issues, and all the usual stuff with UE on PC. I dunno. Reduced pop-in sounds really nice because I’ve seen video of the PS5 version and it looks like a joke. But all of this shit that comes with the PC release, I think I’d still stick with PS5, if I ever get to this game anyway which all the time is becoming less likely.

 

I was hoping the Steamdeck version might be cool but sounds like a no as well 

[one-armed dwarf]

I have about 35 hours now on my 4090/7700x and there isn't really any appreciable way that the PS5 version is a better choice except maybe in terms of shader compilation stutter. But even there, the PC version has a shader precompile which just happens to miss a few effects, which stutter into existence for maybe the first 2 hours or so but are generally not all that disruptive after imo cause you could spend 70-150 hours playing if after with no shader stutter at all. It's a very minor con on the quite large list of pros that the PC version has going for it against PS5, which was so blurry on performance mode it made me dizzy and so juddery on 30fps mode, especially in Gongaga on OLED, that I had to stop playing it on my TV and went on a LED monitor instead to blend the motion better.

 

The biggest problem with the PC port IMO is its massive VRAM consumption, but at this stage I'm inclined to look at this as more of a problem on Nvidia's side with releasing hardware which really should have more VRAM, the 3070 and 3080 were not given enough. On a 4090 it will never be an issue though.

 

I've no idea what you're referrring to about the resolution though, I've been playing this native 4k the whole time. Which again, the image quality alone just makes the PS5 version a thing I'll never touch again except to compare with I suppose. It was such a bad experience on that system that it made me never want to play that console unless I have to. This is a much much better version of Rebirth, if the hardware allows it to be

 

The Deck version looks pretty shit though, 'Deck Verified' doesn't really mean much. Best to treat the Deck as a last gen and indie machine, or legacy/classic titles, however you want to call it.

 

edit tbf I completely forgot that the Pro exists, so I can't compare it to that at all

 

edit 2 watching the early part of the vid I see what the resolution thing is about, it doesn't have exclusive full screen so it defaults to the desktop resolution. To be honest though, you should be playing at your native res 99 percent of the time and using upscaling to make up the difference anyway, subnative always looks a bit strange.

 

It's a feature the game should probably have but again not something which seems relevant to a 4090 PC which will drive desktop res with no issue

[one-armed dwarf]

Spoiler

One thing I have to say is the Costa Del Sol and Gold Saucer part of the game spend too long in the sugar rush happy funtime zone. They never really figured out how to pace and structure FFVII by dividing it into three games. You zoom through Costa Del Sol in the original, it's just a quick pitstop after the boat. Then you hear Barret's backstory in Corel and then it's the gold saucer stuff quite quickly and the tone switches between these neatly complement each other. The juxtaposition between the high and low, made very literal by the fact that Gold Saucer is planted on top of a scene of a crime. This juxtaposition does not happen in Rebirth cause these sequences go on so long so you just forget what happened hours ago. This is why pacing is important for story structure cause the whole thing unravels and feels quite random

 

[one-armed dwarf]

Fort Condor is weird in that it can feel really hard and then you stumble on something, like an army of medics inside Tifa's haste AOE which makes it impossible for the stage 4 boss to deal enough damage to you and it just dies, and you're like oh its easy you just have to combine abilities and buffs and script things out a little.

 

FC is the best one of the protorelics imo, that and the gears and gambit one. The others are a bit lazy imo. There's this sense of obligation by the designers to put one of everything in each zone but I think you could have gotten away with less in certain departments, cause the protorelic feels less ignorable so when one of them is bad it sticks out. Which is why I haven't bothered with the zoomer goblin or the idiots in the Grasslands yet

 

Have to say that the PC version doesn't really 'fix' the issue of Gongaga feeling physically painful to look at. The tight FOV, the terrible lighting and the annoying way the camera gets knocked around constantly is headache inducing. Might even just turn HDR off entirely tbh.

[one-armed dwarf]

None of the characters are bad necessarily in this, but I think some comps don't work. I tried Yuffie, Barret and Red against Kujata and it was a slog. Replaced Barret with Tifa and it was incredibly easy and fast. 

 

There's just certain characters that are vital I think, Cloud, Tifa and maybe Aerith. I don't think you can make it work without one of these three. Cloud in particular does just about everything but Tifa is so incredibly strong at the specific thing she does that it makes everything so explosive, while Aerith literally turns you into invincible weapons of mass destruction, but requires preparation.

 

Yuffie is just gimmicky imo, Barret is basically limited to his support role and Red, well there might be more to the doggo I don't know

 

Cait Sith only gets cool when you unlock tons of stuff for him, he's actually my favorite even if he isn't as good as the top three

 

edit ran it back with Kujata and the doggo destroyed this bull guy thing with three heads or whatever. Got a cool thumbnail
 

Spoiler

Just Bahamut and Odin to go

[one-armed dwarf]

Beat Bahamut Arisen. I'm not a fan of this fight, you basically sit around doing synergy defense moves until he goes up with his wings and you try to kill them. He sticks these orb things on you that count down to damage unless you use a synergy skill or ability to cleanse it, but he also has very few openings in general so even if he didn't have those things that's the way you're forced to play more or less. Which means you have to play as Cloud 90 percent of the time, or go for some other really suboptimal way cause I think he's the only one who can counter spells

 

Cait Sith has a move on his dice that makes you invincible to physical attacks, you have to roll a 6 on it. I managed to get it in the fight but only when he was charging his particles and not doing his regular melee rotation, that's some bad good luck. His AI annoys me cause he never stays on the moogle so loses all the moogle buffs, like increased crits and stuff. What the feck is with not letting us tell him to get back on without directly controlling him anyway, definitely still some QOL stuff that they need to consider for pt3 cause you have to disrupt the flow of things a lot to keep the AI behaving even for simple things.

 

Spoiler

 

 

I don't think there's a better limit break in Final Fantasy than when Cloud does Ascension and says "Lets dance, asshole".

 

One protip I never knew at all on PS5 is that if you use 'prime mode' with cloud and are in punisher stance (the one with the counter attacks), you can press triangle again to jump in the air. Which can dodge attacks (0:30) and do follow up combos and stuff.

 

I'm at Nibelheim now and will have to take a break I think cause I know what's coming next.

[one-armed dwarf]

I'm at the endgame now, more or less. Sort of surprised that I still had it in me to play this game twice in less than 12 months, so it wasn't just a honeymoon sort of experience and is definitely one of my favorite Final Fantasies, top three I reckon.

 

It still has this vaguely disappointing thing about it though in that its story is like a sidequest looking for a main quest, and nothing that happens along the way is really that important. Which keeps original VII and VIII above it in those rankings, also VIII's card game is better and more integrated into that game's progression systems. The thing with the Tiny Bronco, how it reveals how the whole world is linked, that's really cool. But it's undermined a bit by a sense of pointlessness, cause there's no reason to use it. Which tells me that they should have just made these games a duology and cut things out, and completed its story here. Making a faithful remake (well, sort of faithful) was the wrong way, needed a bit more compromise here.

[one-armed dwarf]

My turn to complain, I've been stuck on this fight all weekend. Thing is, I beat it on PS5 but I've no idea how, must have cheesed it with Aerith. But with Yuffie and Red you gotta put in the work. It's from the final sidequest.

Spoiler

 

Have worked out the first three, just these jonklers are a particularly complicated combo cause if you don't dodge their unblockable attack it powers them up. Then the frog is just there to be a big fat distraction.

 

One thing I know is that hitting the frog's tongue a certain way knocks him out for a really long time, so I think they want you to do that. But it's a bit unclear on the damage threshold or abilities that do it so uh I just sleep him instead.

 

The issue with the jokers is the extremely ambiguous timing on the 'Soul sucker' move, which you have to dodge or it powers up their card attacks which make life difficult (as well as the attack's base damage). So Rebirth isn't quite the perfect balance of action/turn-based that Remake was imo, cause of this whole Bayonetta type shit in it. I hope they tone down or remove these elements in part 3 cause I think it doesn't feel good.

 

I can see my mistakes at least, too much greedy button mashing with Yuffie

[Maf]

After reviewing the footage my recommendation is to press square more and faster 

[one-armed dwarf]

Well I pressed square so much that Red XIII is now Square XIII and SquareEnix are SquareSquared, so that isn't really useful to me

 

One thing I find is a lot of Yuffie's mechanics are very underexplained, and her moves have lots of weird interactions with each other and the shuriken. Which causes me to cancel a lot of stuff with her without even realising (only realising now, looking at the video that shooting star keeps getting cancelled)

[DisturbedSwan]

Not reading any of the prior posts properly as having a skim revealed they’re chock full of spoilers as expected lol.

 

Not too much to say really other than I’m really enjoying this so far, compared to my usual cadence I’m putting a lot more hours into this than usual.

 

It just has a bit of magic to it to for me, it’s quite a bit different to the first game though with the locales and how open-worldy it is so far but I feel like that side of the game is meaningful and fun at the moment so I won’t ditch it just yet, the story beats and dungeons have been cool and I think the early town was a great place to just potter around.

 

Graphically it probably looks like shit compared to the PS5/PC/XBSX versions but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the way it runs on Switch 2 and it still manages to look gorgeous in its own way. I pretty much only play handheld mode but would probably be slightly better docked.

 

 

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[one-armed dwarf]

I didn't think I wrote any spoilers, but looking at one post on Jan 31 2025 I guess there's some story stuff there, so I'll have a check at the earlier pages and go back and edit them for avoidance of doubt

 

I picked it up again on PC and am trying to complete the endgame before Revelation, I finished protorelic stuff and am doing Chadley's hard mode VR stuff. Beat the first 'Brutal' challenge last night, which wasn't as brutal as I thought it would be but I had Barret tanking with Lifesaver. I remember giving up on that quick on PS5, but I think I was Chadley-ed out at that point. 

 

I only just learned the other day that Tifa's 'focus strike' can also dodge things. I think this is possibly a really obvious thing lots of people know, but I only just learned it, and it gives you an ATB bonus if you time it right, Bayonetta style. Now I'm going to play her constantly cause of how cool that makes her feel to play. 

[one-armed dwarf]

Chadley's Brutal VR missions have been fine up to this point, the second last 'brutal' mission is called The Seventh Seal. Named I think after the Swedish 50's film where a medieval knight fights Death in a game of chess for his soul, but I think I'm having it a lot harder than that guy. 

 

I got as far as round 8, and I've got a really good setup going with Aerith, Yuffie and Tifa. Yuffie is on point and orchestrates the offense via ATB generating materia, Tifa breaks the damage limit with genji gloves and Aerith sets up multicast and atb wards. I link HP absorb materias to spells so I don't have to always stop and heal, and link elemental to fire to absorb the fire dragons on one round. 

 

But I got eaten by a fecking worm on round 8, and I can't get back there now. I fucking hate Chadley

[one-armed dwarf]

Ugh, finally

 

 

That shit was HARD, can't remember the last time a single player FF kicked my butt like that.

 

Thanks for the MP Up earrings bro, super useful and worth it

 

And now I unlocked an even harder one, but it's the last in this set of fights. I'm doing minigames instead

[one-armed dwarf]

I can sort of see how if you try and tick off every checklist item in this, the game is exhausting. This is not how I played it at all in either of my playthroughs, but it's what I'm doing now. There's so much of it, and a lot of the things in it go really deep on the challenge side of things, like the RTS minigames as well as these VR things.

 

I definitely don't think this game was ever designed to be totally completed/platinumed except by insane people. It's a magical game if you just dip in and out of the things that interest you, I think it's the best Final Fantasy since IX. But if you try and do everything it just gets miserable and exhausting. It's designed like a theme park, and at a theme park you don't go to every single ride and attraction (well, at least I think you don't)

 

So like, I'm glad I waited this long before I decided to utterly ruin Rebirth for myself, rather than to do it immediately.

 

I've only 4 'hard' VR challenges left, one is Barrett's solo one and doesn't seem that difficult. The other 3 are the hardest fights in the game and I think I will come to them later. The difficulty is mainly in that they are gauntlets, so you have to build and compose your party for multiple types of fights and really get deep into the systems. You aren't really expected to just fully skill your way through them, though you can do that if you want, it just means doing lots of parrying which is boring to me.

 

I also made some inroads into the Gears and Gambits hard mode, they throw a ton of new gambits at you in it and it's really quite difficult. They introduce new conditions like you can only use a certain number of units at a time, or for the entire fight, or not the same colour as the enemy. But I'm determined not to drop the difficulty (though I'm definitely not planning on clearing it soon, super burnt out now)

 

The two solo challenges I struggled most on were Aerith and Tifa. Aerith is really good in this, kinda game-breaking, but only in a team. When she's by herself you realise how much she relies on synergy skills and it's a lot harder to figure out. You end up using the tempest move a lot to get some better ATB gain and get her gameplan online.

[DisturbedSwan]

Now up to about 58 hours deep in this, which is pretty good going for me - it would usually take me about 2 months to get to those hours lol - I really can’t put it down despite its considerable size and length () it’s just got a magic and addictiveness about it that I haven’t felt from a game in quite some time.

 

Story wise I feel like it’s almost nonexistent compared to Remake which felt way more story heavy. This also feels much more like a full fat game with tons more mini games, side quests and activities to pursue whereas looking back on Remake that felt like Chapter 1 out of 10 whereas this feels like Chapters 2-5 already and I’ve only just reached Gongaga.

 

I’ve never played more than 3 hours of the original if that but I reckon in the OG game this was like the lighthearted chilled exploration section before the meaty story events kick in later but I can’t be sure. All I do know is that the vibe in this game is completely different to Remake, it is a lot more jolly and chilled than Midgar in Remake which felt oppressive and constrained with Cloud & co constantly under pressure and story sequences being a lot more frequent. This gives you a lot more freedom to doss about and I dig it.
 

 

 

 

 

[one-armed dwarf]

Yeah, that's basically it, it's a character development and backstory chapter that punctuates the other two acts. 

 

I think they could have come up with some more interesting stuff, it's a bit too uneventful for a standalone game imo, though Gongaga is probably the biggest highlight in that regard. 

 

But dossing around is something that modern FF has missed, the PSX era of FF had a lot of dossing and I think it's what gave those game's flavour that the modern era didn't have as much, except for Rebirth. The 90's games had this tertiary scope to the adventure, which made them feel like bigger games than they were, without being totally maximalist like Rebirth is (which I like about it fwiw)

 

It's why I think a lot of fans of that era of FF had a really strong (positive) reaction to what they did in Rebirth, cause it's like we've been waiting for this type of game since then. 

[DisturbedSwan]

Yeah story wise compared to Remake it’s very uneventful, feels like the onus is fully put on the player having fun and a nice chilled time rather than throwing too much action and intense story stuff at you.
 

There are bits like that in Gongaga where the tension has ramped up at times but then you know you’ll be back to riding chocobos and chasing chickens in a few hours time. 
 

Have to say as well I absolutely love Yuffie’s combat, I never played Intergrade but yeah it’s so good in this. Doesn’t feel too far off a Bayonetta or DMC, just without the depth of combos/movesets. I think she feels the most like Sora as well.