With how long Final Fantasy 7 Remake took to launch, it’s perhaps a miracle that it’s getting a follow-up merely four years later. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is out on February 29th for PS5 and looks like a massive improvement over its predecessor. Exploration, combat, side activities, character interactions – so much has been upgraded. However, there are several aspects that we hope are improved over Remake. Check out ten of them below.
Needlessly Drawn Out Sections
Compared to Remake, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth promises 100 hours of gameplay due to the sheer amount of side content. However, the main story is about 40 hours long. Given that some portions of Remake could become a little drawn out, there’s the concern that Rebirth could suffer from the same.
The developer is revamping several sections from the original, making them longer and more complex by default (like the parade sequence), which is good. However, if the plot features too much padding, it could drag things out unnecessarily.
Intermittent Pacing
Of course, a long main campaign could also mean plenty of sections where the pacing can go awry. Final Fantasy 7 Remake started explosively but had several lows when going from one major plot point to the next. Some of this was due to certain levels that felt like they went on forever (more on that below), and that players stomached them for the best bits is a testament to the plot and characters.
Based on the demo for Rebirth, the pacing seems pretty tight and snappy while spending enough time on character development, but as always, we’ll wait and see if that holds up in the full game.
Health Gates on Bosses
As much as the tankier enemies were criticized, Final Fantasy 7 Remake had a bigger issue. When bosses shift phases, their stagger bar fully recovers. On its own, that makes sense – the problem is doing this when they were already staggered.
You spend a sizable amount of time building up stagger, burning Limit Breaks when the boss is down, and then in the middle of these, they get up like it’s nothing, causing your attacks to deal less damage simply because it’s the next phase. Final Fantasy 16 also had health gates and additional phases, but the boss would stay down during the staggered phase before initiating further attacks. Maybe Rebirth will offer the same.
Simplistic Quests
There were plenty of high points to Final Fantasy 7 Remake, but several of the quests were a bit of a mixed bag, often devolving into busywork or overtly simple tasks. The developer made side content a priority of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth with a wide array of activities, mini-games, quests where other party members become secondary protagonists and much more.
It all looks great, and while there may still be some “Kill X monsters” or “Collect Y items”, they could be within a better narrative context. It ultimately comes down to the strength of the writing for its characters, so we’ll need to wait and see.
Limited Character Customization
Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s character customization boiled down to leveling up and mastering weapons to unlock bonus stats and unique Abilities. Each character equips a weapon and armor piece with Materia slots and an accessory. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is expanding on this with the new Folios, where bonding with your party members unlocks new Synergy Abilities and Skills.
There’s also the new Materia, and new weapons, accessories and armor could provide new passive benefits to mix things up. While it looks better than Remake, we’d like Rebirth to go even further with its customization.
Excessive Loading Screens
The developer touts the seamless nature of the new world map, where players can traverse from one region to the other without any loading. Even the fast travel is lightning quick. Witnessing sections in the recent demo, where Cloud and company had to squeeze through a gap clearly meant to mask a loading screen, didn’t provide the best impression.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake (and Final Fantasy 16, to be fair) had several of these, and while not the biggest deal, it’s still a nagging point. Perhaps Rebirth’s demo is one of the few instances, and we’ll see a lot less in the full game. Time will tell.
Overtly Linear Sections
As iconic as some levels are, from the opening reactor to the climb to reach the Sector 7 plate or infiltration of Shinra HQ, the linearity of some sections in Final Fantasy 7 Remake left something to be desired. The Sewers are perhaps the most egregious example – a soul-crushingly repetitive experience with the same bland corridors that had to be explored twice in the campaign. Outside of the worst examples, it would also be nice to have some more branching paths and sections to explore.
Level Layouts
With Rebirth having a more open world and lots of side content with various locations, there’s hope for better level design overall, especially in the optional areas. The latest official gameplay trailer showcased locations where players could battle different Summons, like Alexander, and tougher foes like dragons.
If the levels leading up to these aren’t too straightforward and offer unique puzzles to solve or mechanics that require thinking outside the box, it would be another improvement over Remake. It’s not to say every major fight needs this, or all potential dungeons must be super-complex. However, given the potential for platforming and all the new tools players have, it would help break up the monotony.
Materia Management
The new and returning Materia in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth looks pretty good, especially the mixed Materia since it grants access to two different kinds of elemental spells while taking up only one slot. You can also use Level Boost Materia to rank up a linked Materia, gaining access to powerful level 2 and 3 spells immediately (though you can’t break the limit, unfortunately). However, one sorely needed feature is Materia Loadouts.
Having multiple loadouts per character to switch on the fly would be great. Not only would this allow for quickly switching between Materia that you want leveled, but remove much of the tediousness of manually removing and inserting Materia. Granted, it’s not something that should be available in combat, but being able to switch different loadouts at the Retry screen for a boss fight would be great.
Graphical Issues
Final Fantasy 7 Remake launched on PS4 with its fair share of flat textures, which rubbed several the wrong way. This was fixed with Intergrade, with several other features like improved volumetrics and effects on PS5. Rebirth already looked like a step up in terms of graphical fidelity, from the scale of environments to the amount of foliage and details.
However, the demo left something to be desired from its Performance Mode, which received complaints for being too blurry. The developer acknowledged the same and promised improvements with the next major update (that adds a section of Junon to explore). While that’s good news, remember that Final Fantasy 16 had performance issues with its demo. There were improvements at launch, but it remains, even after multiple patches. As always, it’s “wait and see”, but on the bright side, Rebirth’s Quality Mode is on point with its image quality.
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