Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: A Middle Chapter That Earns Its Ambition

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth picks up where Final Fantasy VII Remake left off. Cloud Strife, Barret Wallace, Tifa Lockhart, Aerith Gainsborough and Red XIII have escaped the dystopian city of Midgar. Out in the grasslands, they hop aboard chocobos and set off with no fixed destination.

Trailer, via FINAL FANTASY.

Leaving Midgar Behind

They are chasing Sephiroth, the vengeful swordsman from Cloud’s past who was thought to be dead. Sephiroth wants to summon Meteor to wound the Planet and unite with the Lifestream, becoming a god. That plan drives everything the party does across the game.

The world around them is falling apart on several fronts. The Shinra Resistance Committee, backed by Wutai’s interim government, declares war on the Shinra Electric Power Company. Figures in black robes carry the corpse of Jenova. The Weapons, monstrous guardians of the planet, have awakened.

An Overworld That Opens Up

The original Final Fantasy VII kept players on a fairly tight path. Rebirth opens that up. The overworld is more open-ended than the linear Midgar stretch of Remake, with objective markers showing main story quests and sidequests along with their distance from the party.

Chocobos return as a faster way to cross the map. Combat keeps the hybrid of real-time action and the Active Time Battle system from Remake. Players switch freely between party members, use physical attacks and magic, and consume items from a menu while the action pauses around them.

The Synergized mechanic, first seen in the “Episode INTERmission” DLC for Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade, comes back. Party members can synchronize their attacks. It is a small addition that makes the party feel like a unit rather than a stack of separate fighters.

Two Directors, One Trilogy

This is the second of three games retelling the 1997 PlayStation original. Rebirth covers the events from leaving Midgar to the Forgotten Capital, though the order of locations changes. The visit to Wutai is being saved for the third installment.

Production started in November 2019, before Remake even launched. Square Enix announced the game in June 2022. The lead staff returned in the same roles, with one shift. Tetsuya Nomura moved from director to creative director, and Naoki Hamaguchi took over as director instead of co-director.

The cast is large and specific. Tyler Hoechlin voices Sephiroth.

Release Schedule

The trilogy’s final entry, Final Fantasy VII Revelation, is set for 2027.

What Rebirth Gets Right

Rebirth was nominated for and won multiple end-of-year awards, including Game of the Year. That is not a surprise given how much the game attempts and how much of it lands.

The open-world structure is the real shift. Remake was confined to Midgar, and that confinement gave it intensity. Rebirth trades some of that intensity for range, and the trade works because the combat and the cast carry the slower stretches. Cloud, Barret, Tifa, Aerith and Red XIII are the reason to keep moving through the grasslands and beyond.

The Synergized mechanic deserves credit for making the party feel connected rather than interchangeable. It is the kind of detail that separates a remake from a re-release.

Where Rebirth stumbles, in this paper’s view, is in the sheer volume of what it asks a player to track. Objective markers, sidequests, story quests, chocobo traversal, the ATB menu, the Synergized attacks. The game layers systems on top of systems. Some players will find that richness. Others will find it exhausting.

The story’s decision to reshuffle the order of locations from the 1997 game is the boldest choice here, and that is a judgment, not a fact. Saving Wutai for the third installment means Rebirth ends before some of the original’s most memorable territory. That is a gamble on the trilogy’s structure paying off in 2027.

The Shinra Resistance Committee declaring war, the black-robed figures carrying Jenova’s corpse, the awakened Weapons. These threads are set up and left running. Rebirth is a middle chapter, and it plays like one. It builds, it widens, and it holds back.

That is the right call for a trilogy. A second entry that tries to resolve everything would undercut the third. Rebirth trusts that players will come back for Revelation, and given the quality on display here, that trust is earned.

The game is not perfect. In this paper’s assessment, the pacing drags in places, and the open world occasionally feels like a checklist. But the combat is sharp, the cast is strong, and the ambition is real. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is the rare middle chapter that makes the case for the whole project.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth · Final Fantasy VII Revelation · game review · JRPG · PS5 · Square Enix