After a week of cramming what gaming I can into my work nights, I’m about six hours into Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. Which might sound like a lot, but much of that time has been spend exploring the largely open world available to me about an hour into Chapter 2 of the game. After all, I can’t NOT explore every nook and cranny of the wipe world open world suddenly thrust upon me with its incredibly limited potential since there doesn’t seem to be much in it other than crafting resources. What if I missed something actually interesting [turns out that following the plot unlocks exploration activities so the interesting stuff isn’t even there or available to you until you’ve gone through the requisite steps]? What if there was a quest that I missed because I didn’t run along the top AND the bottom of each cliff? And, like, after spending some sixty or so hours (probably more, to be honest) playing two Final Fantasy 7 games–Remake and Intermission–that didn’t let me move freely around the world, I might have gone a little bit overboard. Also, you can jump now. Sort of. You have to be next to a cliff that the game judges is short enough for you to jump up, jump down, or somehow clamber over, but you can do it. Only vertical jumps, though, which lends some credence to one of my idle theories from a post that went up just over a week ago. If you want to hop across a small gap, you better hope you can jump down and then back up the other side. After all, you’re not jumping. You’re executing environment maneuvers. Heaven forbid you actually jump. Still, all that aside, it’s been an interesting look at what I might be able to expect from this game as I continue playing.

The game immediately jumps into a scene with the party gathered in a single room in the small town of Kalm. Cloud is telling the group why he has it out for Sephiroth, revealing the tragic backstory that he shares with Tifa. Everything lines up with the original game, other than you not needing to find where Kalm is by wandering around the world map, and even a lot of the voice lines are the same as the original game’s text. The major change, this time, is that the greater graphical quality of the game allows for a lot of extra detail the original game did not, as does Remake and Rebirth’s quick framing of Cloud as having a faulty memory. If you played Remake, then you know there are some odd gaps in Cloud’s memory. You know that some of the things he shares don’t really add up. If you played the original game, you know that Cloud has rewritten much of his memory, putting himself in the shoes of another person as a mixture of trying to make sense of the trauma he’s undergone and fulfill the dream he left his home to chase. That said, the game doesn’t entirely rely on you having played any of the past games in order to know that there’s something going on that pokes holes in Cloud’s recollections

In Rebirth, you get your first inklings that something is wrong when you get a few camera close-ups on the faces of one of the Shinra grunts that appear in Cloud’s flashback. The young, smooth face seems familiar. They never show them side by side, but it bears a striking resemblance to Cloud’s face, which is a marked contrast to the generally more mature and generic face of most helmeted Shinra grunts, which includes the other ones you see during these recollections. Further hinting at the truth of Cloud’s flawed recollections, when you go to your mother’s house to attempt to save her after everything breaks bad with Sephiroth, you find the familiarly-faced Shinra grunt laying down on the ground in front of the door, gasping out the word “mom.” When Cloud goes to open the door, he immediately gets blasted back by the backdraft and lands on the ground in the exact same position as that Shinra grunt who is, coincidentally, nowhere to be seen. If these hints weren’t enough, we get a brief cutscene between Tifa and Aerith as Tifa expresses her concerns about Cloud because, to her recollection–which the story paints as being incredibly clear until she is nearly killed by Sephiroth–which matched the details of Cloud’s story so far as she was willing to share, Cloud wasn’t present in their hometown when all this happened. There’s even a scene between Cloud and Tifa right after that, ratchetting up the tension between them as Cloud expresses a doubt planted in his mind by the whispered words of Sephiroth’s phantasm, questioning how she survived the terrible wound that he saw inflicted on her. Which, unfortunately, ends the conversation before Tifa could do anything to cause Cloud to doubt his own memories since she’s so upset by the callous way he spoke to her.

It’s a really great addition to the moment. It sets the stakes, makes it clear that something’s off with Cloud, and further alienates him from the one person who, with the right questions, could cause his carefully constructed memories to implode. Having progressed only a tiny bit further than this point (I haven’t even been to the Chocobo farm yet), I have no idea how this is going to play out and I’m super excited to see it. I just, you know, have to explore everything first. Sure, I could press forward on the plot and rely on the post-game chapter selection thing to fully explore places, but sometimes the OCD just isn’t worth fighting and you gotta let it have what it wants. Which is to get all the fog of war off my map. Can’t stand the stuff. Plus, the combat is still pretty fun and I’m still experimenting with team composition. I really love that everyone follows you around now, and that you can swap between premade teams at the press of some buttons (no pause menu required, though you can also do more complex team changes there). Everyone can chime in on developments in the game, gets AP for their Materia (which is basically the XP Materia uses to level up), and you can quickly swap out someone who is injured or out of MP. Unless it is cloud who is injured or out of MP. If Cloud needs a break, you’re pretty much screwed or need to take a rest on a nearby bench using a “cushion” since apparently you can’t sit on a dirty old bench without one. Plus, whoever isn’t an active combatant still fights from the background, they just don’t do any damage. At least until your entire party is on the ropes and then you get to call in one favor to help you survive the battle, unleashing a synergy attack with the aid of your backline and hopefully putting you back in the game. It’s a really fun touch. I’m really hoping to get a sizeable chunk of hours logged in the game this weekend [I did not, but you’ll find out why on Monday], given that all my tabletop games have been canceled, so hopefully I’ll have more to say on this game in the future.