After two weeks of struggling to even force myself to play Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth (much less WANT to play it) amidst a burst of burnout, depression, and other pastimes that needed my attention more immediately, I’ve finally figured out why I’ve been avoiding it. In retrospect, I think the main reason it took me this long was because I was up to my waist in denial, and the rest of it is made up of my general patience, my habit of having a podcast to listen to when there’s not much going on in terms of audio, and my genuine love of Final Fantasy 7: Remake. It is difficult to see clearly past all of those blinding or rose-colored filters. But now I have and I can firmly say that the reason I’ve been struggling to play Rebirth is because the open world is boring and empty. Sure, there’s lots of little collectibles, but having junk to pick up doesn’t make the world feel any less empty. It actually makes it feel even more empty most of the time, especially when I have to wander further and further afield to get all of the random junk I need to craft my own items since the people who made the game decided it would be better to fill your inventory with junk than to just give you chests with items in them. And it’s not like you can just keep collecting this stuff so that you never run out. No. You can have ninety-nine of something and then you can’t pick up any more, which sucks because this is your main avenue for collecting potions and items. You have to craft all this crap, mix up weird combo items, and make sure you’re leveling up your item crafter device so you can make level-appropriate items. It’s a whole-ass crafting system created for the sole purpose of filling this empty world and all it has accomplished is to draw attention to the fact that the world is pointlessly massive.

One of my favorite parts of Remake was that you had a relatively small area to cover no matter where you went. Sure, the game made you go back and forth all the time, treading the same ground over and over again, but it’s not like the game ever made you walk all that far. Plus, by the time you started needing to wander the world more broadly, you could get a quest to unlock fast travel. Which wasn’t necessary by any means since the world isn’t that big until you get into dungeons or buildings built by Shinra (and even then, they’re pretty linear so it’s difficult to get lost), but it was convenient. In Rebirth, you occasionally have small interstitial segments of the game that are direct or provide limited pathing, but so much of the game takes place in sprawling cities, massive open environments, and across huge swaths of land. It’s exhausting to see how far I have yet to travel to explore the area I’m in or how many little side quests I have to complete in order to mark this zone as done. Or how even the more focused-zones still have this wide area for you to explore that is just empty! There’s barely any materials there, so even the pretense of having a reason for this area to be so open and explorable is gone.

I’m sure you could try to make a pretty good argument that the expanded traversal mechanics meant that the game’s developers needed to make the environment more open so you, the player, wouldn’t spend your whole time playing the game asking your TV why you can’t hop of this log at the side of the path when you can hop over a much larger one that’s laying across the path. The problem with that argument is that a better solution would be to just not include the additional traversal mechanics. Absolutely no part of having these additional mechanics has been important, relevant, or even interesting. Conversely, they’ve actually interrupted the experience more because sometimes Cloud winds up climbing up or jumping down something I don’t want him to interact with because I can’t get the pathing to work for the place I actually want to go to. Or because they can’t just leave the “glowing blue arrows” signs on the ground to mark a special traversal space and now need to include the ever-more-common yellow paint/markings on handholds and rocky outcroppings so you absolutely know you can climb it. I mean, you’ve already marked the spot with the incredibly easy to see blue arrow signs, so why add the pathing? Why make me direct Cloud up that cliff? Why make the climbing controls so damn finicky in terms of what direction I’m pushing when, ultimately, Cloud is either going up or down?

The inclusion of the “open world” elements in this game feel like they’re here to pad things out. To take up time or even just mark a box on a checklist of things that modern games are supposed to have to be successful. They don’t feel like they serve a purpose when Remake has already done a great job of creating a full, interesting world WITHOUT needing to give you endless collectibles to find and an entire crafting system that exists solely to justify putting junk all over the pointlessly large map. Sure, the side benefit of this is that I do plenty of grinding for XP as I run around the world, mindlessly collecting things, fighting special enemies, taking pictures of scenic overlooks, learning about the region, and doing little chores to upgrade the summoning Materia I’m going to eventually unlock. But the mindless collection is pointless, as I’ve already said. The special enemies don’t show up outside of those fights and fighting them isn’t even particularly fun or difficult. There’s no challenge to the pictures and, as far as I can tell so far, no reward for them. Learning about the region is a little interesting, but it ultimately doesn’t even contribute to you understanding the world you’re playing in any better, only how the world used to be before Shinra wrecked it and there’s already plenty of interesting environmental storytelling that covers that point. And the summoning Materia are fine, sure, and doing these tasks makes them easier to get, but I barely use summoning Materia. Most battles are over before I need it, thanks to all the grinding I do while trying to do side quests and find whatever weird little hidden gulch is hiding the next massive Materia crystal for me to play a “press triangle at the right time” mini-game.

The pervading feeling I get from this game is that, when it comes to the open world, the game doesn’t respect my time. It’s giving me mindless busywork because that’s just what people expect from games like this now. Doing quests in town, learning about my party members, focusing in on NPCs, and doing the work of advancing the plot through incremental shifts in the place the characters are staying is all interesting and fun. But all that disappears the instant you step outside of town and enter the open world. Even the side-quests you get that take you out of town or that start out of town can’t save it, especially because most of them wind up being boring “go collect some junk” or “go beat up some monsters” missions with nothing to recommend them other than the ever-present grind for gear, items, and XP. It’s truly frustrating to find myself struggling to play and enjoy a game that I mostly love except for this massive, pervasive, and undeniable aspect of it.