One interesting factoid about social media is that far more accounts are created than are active at any given time. Most accounts will never post more than once or twice and most posts on social media are created by a relatively small number of uses. Something similar is true about video games, even if it’s often more difficult to observe or discover (or maybe I’m just following weird people on social media who talk about that stuff a lot and can get the numbers to back their assertion up): lots of people start but don’t finish video games. These days, that information is, if available at all, pretty easy to find since a lot of video games will have achievements of some kind (achievements, trophies, etc.) and a subset of achievements that are unlocked for completing sections of the game. You can go to your Steam profile and look at the global achievement numbers for a game you’ve played and while it absolutely doesn’t count every singe person who has played that game thanks to the proliferation of other sources for games, it still gives some interesting statistics about the people on the platform you’re using. Since useless statistics are one of my favorite things, if I get bored while I’m waiting for a Steam game to update or for a friend to come online so we can play a game together, I’ll spend some time looking into what achievements I’ve got that are rare according to Steam. Recently, as I’ve been playing more and more games on my PS5, I’ve taken to doing the same thing while winding down for the evening, once I’ve shut the game off. Which is how I found out that almost half of players never finished Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth.

This number might seem kind of high, but the game is so much longer than its prequel and has a lot of soggy-middle parts in all of its open-world chapters. I mean, I’m still on Chapter 9 because I haven’t played the game in a couple of months and while I will eventually finish the game (I got back to work on that last night, even, which is what prompted this post), I’m currently amongst the number of players who played it but never finished it. It isn’t difficult to imagine a number of people falling by the wayside as they play the game, thanks to just how big the open-world sections of the game are and just how pointless they feel. I mean, I’ve spent a bunch of time wandering around to scan a bunch of crystals for no benefit other than to get points to buy Materia I’ll probably never use and to unlock small bits of history about the world (or the regions I’m exploring) that make it feel ever more clear that the world of the recent FF7 games is aware that consuming Mako is directly destroying the planet–which just makes it more difficult to suspend my disbelief that the company effectively ruling the world is able to operate with as little opposition as it does. I can completely understand that people wouldn’t want to spend their time on a game like this and while the number of people who didn’t finish the game feels high, I still can’t deny that I’ve considered not finishing it myself. It’s so much more onerous than it needs to be, given how little all these side systems and world events matter.

I love the writing and the characterization of the game (aside from some of the character model motions that feel a little over-the-top as people are having normal conversations but I’m not sure if that cropped up when Yuffie joined the group or if it was always there and I just didn’t notice before her obvious example drew my attention to it), but it is really frustrating that I have to slog through so much underwhelming gameplay to get to it. Sure, some of it is by my choice since the game isn’t forcing me to play minigames until I’ve unlocked the highest tier of reward, but a lot of the time I’m wandering through a lot of boring terrain as I hunt for whatever junk I need to complete a quest or in order to discover the “hidden cache” locations on the map for what almost always winds up being an underwhelming amount of treasure. I could, of course, ignore all this stuff, but this stuff also provides the experience points that give you access to higher tiers of character abilities (Party EXP) so it feels like I need to do as much as possible so I can keep my characters appropriately powered up. I genuinely feel like they made it an open-world game and then added systems into the game to justify the open-world, which makes both the systems and the open-world feel superfluous and boring.

I’d probably enjoy the game a lot more if there was a more restricted version of it. It’s difficult not to look back at Final Fantasy 7: Remake and compare the two. Remake is a shorter game, by virtue of keeping your paths limited and keeping almost all of the side quests contained within a few “welcome to a new population center” periods within the game. The paths between places are small, limited trails meant to give the game time to load things while you walk. Sure, some of this difference could be an attempt to induce the feeling of being in a much larger world since you’ve left Midgar behind, but the grandeur immediately fades in the face of the daunting task that is navigating through these open-world areas that lack much to distinguish themselves from each other beyond the type of Chocobo you might find and the general look of the biome you’re in. Beyond that, it’s just crumbling infrastructure, Mako pipes, random bits of water, and cliffs bordering a too-large explorable expanse with little in it to recommend taking the time to explore. It’s frustrating and I wish they’d stuck with the tighter, more focused style of game they’d made in FF7: Remake. I have no idea what the next one is going to look like, but I really hope they’ve gotten over their little open-world kick by the time they release it…