A few weeks ago, as a part of my on-going quest to document my time spent in the various worlds of Final Fantasy 7, I wrote about Cloud Strife and the way his character is portrayed differently between games. As I’ve gotten further into Rebirth, I’ve thought a lot about the depiction of Cloud in the original game, the way it was different in Remake, and the way it’s different again in Rebirth. The Rebirth version of Cloud is a melding of the two. The terse, non-committal version of Cloud has returned (which brought back the Classic Cloud Shrug, baybee!), but there are still moments of awkward earnestness that break through this shell. Despite that merge of the two different Clouds I saw, between the original Final Fantasy 7 Cloud and the Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth Cloud, there’s still a missing element here. Original Cloud felt like he was playing at being a cool guy. He felt like he was living out his dream and trying to fulfill the image he had in his head of what it meant to be a SOLDIER. This Cloud, the Cloud of Rebirth, feels more like he’s just a million miles away. He tunes in and out, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes seemingly involuntarily. He has moments where is is alive, his personality is a brilliant spark, and he’s driving the group forward with lateral and creative thinking. Other times, he can barely pay attention to a conversation or someone sharing a memory from what should be their shared past in an effort to connect with him. It’s disconcerting to see it play out on the screen but, crucially, the game also makes it clear that the other characters are noticing it as well.

Now, I’m still not very far into the game. I spent all of Saturday (and far too many of the early hours of Sunday) playing Satisfactory in an attempt to escape from the stress of last week, so I only wound up getting a short evening’s gaming in last night between my late dinner and bedtime (also, as a note, I’m writing this on last Monday rather last Friday since I was too busy and then exhausted to write anything on Friday). As a result, I’ve only gotten through the Junon area exploration stuff and finally arrived in Upper Junon, just in time to prepare for the parade. I had a lot of fun recruiting soldiers and I’m eager to see how the parade minigame will go this time around, since I love a good minigame. Still, even with most of my game time being spent on exploring the open world and only a little bit of time on progressing the plot, it’s been interesting to see that the characters who changed the most from their original versions, Aerith and Cloud, have both changed again.

Aerith has lost her ethereal quality. She no longer seems to be some wise sage with a strange, unknowable plan for the future, speaking for the player as she resigns herself to accepting the disasters to come. She has moments of hesitation where she once showed confidence. Now, this change isn’t exactly new since it was foreshadowed at the end of the first game, but the story keeps bringing it up here and there. She remarked at the end of Remake that she misses the steel sky of living beneath Midgar and has brough it up a couple times in Rebirth. Each time, even when Tifa brings it up in reference to her own experiences, it’s always serving as a metaphor for the loss of her ability to sort of see the future and know how events will play out. She’s lost her sense of predestination. And, to cope with feeling out of her depth, She–like Cloud–leans into moments of doubt or fear with a little too much enthusiasm in an effort to hide her true feelings.

Outside of the continued development of these two characters, things are remarkably the same so far. At least in broad strokes. There’s a lot of new details and, unlike the original Final Fantasy 7, Rebirth doesn’t handwave how the rest of the party gets into Upper Junon. We’ve met new characters that are apparently originally from material surrounding the original FF7 game, we’ve seen a lot of depth added to every area we’ve passed through, and the entirety of the Fort Condor side quest was turned into a minigame (though I still MUCH prefer the Fort Condor minigame from Intermission). Still, the broad strokes haven’t changed yet. We’re still about to get on a boat. There’s still a parade. We still had to acquire access to chocobos. The main ACTUAL difference seems to be that Yuffie isn’t a party member who can be missed this time around. And that there’s a biker asshole waiting for us in Upper Junon, potentially ready to fuck up all our plans as he seeks to fight Cloud again, this time over the pretext of whether or not he’s going to try kidnapping Aerith.

I can’t shake the feeling that this game isn’t really in a conversation with its past self anymore. We resolved the whole “fated to live out the original game” thing in the end of Remake, but so far nothing has changed. The party still hunts Sephiroth. Cloud is still spacing out weirdly. Rufus Shinra is still an asshole who has decided that the Turks aren’t supposed to bother with us. It’s almost discouragingly similar. Except that now Tifa and Aerith are a part of the whole “dressing up as Shinra guards” thing and I’m all for it. I was hyped to discover that it wouldn’t be Cloud alone parading through this particularly minigame. I stopped last night’s play right at the point of moving on to the next area to start the parade and my squad’s performance, so I’m looking forward to getting to run through that until I’m satisfied. I will miss having my own personal hype squad, though, once I move on from this area. It’s a great feeling to emerge from a shop and here one of the guards shout out “Welcome back, Sir! I hope you found what you were looking for, Sir!” with each of the other guards shouting “Sir!” along with the main speaker. It’s absolutely delightful. Enough so that I stopped worrying about whether Rebirth was going to be able to successfully cash the check that Remake wrote. Like I said, there’s an awful lot of similarity still playing out here for a group of people that supposedly threw off the shackles of fate…