I’ve been steadily chipping away at Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth again and was planning to keep my thoughts to myself until I got further in the game (apparently ending the open world sections of chapter 9 just launches you into an open world section in chapter 10, unlike every other open-world section that got to have a break for some fun story time before heading back to the open world stuff again, which made me so frustrated that I turned my PlayStation off and stared at my ceiling in discontent for fifteen minutes). Instead, I’m writing this post because I saw someone writing about Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth by saying that there might never be another game like it. This was meant as praise and had me wondering if the writer of that post had played the same game I did. As I chewed on this opinion, I realized I’d never really looked at reviews for the game, as it released or in the months since then, because I’d wanted to avoid being spoiled while I finished up some other games before diving into FF7: Rebirth. Uncertain, now, if my opinion was just me being curmudgeonly and unwilling to allow myself to appreciate the game, I decided to spend some time looking at reviews and discussions of the game. Which pretty much all broke down into people either loving or hating the open-world segments of the game, for good and bad reasons on both sides, and doing nothing but shouting down the people who disagreed with them. So, today, as I complained about the game to a friend, I decided I should actually talk about WHY this game doesn’t work for me, why I continue to push myself to play it, and why I feel so emotionally invested in all of this that I’m writing about it multiple times without even finishing it.

To put it simply, I can see the excellent game that exists here. The plot is interesting, the characterization of the various protagonists is fairly compelling, and the whole thing walks an interesting line between retelling the story from its original game and acknowledging the fact that most people are aware of or have already experienced that story. There’s a lot of interesting stuff the game does that I’m excited to experience to its full extent when I can finally reengage with the plot (I’m currently telling myself to just do all the open world stuff right now so I can then go back through the game, chapter by chapter, to get the interesting plot stuff without having to bother with the largely flavorless open-world exploration stuff once I’ve run through it all) and I find myself continuously drawn back to the game because I NEED to know what the game has to say about its past self and its modern interpretation. It is narratively compelling–as both a story for me to experience and to me as a storyteller myself. I want to luxuriate in it and all its delightful strangeness. I want to let myself be swept away by this game more than almost any other game I’ve played.

I specifically say “want” here because the game frequently picks me up, carries me along, and then dumps me unceremoniously on the ground. Every time I step away from the flow of the plot to even cross some empty wasteland, much less fail to navigate my way through an incomprehensible jungle, I find myself struggling to get into the game. Normally, I’m a big fan of open worlds. I find exploration rewarding in its own right and I love finding all the little details and vistas that the developers put into the game for people like me, who enjoy a good checklist but also just want to exist in a game’s world, to enjoy. FF7: Rebirth’s open worlds do nothing for me, though, because behind every bend is either nothing or a location on my map with some uninteresting event for me to check off the list of events I’m presented with in every open world area. Even the more open and easily-navigated open world segments are nothing but stretches of nondescript ground, trees or rocks my movement gets fouled up on, scattered enemies, or materials I need if I want to engage in the crafting component of the game (which you have to do if you want to do a bunch of side quests or have enough items without constantly spending all your money). There’s nothing of interest there. Even the “vistas” are just water, featureless grey rocks, the occasional distant mountain that looks more like a featureless rock than a verdant mountain slope, a city, or the ruins left behind by previous civilizations and wars (which are often featureless rust-colored lumps rather than anything particularly interesting). Even the bits of the world that have variety and color to them feel superficial and like they’ve been dragged into the games to make “an environment” rather than something built to at least reflect the world we’re supposed to be buying into.

I’ve tried to find the fun in the open world areas. I’ve spent some thirty hours sifting through them, looking for anything I can enjoy, and have come up empty because even the check list of events aren’t fun (and I normally LOVE a checklist). I can do a mini-game that sometimes starts fun but often gets old quickly (given that there is zero margin for error if you want to make an attempt at the higher-tier rewards), fight a new variant of a monster (which is supposed to be more powerful and dangerous but really just has a different elemental weakness or a special attack that you never see since you can just damage-burst the enemies into the ground), or get a bit of lore about the world that adds some flavor, sure, but it most just piles on what you already know from the game’s plot rather than tell you anything new. It consistently feels like I’m doing the same chores over and over again and I have a difficult time convincing myself not to do these chores because they’re the main delivery mechanism for one of the types of experience points you need to grow more powerful, not to mention they get you a special currency you can spend on rare Materia that might not be available anywhere else. Sure, a lot of the game adapts to your level so it shouldn’t be any more or less difficult based on your stats, but having more powerful Materia and more moves unlocked is a significant power boost that you’ll be denied if you just try to focus on the plot. The one time I tried that, the plot outpaced my power and I had to circle back around to the open world grind for a while before I could tackle the next plot point with confidence.

It just constantly feels like the game is getting in its own way. Sure, Remake had a few long-winded side-missions and plenty of areas to explore with their own sub-plots that weren’t really relevant to the main story, but more of those were fairly limited and they were always new. It was always a different thing for you to do rather than just a list of boxes you need to check every time you move between plot segments. Rebirth just hands you a list and expects you to get to work. It event makes it more difficult for you to play if you don’t at least do some of them. That said, sometimes it makes it impossible to complete some of those check boxes until you’ve moved on to another area and then returned, which is just adding insult to injury since now I have to spend time backtracking to make sure I’ve done all of the filler content (and that’s what it all feels like: content to fill out the game rather than any kind of storytelling in its own right) required to get whatever these “protorelic” things add up to. Because its not like I’m actually getting something for that work. I’m just chasing a MacGuffin that looks the same every single time I finally get it. Even the thin veneer of storytelling placed over this particular line of quests doesn’t ever amount to anything and feels like more empty framing to justify more empty content so they can fill in some of the space around what is a fairly trimmed down bit of plot (even if it seems like this game should be covering more than half the plot development of the original game).

I just want to play this game! I want to have fun! Instead, I find myself wandering around some rocky, craggy canyon as I search for a race track because some new NPC wants me to use the racetrack she built to presumably encourage her daughter to get back in the saddle again after a nasty spill. Why I’m supposed to care about these people or why I, a perfect stranger, am the one this person decided to turn to is a mystery, since this quest is just another attempt to get me to spend some time on yet another mini game. There’s no depth to it. There’s nothing of interest. It’s just a new, upgraded mount in a new area and the sudden appearance of the second race track for you to play around with that doesn’t even do a good job of teaching you the basics of whatever new bird you’ve acquired since they all steer like giant boats and the game never tries to teach you how to steer well at speed. It’s just as empty as the flying instructions I got in what was essentially a cut scene since all I could do was tip the nose of the plane I was flying, not change directions at all. It was a waste of my time and it really drove home the feeling that this game doesn’t respect me or my time at all. That’s a difficult feeling to reconcile with just how interested I am in the plot and actual storytelling that appears in the game. I really do want to like this game so much, I just don’t know if I can. I don’t even know if I can actually finish it since I’ve once again decided to take a break from pushing myself to play it so I can actually have fun in my evenings.