I've never played the OG FF7 but I loved Remake. Beautiful environments, great music, story, and characters. I rarely pick games back up after finishing them, but I finished remake twice.

I was really excited to play Rebirth, especially after seeing the all the great reviews, and wow what a let down. The graphics are downgraded, the story is filled with Ubisoft style open world bloat, loaded with pointless minigames. It felt like SE tried to pad out the game with as much time wasting garbage as possible. I put the game down shortly after reaching the second area and haven't felt compelled to come back.

Does the game improve at all later? Is it worth pushing through?

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[–] Katana314@lemmy.world 15 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'll admit, it's probably not disingenuous to the original for it to be crammed with minigames, whether or not they changed it up with new ones. When the original was one game, leaving Midgar was very much a moment of freedom they wanted to capitalize on, so it was the perfect checkpoint to start giving the player optional activities.

That said, the "Towers" subject in particular (what I believe prompted the "Ubisoft style" comment) is something I feel like gamers need to cool down on. As much as people habitually throw shade on Ubisoft for starting them, they make sense, and can be done in an interesting way. If you have an open world environment, you want players to rely on the ugly minimap as little as possible; that often means both a focus on vertical movement that allows you chances to see the space in front of you, as well as tall buildings that encourage distant exploration. I really think towers get unfair criticism, even if a few games have done them in less fun ways (I could be biased - I think even in their initial appearances in Far Cry 3, they were actually fun to climb)

[–] relic_@lemm.ee 1 points 8 months ago

Yeah your understanding about the towers is correct. I don't think it's inherently bad, I've even enjoyed it in some of the AC games, but in rebirth it just feels like a bad chore list. Some of the combat challenges can be interesting but the ones with the summon stones (I forget the name, but they reduce the power of summon fights and do other things) and scanning the life springs are just terrible imo.