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?
After playing the game more, it feels like the side content is better paced after the first section. So far the first area “Grasslands” is the only one to fully open up to you immediately with the next story quest being “get out of here”.
The rest have story quests that break up the potential monotony. I was about to burn out on the side content on the third area. But pushed through cause I was enjoying the game as a whole anyway and all of a sudden I had done everything I could do in the area at this point pretty quickly (because I couldn’t get fully explore it all before continuing the story) and I ended up enjoying it this time too which I hadn’t expected. I just got to this area and immediately thought “ugh more of the same” but it wasn’t completely the case.
The type of terrain and level design of these big areas are a big factor in the content in them feeling varied I feel, and they do change a lot. The actual side quests get better too, some resulting in you doing a few optional linear dungeons which is nice.
The big enemies you unlock to fight like mini bosses are really fun too, so if you like the combat, getting them unlocked might just end up being worth it to you too.