Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: The Middle Chapter With Everything In It

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth shipped on 29 February 2024 for PS5, the second part of a planned trilogy remaking the 1997 original, directed by Naoki Hamaguchi at Square Enix’s Creative Business Unit I. Where 2020’s Remake covered the opening hours of the original game — Midgar alone, expanded to a full forty-hour release — Rebirth covers the entire middle stretch, from Cloud and party leaving the city at Kalm through Cosmo Canyon, the Gold Saucer, Wutai, Costa del Sol and Gongaga, up to the Forgotten Capital and the event the original game is most known for. It is, structurally, the single biggest bet Square Enix has made on a middle chapter in the studio’s history: an entire open-world game built out of what used to be the least memorable stretch of a thirty-hour RPG’s world map.

An open world built region by region

The map splits into distinct, walled-off regions — the Grasslands, the Junon area, Cosmo Canyon’s badlands, the Gongaga jungle, Corel’s desert basin — each unlocked in story order and each stuffed with its own density of towers, treasure, side content and a recurring minigame called Chadley’s assessments, which functions as the game’s tutorial-and-checklist system in one. It’s the most Ubisoft-shaped Final Fantasy has ever looked, and the game knows it: towers you climb to reveal the regional map, a completion percentage tracked per zone, a research-log structure that gates late-game abilities behind exploration quotas. That structure is worth naming honestly rather than treating as a compromise, because it’s also where the systems argument gets genuinely interesting — Square Enix built an open world using the most familiar, most criticised open-world grammar available, then spent the region design compensating for exactly the fatigue that grammar usually produces.

The compensation is variety of kind, not just quantity. Cosmo Canyon’s content leans into lore and Nanaki’s backstory; Gongaga’s leans into a jungle-survival tone with different enemy behaviour; the Gold Saucer abandons the open-world structure entirely for a dense, self-contained minigame arcade — chocobo racing, a rhythm game, a card game called Queen’s Blood that’s substantial enough to function as its own mini-RPG inside the RPG. Queen’s Blood in particular is the standout system: a two-lane card battler with real deckbuilding depth, optional NPC opponents scattered across every region, and enough strategic room that a player could reasonably spend ten hours on it without touching the main plot. It’s the clearest sign in the whole game of a team given the resources to over-deliver on a side system rather than pad one out.

The combat, three games deep into the same idea

Combat is the hybrid system Remake introduced — real-time attacks building an ATB gauge that unlocks menu-selected abilities, spells and limit breaks, so the game reads as action from a distance and as a tactical queue up close. Rebirth deepens it with a larger playable-party roster (Nanaki, Cait Sith and Yuffie all become controllable across the story) and Synergy Abilities, two-character combo moves that cost ATB from both party members and visibly stage a scripted double-team animation. The system’s real achievement is switch speed: swapping active control between three party members mid-fight, each with a different ATB rhythm and Materia loadout, without the fight ever losing its shape. It’s the best version yet of a compromise Square Enix has been building toward since abandoning pure turn-based combat, and it’s worth reading against the harder pivot in Final Fantasy XVI: the JRPG that wanted to be Devil May Cry, which throws the menu out entirely rather than keeping it as a layer beneath the action — two different answers to the same question about how much of the old Final Fantasy a modern one can keep.

The Gold Saucer as a pressure valve

The Gold Saucer arc deserves separate credit because it does something the region-by-region map never quite manages: it stops asking the player to do open-world completion work entirely and instead offers a dense arcade of self-contained systems — chocobo racing with its own handling model and upgrade tree, a rhythm-battle minigame, a 3D brawler pastiche, a full theatre sequence built around a cast dress-up gag lifted faithfully from the 1997 original — each of which exists purely for its own sake rather than to fill a regional completion bar. It’s the clearest moment in the game where the open-world grammar gets set down entirely, and the tonal relief is real: after twenty hours of towers and assessment logs, an arcade that asks nothing of you except to enjoy the individual minigame in front of you reads as generous rather than as more busywork. That the Gold Saucer sequence is also, structurally, a faithful expansion of a section players have loved since 1997 says something about where Square Enix’s instincts are soundest — restaging and enlarging a beloved set-piece rather than inventing an open-world justification for one.

Chadley as the tutorial you can’t skip

The one recurring irritation, and it’s worth calling out specifically because it’s a design choice rather than an accident, is Chadley: an AI hologram who appears via handheld device to explain every new system, rate your combat performance, and dole out the assessments that gate Materia and abilities. He’s necessary — the game has genuinely a lot of systems to onboard across forty-plus hours — but the game leans on him as a delivery mechanism for busywork rather than trusting the regions themselves to teach through play, the way Tears of the Kingdom’s Sky Islands do. It’s the clearest evidence that Rebirth, for all its craft, is still an open world built to a checklist template rather than one that fully escaped it.

The bench problem and how Synergy solves it

Any RPG with a party larger than the active combat slots runs into the same problem: characters who aren’t currently equipped rot on the bench, their Materia loadouts stale, their relevance to the story disconnected from their usefulness in a fight. Rebirth has seven eventual party members and only three active combat slots, which by the genre’s normal math should produce four characters nobody bothers levelling. Synergy Abilities are the fix, and they’re a smarter fix than they first look: each pair of characters gets unique combo moves, and — critically — Synergy Skills passively boost stats for the inactive member of a pairing too, so keeping Yuffie or Cait Sith benched doesn’t mean their growth stalls. The game is quietly solving its own structural math problem with a system that reads, on the surface, like pure spectacle. It’s the kind of fix that’s easy to miss because the flashy combo animation is what a highlight reel shows, when the actual design achievement is the invisible stat math running underneath it.

Cosmo Canyon and the game’s best hour

If there’s a standalone highlight worth naming without spoiling plot, it’s the Cosmo Canyon sequence: a vision-quest scene that drops the open-world structure entirely for a scripted, linear stretch built purely around Nanaki’s history and grief, using the game’s engine to stage something closer to a playable cutscene than a level. It’s the strongest evidence in the game that the team can still do focused, hand-authored storytelling when it chooses to step outside the regional-map format, and it makes the surrounding checklist content feel more like a choice than a limitation — the team clearly can build tight, but chose sprawling for most of the runtime because the trilogy format demands enough total playtime to justify three full priced releases.

What the ending is actually doing

Following Remake’s ending, which introduced ghostly “Whispers of Fate” bending events away from the 1997 script, Rebirth keeps pulling that thread — the game is now visibly building toward a multiversal take on the original story rather than a straight remake, and the back half leans into that uncertainty rather than resolving it. Whether that pays off depends entirely on the third instalment, which makes Rebirth, fairly read, an enormous, gorgeous, occasionally padded middle act that cannot fully stand alone — the honest cost of choosing to tell a thirty-hour story across three sixty-hour games.

The verdict: the best Final Fantasy combat system to date, wrapped in the most conventional open-world structure the series has attempted, saved by regional content varied enough that the conventional shape rarely curdles into fatigue. Whether forty-plus hours of that structure earns its length is a fairer question than whether any individual hour is good — most of them are — and the honest answer is that only a trilogy built on this scale would need a middle chapter this large in the first place.

Spoilers below

The Forgotten Capital sequence restages the original 1997 game’s most famous scene — Aerith’s death at Sephiroth’s hand — but complicates it: thanks to the Whispers of Fate and a multiversal framing introduced across both games, the moment plays ambiguously, with visual and narrative cues suggesting Aerith may exist, or partly exist, in more than one timeline simultaneously by the sequence’s end. Square Enix declined to simply restage the scene as tragedy-confirmed the way the original did, gambling an entire fanbase’s most sacred story beat on a swerve the third game has to justify. It’s the single highest-stakes narrative decision the remake trilogy has made, and as of this game alone, it remains unresolved.

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