Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

[Vergil]

I hope that since Zack gets resurrected Zakkura can become official canon.

[Jordy]

I like that Shinra troops have completely functional looking uniforms with cool Helghast helmets but if you become a SOLDIER you get issued a pair of jinco jeans and a sleeveless turtleneck.

Cloud never became SOLDIER though. Or did they change that in the remake?

[Vergil]

I like that Shinra troops have completely functional looking uniforms with cool Helghast helmets but if you become a SOLDIER you get issued a pair of jinco jeans and a sleeveless turtleneck.

Cloud never became SOLDIER though. Or did they change that in the remake?

I was speaking more in general. All of the SOLDIER members wear the outfit.

[Jordy]

I like that Shinra troops have completely functional looking uniforms with cool Helghast helmets but if you become a SOLDIER you get issued a pair of jinco jeans and a sleeveless turtleneck.

Cloud never became SOLDIER though. Or did they change that in the remake?

I was speaking more in general. All of the SOLDIER members wear the outfit.

I thought they wore what they wanted? Sephiroth, Zack/Angeal and Genesis all wear different things.

[Vergil]

Cloud never became SOLDIER though. Or did they change that in the remake?

I was speaking more in general. All of the SOLDIER members wear the outfit.

I thought they wore what they wanted? Sephiroth, Zack/Angeal and Genesis all wear different things.

In Crisis Core you see whole squads of SOLDIER troops and they all wear the indentical outfit Zack/Angeal wear. The only difference is each rank is a different color. Genesis and Sephiroth get to wear what they want because they have swag I guess.

[Jordy]

I was speaking more in general. All of the SOLDIER members wear the outfit.

I thought they wore what they wanted? Sephiroth, Zack/Angeal and Genesis all wear different things.

In Crisis Core you see whole squads of SOLDIER troops and they all wear the indentical outfit Zack/Angeal wear. The only difference is each rank is a different color. Genesis and Sephiroth get to wear what they want because they have swag I guess.

I'll take your word for it I guess. Perhaps I mistook them for Shinra troops.

[Vergil]

[Jordy]

Ah yeah, you're right. I remember killing a ton of them in Shinra HQ. Never occured to me they were SOLDIER.

[Jordy]

[Jordy]

@Vergil My mistake was that I thought you were talking about the image you posted of Cloud when you were referring to the Shinra uniform.

[KOS-MOS]

Another issue is that FF7 Rebirth is a Western styled photo realistic movie game/Assasin's Creed open world. It's not going to do well in Japan. Same issue with FF16. People want more traditional JRPGs, not being sold non-JRPGs with a JRPG franchise brand name slapped on it.

As a former die-hard (now not so much) FF fan, this is exactly why I don’t even bother with the FF7 remakes or FF16. I completely skipped FF15 too, and since I’m not into MMORPGs, FF14 can go to hell.

These days, I just keep replaying the classic FF games over and over again.

I’m not a fan of this boring action-oriented, button-mashing "RPG" trend they’ve embraced. I don’t like the way they’ve changed the story, I don’t like that they’ve chopped the game into pieces to sell more games, and I absolutely hate the hyper-realistic graphics. Also, since I despise Ubisoft games (except for Rayman and Child of Light), the FF7 remakes feel even more unbearable to me.

[Vergil]

I actually quite like the gameplay but everything else surrounding it is kind of the problem for me. Too much interruption and too many annoying characters.

[KOS-MOS]

Oh, and I completely forgot to mention that FF7 remakes OST are absolute trash

[ArcaneLurker]

I’m not a fan of this boring action-oriented, button-mashing "RPG" trend they’ve embraced.

The remake combat is way more engaging than the original game, where, for the most part, you're just spamming through menus to attack, and it's random encounters too.
Especially with the mods to tweak difficulty, to make actions faster for npcs, enemies take less damage when they're not broken, and doing tactical things breaks their guard, it becomes more about averting damage, whilst building ATB & then using it wisely.

It's one of the things they got right. Better than FF15.

[Vergil]

Yea FF15 has truly awful gameplay where I felt like I was holding a button while the game played itself.

[Finarfin]

Oh, and I completely forgot to mention that FF7 remakes are absolute trash

fixed

[DDC]

I had been waiting to play this for a long time, ever since the release of Remake on the PS4, and now Rebirth finally dropped on PC, I don't know what to think. I really enjoyed Remake as a cinematic retelling of FF7 (other than some of the new plot elements inserted and the excessive backtracking), but Rebirth is very different.

It starts off well enough because you play as Zack and Sephiroth in the first hour and both are absolutely epic. Then suddenly it just turns into a directionless openworld slopfest where it seems like they are hell bent on ripping off every last trope from Ubishit games. It's all here: traverseable climbing areas painted bright yellow, landscape littered with "crafting materials," revealing "points of interest" on the map by activating "survey towers," collectathon side quests, boring exploration, terrible pacing.

I hope it gets a lot better, because right now the most interesting thing is the card game.

[LuX]

Hello, i just registered desperately because i'm playing FF VII rebirth, which i consider one of the best jrpg's of the last years, and they've filled it with woke npcs, black ones, other ugly ones, etc and they ruin the game's atmosphere. i came to ask if someone could create a mod for the antiwoke npcs for this game, if i had the necessary knowledge i would do it myself. it's bothering me quite a bit while i'm playing all this. greetings, i'm very happy to see a website/forum dedicated to cleaning up woke garbage of games.

[DDC]

Wow, I just finished it and this might be the most disappointed I've ever been by a JRPG...and my history with the genre dates back to the Dragon Warrior nintendo power giveaway. Something I forgot to mention in my prior post that really bothered me at the start is that the game flat out tells you that if you miss any weapons, they'll be available later in the shop. What in the actual ****? The entire point of exploring is to find powerful items, but modern audiences get their panties in a twist if they "miss" something, so the most powerful artifacts in the game can all be bought for a trivial amount of gil.

The same philosophy extends to materia and summons. Now good game design (and this isn't ******* rocket science since everyone has done this for decades) is that you take your world, toss some monsters of various dangerousness in it, put the most dangerous monsters in some dungeon or caves or ruins-type areas, and put chests with the best items next to the toughest monsters (or have the monsters drop the items directly). Rebirth tosses that out the window. The good materia are bought with "points" that you get for checking off all of the ****** open-world point-of-interest locations...and they really are ******, we're talking "simon says" copy-the-button-press QTEs with 3-6 buttons and lengthy animations to transition in and out of them, and Chadley-the-****** always piping in with a pointless line or two after (which is another involuntary 10-second animation to pull out your radio and listen to his ********). Summons (and these battles are absolutely awesome) are fought in the same simulator as Remake. This was sort of excusable in Remake because you wouldn't expect to randomly find Bahamut and Leviathan running around Midgar, but there were tons of places in Rebirth that they could have been put out in the open world for the player to have the excitement of discovering them and to provide scenic backdrops. Instead what is in the open world are little temples that will give you the option to weaken the summons when you fight them in the simulator, thereby trivializing and depriving yourself of the best fights in the game.

To drive home how stupid the open world gameplay design is and how much it caters to "modern audiences," you will never find a single chest by itself out in the open world. Why? Because any chest must be part of a "cache," which is a map-marked "activity" with 2-3 chests, done this way for no purpose other than to facilitate autistic checklist-style 100% runs by zoomers and millenials. Actual discovery and exploration are gone. It might be the worst design I've ever seen. It makes an open-world Ubishit games seem like the second coming of Morrowind. It's really a shame because the open worlds look great and are well-made and could have been fun, but whoever was supposed to populate them didn't do their job.

The main story and primary side quests are mostly better. In fact, they absolutely nailed some parts of the game. The Junon parade is absolutely epic, and Costa Del Sol is great as well. The Barret-Dyne arc is amazingly good. The battle system is best in class, as are the presentation values, which I'd say make just about every other top JRPG look like a "AA" game at best. I'd say 30-40% of the game was extremely enjoyable. But the disastrous open-world along with some botched story elements and bad pacing make it lose all narrative steam before the end. Generally speaking, most minor things added (like making Jesse a surprise waifu in Remake) are great. The major plot elements added or deviations from the OG plot are disasters (black robes, "fate," etc). And I found the complete butchering of Cid, who was one of my favorite characters, particularly offensive. He no longer smokes, isn't angry, doesn't swear, and has no edge whatsoever. He has been transformed into a cheerful hayseed bumpkin happy to take your party wherever it needs to go. His main story arc isn't in this game, but I can't imagine that they won't ruin it in the next one and completely water down his interactions with Shera.

As for the heavy-spoiler things that bothered me off the most:

► Show Spoiler

The Midgar Zolom sequence (stupidly renamed to Midgarsormr in Rebirth) was completely ruined. This was one of the best parts of the OG, with the iconic visual of the Zolom impaled as lightning crackled in the background, conveying the sheer power and ominous threat posed by Sephiroth:



This was an enemy of overwhelming strength that your party was forced to flee from on Chocobo when encountered in the early game, and ever since Remake I had been looking forward to seeing the impaled Zolom and chocobo chase with modern graphics. It would have been amazing had they just stuck to the plan. Instead, you fight (and beat!) the Zolom with a low level party, it drags Cloud under the water, and Sephiroth materializes out nowhere to strike it down...thus placing his strength roughly on the same level as your low-level party. It makes the world and your quest feel much less dangerous.

Sephiroth is further nerfed in the Temple of the Ancients. In the OG, he strikes Tseng down with a sideways slash that doesn't look fatal. In Rebirth, Sephiroth completely runs Tseng through with his sword, full-on Aerith style. Tseng acts hurt for a bit, then he walks away and no-sells Sephiroth's biggest move like Ultimate Warrior getting up from a pedigree:



Tseng is later seen alive on a chopper right outside of Midgar.

Now on to the most consequential fuckup -- Aerith's death scene. It is not a stretch to call the original death the most important scene in the entire history of the JRPG genre. Given that significance, and the fact that the ending of Remake hinted that things might play out differently than the original, this was easily the part I was looking forward to the most. I assumed they would nail it like they did so many parts of Remake, or that if they were going to change it, it would at least be shocking and well done. Maybe Cloud kills Aerith (would have been my pick), maybe a different character dies, maybe Zack jumps out of another dimension to block the strike and she survives. I assumed they had something. Unfortunately what they "had" was the biggest narrative disaster in the history of JRPGs.

The thing that makes the OG scene is the shocking brutality. Sephiroth runs Aerith through with his sword from behind and it pops out her front like an Alien chest-buster:



So what to do now that we have the technology to really do this moment justice? Let's just...not show it. I cannot make this up. Let me reiterate: you do not see the blow that kills Aerith. In fact, she is repeatedly shown un-wounded to create ambiguity about whether she is dead, whether she is alive, whether she died and Cloud has gone insane and is blocking it out, etc. After about 20 boss fight phases that end up taking over an hour, it becomes clear that she is dead, although Cloud still sees her (whether it's her spirit or a hallucination isn't made fully clear). For a brief moment, she had an odd facial expression and I thought Sephiroth was going to start appearing to Cloud as Aerith to order him around and they would go all-in on the insanity angle, which would have been pretty dark and might have sort of salvaged it. But nope: they still killed her, there was no twist, and they took away everything that made the original scene good (including Cloud's monologue, which was the first time he showed real emotion). I probably could not have done worse if you paid me to **** it up as badly as possible. Seriously, the original scene, consisting of characters who have gouraud shaded cubes for arms and hands, is infinitely better than what was accomplished using the finest modern technology.

[Oyster Sauce]

The Midgar Zolom sequence (stupidly renamed to Midgarsormr in Rebirth)

The name hails from Norse mythology, in which Midgardsormr (Old Norse: Miðgarðsormr; also known as the World Serpent or Jörmungandr) was the middle child of Loki and a giantess named Angrboda. Odin threw it into the ocean that encircles Midgard and it eventually grew large enough to reach around the entire world and bite its own tail. It had been foreseen that on the day of Ragnarök it would battle with its arch-nemesis: Thor, the god of thunder. The sky would darken from the poison mist emitted by Midgardsormr, and the battle would end in the death of both. Thor would first kill Midgardsormr and then stagger nine steps before dying from its poison.

"Midgar Zolom" is an artifact of Final Fantasy VII's spotty localization. "Midgardsormr" is usually rendered in the series and elsewhere correctly as ミドガルズオルム (Midogaruzuorumu?); however, as ウ (u?)-column katakana, along with ト (to?) and ド (do?) for /t/ and /d/, are used to transliterate bare consonants in other languages, the translator working on this section of the game likely did not realize the mythological connotation and attempted to transliterate the name directly from the kana without further context. The serpent being found near the city of Midgar (which, in Japanese, is meant to be part of the pun and reference) likely led to the final result.

"Midgar Zolom" is further in error as, even if setting aside ミドガルズオルム being correctly translated as Midgardsormr in other games, the original Japanese word does not possess the interpunct (中黒, nakaguro?), which is necessary to indicate that the proper noun being transliterated is two separate words; i.e., "Midgar Zolom" should be ミドガル・ズオルム in Japanese, with the interpunct in between the words.

[ArcaneLurker]

Wow, I just finished it and this might be the most disappointed I've ever been by a JRPG...and my history with the genre dates back to the Dragon Warrior nintendo power giveaway. Something I forgot to mention in my prior post that really bothered me at the start is that the game flat out tells you that if you miss any weapons, they'll be available later in the shop. What in the actual ****? The entire point of exploring is to find powerful items, but modern audiences get their panties in a twist if they "miss" something, so the most powerful artifacts in the game can all be bought for a trivial amount of gil.

The same philosophy extends to materia and summons. Now good game design (and this isn't ******* rocket science since everyone has done this for decades) is that you take your world, toss some monsters of various dangerousness in it, put the most dangerous monsters in some dungeon or caves or ruins-type areas, and put chests with the best items next to the toughest monsters (or have the monsters drop the items directly). Rebirth tosses that out the window. The good materia are bought with "points" that you get for checking off all of the ****** open-world point-of-interest locations...and they really are ******, we're talking "simon says" copy-the-button-press QTEs with 3-6 buttons and lengthy animations to transition in and out of them, and Chadley-the-****** always piping in with a pointless line or two after (which is another involuntary 10-second animation to pull out your radio and listen to his ********). Summons (and these battles are absolutely awesome) are fought in the same simulator as Remake. This was sort of excusable in Remake because you wouldn't expect to randomly find Bahamut and Leviathan running around Midgar, but there were tons of places in Rebirth that they could have been put out in the open world for the player to have the excitement of discovering them and to provide scenic backdrops. Instead what is in the open world are little temples that will give you the option to weaken the summons when you fight them in the simulator, thereby trivializing and depriving yourself of the best fights in the game.

To drive home how stupid the open world gameplay design is and how much it caters to "modern audiences," you will never find a single chest by itself out in the open world. Why? Because any chest must be part of a "cache," which is a map-marked "activity" with 2-3 chests, done this way for no purpose other than to facilitate autistic checklist-style 100% runs by zoomers and millenials. Actual discovery and exploration are gone. It might be the worst design I've ever seen. It makes an open-world Ubishit games seem like the second coming of Morrowind. It's really a shame because the open worlds look great and are well-made and could have been fun, but whoever was supposed to populate them didn't do their job.

The main story and primary side quests are mostly better. In fact, they absolutely nailed some parts of the game. The Junon parade is absolutely epic, and Costa Del Sol is great as well. The Barret-Dyne arc is amazingly good. The battle system is best in class, as are the presentation values, which I'd say make just about every other top JRPG look like a "AA" game at best. I'd say 30-40% of the game was extremely enjoyable. But the disastrous open-world along with some botched story elements and bad pacing make it lose all narrative steam before the end. Generally speaking, most minor things added (like making Jesse a surprise waifu in Remake) are great. The major plot elements added or deviations from the OG plot are disasters (black robes, "fate," etc). And I found the complete butchering of Cid, who was one of my favorite characters, particularly offensive. He no longer smokes, isn't angry, doesn't swear, and has no edge whatsoever. He has been transformed into a cheerful hayseed bumpkin happy to take your party wherever it needs to go. His main story arc isn't in this game, but I can't imagine that they won't ruin it in the next one and completely water down his interactions with Shera.

As for the heavy-spoiler things that bothered me off the most:

► Show Spoiler

The Midgar Zolom sequence (stupidly renamed to Midgarsormr in Rebirth) was completely ruined. This was one of the best parts of the OG, with the iconic visual of the Zolom impaled as lightning crackled in the background, conveying the sheer power and ominous threat posed by Sephiroth:



This was an enemy of overwhelming strength that your party was forced to flee from on Chocobo when encountered in the early game, and ever since Remake I had been looking forward to seeing the impaled Zolom and chocobo chase with modern graphics. It would have been amazing had they just stuck to the plan. Instead, you fight (and beat!) the Zolom with a low level party, it drags Cloud under the water, and Sephiroth materializes out nowhere to strike it down...thus placing his strength roughly on the same level as your low-level party. It makes the world and your quest feel much less dangerous.

Sephiroth is further nerfed in the Temple of the Ancients. In the OG, he strikes Tseng down with a sideways slash that doesn't look fatal. In Rebirth, Sephiroth completely runs Tseng through with his sword, full-on Aerith style. Tseng acts hurt for a bit, then he walks away and no-sells Sephiroth's biggest move like Ultimate Warrior getting up from a pedigree:



Tseng is later seen alive on a chopper right outside of Midgar.

Now on to the most consequential fuckup -- Aerith's death scene. It is not a stretch to call the original death the most important scene in the entire history of the JRPG genre. Given that significance, and the fact that the ending of Remake hinted that things might play out differently than the original, this was easily the part I was looking forward to the most. I assumed they would nail it like they did so many parts of Remake, or that if they were going to change it, it would at least be shocking and well done. Maybe Cloud kills Aerith (would have been my pick), maybe a different character dies, maybe Zack jumps out of another dimension to block the strike and she survives. I assumed they had something. Unfortunately what they "had" was the biggest narrative disaster in the history of JRPGs.

The thing that makes the OG scene is the shocking brutality. Sephiroth runs Aerith through with his sword from behind and it pops out her front like an Alien chest-buster:



So what to do now that we have the technology to really do this moment justice? Let's just...not show it. I cannot make this up. Let me reiterate: you do not see the blow that kills Aerith. In fact, she is repeatedly shown un-wounded to create ambiguity about whether she is dead, whether she is alive, whether she died and Cloud has gone insane and is blocking it out, etc. After about 20 boss fight phases that end up taking over an hour, it becomes clear that she is dead, although Cloud still sees her (whether it's her spirit or a hallucination isn't made fully clear). For a brief moment, she had an odd facial expression and I thought Sephiroth was going to start appearing to Cloud as Aerith to order him around and they would go all-in on the insanity angle, which would have been pretty dark and might have sort of salvaged it. But nope: they still killed her, there was no twist, and they took away everything that made the original scene good (including Cloud's monologue, which was the first time he showed real emotion). I probably could not have done worse if you paid me to **** it up as badly as possible. Seriously, the original scene, consisting of characters who have gouraud shaded cubes for arms and hands, is infinitely better than what was accomplished using the finest modern technology.

I was super disappointed to see that the Midgarsormr wasn't impaled but tbh they had already ruined the narrative progression by trying to break it into three games, and making you fight Sephiroth in Remake along with the ******** Fate Whispers. We already know the party is as strong as Sephiroth and some kind of godlike deity thing, and then in the second game, they return to being nobodies, with all the progression lost, yet they can now fight that serpent with early game stuff. It's really stupid. A total mess of development leadership/ direction, but I can't even criticise them because Western companies are worse!

I don't like checklists, but I also don't like not knowing what content I may have missed. I think you mean Rebirth follows Ubisoft trends? Like Shadow of Mordor, etc?
They do tend to follow what they see works for other companies, rather than it being some kind of clever intuition of theirs, in perceiving that Zoomers enjoy that kind of thing compared to alternatives.

The main thing I liked about Remake was the combat, with a few difficulty/ mechanic tweak mods, but they're really taking the **** in almost all other regards. The music and visuals were also appealing, as well as the characterisation of Jessie, Bigs, etc. Chadley wasn't a bother to me, he's some kind of Hojo cyborg. A good excuse for the simulation to exist-- which I agree, shouldn't have existed in Rebirth in the same capacity. If they wanted to put simulation in Rebirth, they should have made it customisable and tie it to Assessment/ Bestiary unlocks, so you can choose which creatures appear in the simulation, what levels/ traits they have, and still get XP, but then it doesn't replace actually exploring the worldbuilding.

Completing the last two chapters of Remake felt like a chore whereas its DLC was pretty enjoyable, just very short with annoying chinky happy turtle music. Sqaure Enix are Nip libtards, so you can't expect any sense from them, even if they're more tolerable than our homegrown ones. Could have made an amazing game by sticking loosely to the story, rather than subverting it with Kingdom Hearts level narrative ******** or token DEI. They totally ruined the narrative and all sense of tension or the slow, gradual build up that the original had. I felt nothing when they (temporarily) killed off Barret. It would have been bold of them to kill the only main character ****** they have! Everyone knows they wouldn't do it, so there's no point bluffing.

They could have added elements like the Yuffie DLC where appropriate, just playing as different characters, showing different perspectives on the same narrative, fleshes it out without harming the impactful beats of the original. The "you can't do x because of the whispers" is super ******* lazy, and then to extend it into some convoluted multiverse ******** is doubling down in the retardation.
If they wanted to make Midgar into a full game, they could have given each character their own segment where a different perspective on the story was shown, rather than repeating the same levels or forcing the player to do busywork. When I heard that initial 10 hour segment was being turned into a full game, I was expecting more playable areas than what we got. Not the entire city, but large segments of it being explorable from the start. Not just hallways. Then for the second game, using flashbacks to play as Zack with Cloud, would have been preferable to the multiverse plot-- the VA change is atrocious too.

Regarding the technical aspect, Unreal 4 isn't supposed to handle DRS, yet Rebirth also runs on Unreal 4, like Remake, and yet it only has TAA and TAA + DRS available as options. They made a conscious decision to make the game dependant on certain GPU rendering/ post-processing gimmicks to exclude older PC systems that could play Remake Intergrade perfectly (which is basically the same game). I suspect an agreement with hardware companies was made.

I won't hold out any hope for the combat gameplay to inspire improved versions in more enjoyable games. Doesn't seem like many people hold the same appreciation for it.

[Magick]

Wow, I just finished it and this might be the most disappointed I've ever been by a JRPG...and my history with the genre dates back to the Dragon Warrior nintendo power giveaway. Something I forgot to mention in my prior post that really bothered me at the start is that the game flat out tells you that if you miss any weapons, they'll be available later in the shop. What in the actual ****? The entire point of exploring is to find powerful items, but modern audiences get their panties in a twist if they "miss" something, so the most powerful artifacts in the game can all be bought for a trivial amount of gil.

The same philosophy extends to materia and summons. Now good game design (and this isn't ******* rocket science since everyone has done this for decades) is that you take your world, toss some monsters of various dangerousness in it, put the most dangerous monsters in some dungeon or caves or ruins-type areas, and put chests with the best items next to the toughest monsters (or have the monsters drop the items directly). Rebirth tosses that out the window. The good materia are bought with "points" that you get for checking off all of the ****** open-world point-of-interest locations...and they really are ******, we're talking "simon says" copy-the-button-press QTEs with 3-6 buttons and lengthy animations to transition in and out of them, and Chadley-the-****** always piping in with a pointless line or two after (which is another involuntary 10-second animation to pull out your radio and listen to his ********). Summons (and these battles are absolutely awesome) are fought in the same simulator as Remake. This was sort of excusable in Remake because you wouldn't expect to randomly find Bahamut and Leviathan running around Midgar, but there were tons of places in Rebirth that they could have been put out in the open world for the player to have the excitement of discovering them and to provide scenic backdrops. Instead what is in the open world are little temples that will give you the option to weaken the summons when you fight them in the simulator, thereby trivializing and depriving yourself of the best fights in the game.

To drive home how stupid the open world gameplay design is and how much it caters to "modern audiences," you will never find a single chest by itself out in the open world. Why? Because any chest must be part of a "cache," which is a map-marked "activity" with 2-3 chests, done this way for no purpose other than to facilitate autistic checklist-style 100% runs by zoomers and millenials. Actual discovery and exploration are gone. It might be the worst design I've ever seen. It makes an open-world Ubishit games seem like the second coming of Morrowind. It's really a shame because the open worlds look great and are well-made and could have been fun, but whoever was supposed to populate them didn't do their job.

The main story and primary side quests are mostly better. In fact, they absolutely nailed some parts of the game. The Junon parade is absolutely epic, and Costa Del Sol is great as well. The Barret-Dyne arc is amazingly good. The battle system is best in class, as are the presentation values, which I'd say make just about every other top JRPG look like a "AA" game at best. I'd say 30-40% of the game was extremely enjoyable. But the disastrous open-world along with some botched story elements and bad pacing make it lose all narrative steam before the end. Generally speaking, most minor things added (like making Jesse a surprise waifu in Remake) are great. The major plot elements added or deviations from the OG plot are disasters (black robes, "fate," etc). And I found the complete butchering of Cid, who was one of my favorite characters, particularly offensive. He no longer smokes, isn't angry, doesn't swear, and has no edge whatsoever. He has been transformed into a cheerful hayseed bumpkin happy to take your party wherever it needs to go. His main story arc isn't in this game, but I can't imagine that they won't ruin it in the next one and completely water down his interactions with Shera.

As for the heavy-spoiler things that bothered me off the most:

► Show Spoiler

The Midgar Zolom sequence (stupidly renamed to Midgarsormr in Rebirth) was completely ruined. This was one of the best parts of the OG, with the iconic visual of the Zolom impaled as lightning crackled in the background, conveying the sheer power and ominous threat posed by Sephiroth:



This was an enemy of overwhelming strength that your party was forced to flee from on Chocobo when encountered in the early game, and ever since Remake I had been looking forward to seeing the impaled Zolom and chocobo chase with modern graphics. It would have been amazing had they just stuck to the plan. Instead, you fight (and beat!) the Zolom with a low level party, it drags Cloud under the water, and Sephiroth materializes out nowhere to strike it down...thus placing his strength roughly on the same level as your low-level party. It makes the world and your quest feel much less dangerous.

Sephiroth is further nerfed in the Temple of the Ancients. In the OG, he strikes Tseng down with a sideways slash that doesn't look fatal. In Rebirth, Sephiroth completely runs Tseng through with his sword, full-on Aerith style. Tseng acts hurt for a bit, then he walks away and no-sells Sephiroth's biggest move like Ultimate Warrior getting up from a pedigree:



Tseng is later seen alive on a chopper right outside of Midgar.

Now on to the most consequential fuckup -- Aerith's death scene. It is not a stretch to call the original death the most important scene in the entire history of the JRPG genre. Given that significance, and the fact that the ending of Remake hinted that things might play out differently than the original, this was easily the part I was looking forward to the most. I assumed they would nail it like they did so many parts of Remake, or that if they were going to change it, it would at least be shocking and well done. Maybe Cloud kills Aerith (would have been my pick), maybe a different character dies, maybe Zack jumps out of another dimension to block the strike and she survives. I assumed they had something. Unfortunately what they "had" was the biggest narrative disaster in the history of JRPGs.

The thing that makes the OG scene is the shocking brutality. Sephiroth runs Aerith through with his sword from behind and it pops out her front like an Alien chest-buster:



So what to do now that we have the technology to really do this moment justice? Let's just...not show it. I cannot make this up. Let me reiterate: you do not see the blow that kills Aerith. In fact, she is repeatedly shown un-wounded to create ambiguity about whether she is dead, whether she is alive, whether she died and Cloud has gone insane and is blocking it out, etc. After about 20 boss fight phases that end up taking over an hour, it becomes clear that she is dead, although Cloud still sees her (whether it's her spirit or a hallucination isn't made fully clear). For a brief moment, she had an odd facial expression and I thought Sephiroth was going to start appearing to Cloud as Aerith to order him around and they would go all-in on the insanity angle, which would have been pretty dark and might have sort of salvaged it. But nope: they still killed her, there was no twist, and they took away everything that made the original scene good (including Cloud's monologue, which was the first time he showed real emotion). I probably could not have done worse if you paid me to **** it up as badly as possible. Seriously, the original scene, consisting of characters who have gouraud shaded cubes for arms and hands, is infinitely better than what was accomplished using the finest modern technology.

I'm SO glad I've been too busy to play lately, so I missed out on this abortion.

FF7 is in my handful of top RPGs that I played growing up, had completed it many times. I, like many others had been waiting YEARS for it to be re-done. All they had to do is remaster the original as-is with modern graphics and controls ffs! I don't mind ATM combat but I'd have no wrote it off just with a combat change, too.

But all this "modern audience" crap, yellow paint, re-writing and outright PADDING and ******** including woke crap just makes me rage, it's a twisted abomination of the original game, from what I can see.
If they wanted to be greedy ***** and sell it as multiple games then like @ArcaneLurker says, they could have just fleshed out and extended some of the bits that were implied but NOT shown. Bigger midgar, flashback / dream sequences, longer reactor raid with sephiroth etc. But no they had to go the easy route and add ubislop ******** and other padding.

I remember playing the game the first time and just outright missing knights of the round, and being super excited when I came back and finally finished it all off, getting those missing secrets and weapons. Now you just...buy them? lol. Just who is this game made for?

**** this ****, I'll just try and pretend it doesn't exist. It's just a shame that we'll never get to see the old one actually remastered as it should have been.
At this point I'm happy they haven't gone and finished Xenogears, as they'd just have ****** that up, too.

[ArcaneLurker]

Now you just...buy them? lol. Just who is this game made for?

Perhaps this will clue you in

[rusty_shackleford]

but he's banned

[Magick]

Now you just...buy them? lol. Just who is this game made for?

Perhaps this will clue you in

******* yes, but it's just weird that modern games apparently want to play themselves, with the gamer sitting back and doing **** all but pressing a single button.
I was a literal CHILD when I played the most games, and yet managed! Why do people need them to be "easy", now?

Journos?

[rusty_shackleford]

Now you just...buy them? lol. Just who is this game made for?

Perhaps this will clue you in

******* yes, but it's just weird that modern games apparently want to play themselves, with the gamer sitting back and doing **** all but pressing a single button.
I was a literal CHILD when I played the most games, and yet managed! Why do people need them to be "easy", now?

Journos?

Target audience went from nerdy white & Asian kids to people that can't visualize an apple.

[WaterMage]

Is truth thjat cloud not only is androgynous but he alsos crossdresses in game?

[Magick]

Is truth thjat cloud not only is androgynous but he alsos crossdresses in game?

He crossdresses in the original, to infiltrate a mafia don and recover one of his party members, (who was also infiltrating).
The mafia don is only interested in women, so he (along with another party member) has to pose as one to get in.

That was the only part I remember, though.

[WaterMage]

LOL.

IDK what is ridiculous. The fact that the game forces you to play as an crossdresser or this stupid narrative or that he is so androgynous that no one suspects him...

I really don't see the appeal in JRPGs. The last JRPG that I played was Scarlet Nexus. I dropped cuz couldn't stand the protagonist and **** progression. Only numbers go big and you get access to more teamembers powers, the generi-kun start the game capable to lifting busses with telekinesis and ends the game with the same telekinetic capability. Hell, the protagonist throws objects at a similar speed, be it a pole or a car and they dish around the same damage...

Meanwhile, in UnderRail, I made a psykokineticist. He can't lift cars and other heavy objects with his mind. At the beginning of the game, I had only a telekinetic punch and was out of power for anything else. Had to use a secondary weapon and instead of forcing me to use a katana, I could chose any weapon to use. I decided to use a .44 Magnum Revolver. It costs a lot of AP to fire, ammo was much more expensive and less readily available, but deals way more damage than other sidearms. Slowly my char learned how to create force fields and electrokinesis, to cause short circuit against robots and more advanced abilities. The skills which my character developed also solved problems outside combat. I could for eg, use stealth to avoid combat completely in some situations. Could used my traps skill to turn enemy traps against them. Could use my hacking skill to turn enemy turrets against themselves.

[DDC]

Now you just...buy them? lol. Just who is this game made for?

Perhaps this will clue you in

******* yes, but it's just weird that modern games apparently want to play themselves, with the gamer sitting back and doing **** all but pressing a single button.
I was a literal CHILD when I played the most games, and yet managed! Why do people need them to be "easy", now?

Journos?

I wouldn't levy that particular criticism against Rebirth. The combat is good and it has some difficult fights. In fact, it's miles ahead of any other JRPG that uses action-based combat. There are also a lot of tough minigames.