With only a month and change left to go before FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH is released exclusively for the PlayStation 5 on Leap Day 2024, SQUARE ENIX has managed to keep almost all of the game’s play and content tightly under wraps. With so many mysteries swirling around, I put together a list of five things that I want to see happen in FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH.
WARNING: There will be heavy FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE and CRISIS CORE spoilers throughout the remainder of this article. You have been warned.
1) Tie CRISIS CORE -FINAL FANTASY VII- REUNION’s Ending and FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE: Traces of Two Pasts Into FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH’s Plot
One of the biggest questions, for me at least, is that the ending of CRISIS CORE -FINAL FANTASY VII- REUNION mirrors that of its original PSP release: Zack dies at the end of the game while fighting against endless Shin-Ra enemies. In one of the most surprising moments of FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE however, Zack actually survives that fateful encounter after defeating everyone thrown against him. These are two seemingly-canon continuities with two extremely different (and seemingly incompatible!) endings, and hopefully it is something that FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH will address during the game.
Furthermore, I also want the game to build upon the backstories of Aerith and Tifa that were told in the canon novel FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE: Traces of Two Pasts, when they open up about their respective pasts. If you read both stories, you see deep into both character’s backstories in a way that FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE doesn’t address. I would love for FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH to build upon those stories in at least some referential way so we can see how their backgrounds shape both themselves, and each other, as the story progresses.
2) Make The Minigames in Gold Saucer Fun
While FINAL FANTASY VII on the original PlayStation is a game that stands the test of time as a whole, not all of the elements of the game are quite as replayable in 2024. Case in point: the minigames in the Gold Saucer. While perhaps groundbreaking for a 32-bit console in 1997, the minigames, such as Super Dunk where you shoot basketballs, or the claw game Wonder Catcher, have clunky controls with a play-and-forget quality to them.
Unfortunately, FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE’s minigames were somewhat hit or miss for me. While I loved darts and the dancing minigames and thought they were well done, I found that the squats and pull-up minigames were both tedious and frustrating to play, and I immediately swore off of them both once I got the rewards.
While FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH director Naoki Hamaguchi HAS said in a September 2023 interview with PlayStation.Blog that there will be new minigames and harder unlockable difficulty modes, it all doesn’t matter if the minigame gameplay doesn’t also improve to match the new content. After all, decent gameplay controls do matter when it comes to playing a video game since gamers hate to lose when poor game mechanics are at fault.
Fingers are crossed that this time around, all of the Gold Saucer games will be fun to play and they will make me want to go back to experience them again and again.
3) The Party Starts Using Red XIII’s Real Name After Cosmo Canyon
This is a fairly straight forward gameplay desire for me.
When Red XIII first joins your party in FINAL FANTASY VII on the original PlayStation, his default name is Red XIII. In Cosmo Canyon, Red XIII discovers his true identity and undergoes character growth, and it drove me crazy that the game would not automatically give me the option to rename him at that point. During my various replays of FINAL FANTASY VII, I would always rename Red XIII to Nanaki when he first joins my party as a poor attempt to fix that.
In an October 2023 interview with Screen Rant, FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH director Naoki Hamaguchi confirmed that all the quests in the game have both a Red XIII version and a Nanaki version to reflect the metamorphosis that Red XIII goes through after he visits Cosmo Canyon. However, there is no mention that the party will actually address Red XIII by his true name or not once they visit Cosmo Canyon and complete the story content there. Even the trailers shown so far only refer to him as Red XIII.
Hopefully, even though this will obviously require more audio lines to be recorded in the booth, Red XIII’s name switch will be something that will be hopefully done in FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH.
4) Queen’s Blood Should Be Fun And Not Mandatory To Play
One of my favorite parts of FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE DLC, Episode INTERmission, was the Fort Condor minigame. Early on in the DLC, you get to play a tower defense tabletop game where the objective is to take down the opponent’s headquarters with the optimal use of unit pieces. It is a game that is fairly quick to learn, but becomes incredibly challenging as you start to fight tougher opponents. The key aspect is that while you have to play one tutorial match, the DLC does not force you to play the minigame again if you do not wish to.
At Tokyo Game Show 2023, we got our first glimpse of FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH‘s card game, Queen’s Blood. While SQUARE ENIX hasn’t quite told us how to play the game yet, or how important it is to the overall storyline, we have seen how SQUARE ENIX has approached card games in the past with Tetra Master in both FINAL FANTASY IX on one side, and the FINAL FANTASY XIV Online version on the other side.
In FINAL FANTASY IX, Tetra Master is a card game that requires the player to not just learn hexadecimal in order to play, but also forces the player to play in a Tetra Master tournament in Treno. In a wonderful game with memorable characters and amazing music, the card tourney is an absolutely confusing and unfun slog that I guessed my way through to move the plot forward. Comparatively in FINAL FANTASY XIV Online, Tetra Master is a simple “highest number” wins game that is easy to grasp and absolutely is not required for gameplay progression.
Here is hoping that SQUARE ENIX borrows from the FINAL FANTASY XIV Online and Episode INTERmission Fort Condor routes of gameplay and doesn’t make Queen’s Blood hard to understand, while making the player suffer through multiple required matches to proceed the storyline.
5) 23 Tiny Wishes and 89 Sent Letters
If you played CRISIS CORE: FINAL FANTASY VII on the PlayStation Portable or CRISIS CORE -FINAL FANTASY VII- REUNION, then there are two quotes that sum up Aerith’s relationship with Zack:
“I have twenty-three tiny wishes. But, you probably won’t remember them all. So, I’ve put them all into one: I’d like to spend more time with you.”
“How are you? I wish I knew where you were. It’s already been four years now. This is the eighty-ninth letter that I’ve sent to you, but I don’t even know where to send them anymore. I really hope…that this final letter that I’m writing gets to you.”
Twenty-three tiny wishes and eighty-nine letters sent. In fact, it was that eighty-ninth letter that sent Zack to try to fight a doomed battle on his way back to Midgar to try to reunite with Aerith.
Zack’s ultimate survival in FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE was the first time that I full-on cried during a video game in years because I realized that him living means that he and Aerith can meet up again and see what, if anything, of their budding relationship is still there. While I love the reunion of Zack and Aerith in the Lifestream in FINAL FANTASY VII: Advent Children, and I think it is an absolutely fantastic film, selfishly, I desperately WANT them to have an opportunity to have that happy ending and relationship that was so cruelly denied to them in CRISIS CORE, in a way that doesn’t require them to meet again in death. It is a moment in gaming that hits harder than listening to Taylor Swift’s song “You’re Losing Me” when she sings about how she wouldn’t marry herself – a pathological people pleaser who only wanted him to see her- towards the end of the song.
It is the one thing that I honestly want more than anything else in FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH, since it is what I’ve dreamed about since I first played through CRISIS CORE: FINAL FANTASY VII in 2008, and I would gladly give up the rest of everything else I want in my list to make that single thing come true.
What are you hoping will be included in FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH?
Do you want to see Aerith and Zack reunite?
Let us know in the comments below!
