Retronauts - 615: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

Head to https://www.squarespace.com/RETRO to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code RETRO. It's taken nearly four years, but it's finally here: part two of Square-Enix's ambitious trilogy of Final Fantasy VII remakes. And guess what? It's HUGE! While Remake proved the viability of a modern Final Fantasy VII reimagining, Rebirth absolutely blows the doors off with an open-world take on this classic RPG. But does this chunk of the original game's disc one make a smooth transition into a 100-hour journey? On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Will Hughes, and Henry Gilbert as the crew discusses the remake that's now taken up a significant portion of their lives. Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get two full-length exclusive episodes every month, as well as access to 50+ previous bonus episodes, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com/retronauts.

This week on Retronaut's Warning, this podcast has a Mughal Mischief rating of 10. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. host for this one, Bob Mackie. And this week's podcast is all about Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, part two of Square Annex's big budget remake trilogy. Yes, it was four short years ago that we assembled to discuss part one. But will we come together before the year 2030 to discuss part three? Only time will decide. Before I go any further, who is here with me today are Final Fantasy experts, a guest number one? Hi, I'm Will Hughes. I'm a podcaster and a games journalist. I write for the AV club where I run our games section. I'm also the co-host of the podcast, Everything to Guppie, which is ostensibly about games, but is mostly about saying the dumbest thing I can at any given moment. And I love this game. I'm just going to say it right now. I'll fight everybody. I love this game. I mean, Will was on our Final Fantasy 16 podcast a few months ago. And I don't want to put words in your mouth, Will, but I assume like for me, playing FF7 rebirth after FF16 was basically therapy.

I would say that that is definitely fair. I think after playing a version of Final Fantasy combat that was stripped to the absolute bone to the point where you can make a real strong argument, it doesn't really count as an RPG anymore, to play this system where they're trying to put A, everything in the world into the game, and B, trying to make a combat system that honors RPG roots while still being a really fun action game. Yeah, no, that was a palliative for my spirit. I don't want to get too into it. We have another guest on the line, but just imagine an RPG where you can control other party members, and there are things to do on the world map.

It's so innovative. I'll be referencing FF16 quite a bit because I just played it. I assume Will might be doing that as well. Who is the other guests with us here today? I'm being outfitted for my black robe as we speak. It's Henry Gilbert. Hello. Henry is very comatose.

He's just standing around on a beach. People are looking at him funny. Welcome to the show, Henry. I love that you just can stumble around. If you stumble around enough, then Shinra will give you a free black cloak to get you ready. They don't want you standing around naked, everyone looking at your number. I'm actually unclear. Do you spontaneously generate the black cloak?

It sometimes seems like people are growing the black cloaks out of like their skin when they go crazy. We see somebody get cloakified late in the game and he's surrounded by cloaked dudes. So they seem to put the cloak upon him. Okay. Okay, yeah, they've got a couple in like a duffel back. The cloak is not an additional layer of flesh. We have determined that so far. Before we continue, though, I do want to ask everybody really briefly if you could sum up your relationship with the original

FF7 and these remakes. Let's start with Will. Yeah, I played Final Fantasy 7 when it came out. It was mind-blowing. It was my first PlayStation 1 game. It is the game that unfortunately taught me that if you are renting a PlayStation and a PlayStation game, but do not rent a memory card, you are going to have a really bad weekend.

So that was an emergency as a child. You know, in hindsight, this probably sits right dead in the middle of the franchise for me, looking at it with adult eyes, the original game. I think it's revolutionary from a presentation point of view. It's a little on the simplistic side from a story view, I think.

It does a lot of, like, flashy things that ultimately, maybe don't add up to as much. But it was hugely influential on me as a kid. You know, it was, it's Final Fantasy 7. It's the one everybody played. For me, when I was 16, I first played seven. Me and my brother split playing it. And I was old enough to start putting on the act of a crunchy old gamer.

Like, I love the Super NES, Final Fantasy games. And so I saw 7 is like moving away. from all of that stuff. I'm a guy who preferred nine to seven back in the day, but I like them. I love these remakes, both, both of them. Like I, they really have made me a FF7 fanboy of just the entire world and the characters, like that I wasn't back in high school, like many of my friends. Oh, you got to be careful there, because there's a lot of world people can throw at you with this particular franchise. You can be going to bat for Durga Cerberus right now. Oh, well, I won't, yeah, I mean, I don't defend things prior to the release of remake. That's... Okay, okay.

There's a huge gulf of things we won't defend. As for me, obsessed with FF7, I got the PlayStation because Final Fantasy was going to the PlayStation. I cleaned the basement every week for an entire summer to get my mom to buy me a PlayStation. And I spent about maybe three or four years just obsessed with this game reading fan theories finding every secret yes i got nights of the round at one point in one of my playthrus and yeah these remakes have delighted me for retaining the tone the very very strange and inconsistent tone of final fantasy seven i like that it's preserved by these remakes in a way that the last wave of ff7 spinoffs completely missed and i do want to talk a little bit about that during this podcast but yeah i think we're all on board with loving the game

loving remake and rebirth and if you're concerned about spoilers I will say that we will spoil things that took place in the original game and because I'm the host of this podcast and I have not finished rebirth yet I've only played a disgusting 80 hours yuck fake gamer

we'll cover some of the end stuff very very broadly but I know it's my job to play this game I've been playing it for two and a half months and I still didn't finish it I imagine a lot of you out there have not finished it as well so we'll leave things rather broad but we will let you know when the ending discussion will begin so you can skip ahead if you want it.

Maybe in the text write up for this, I'll include the timestamp. But yeah, we're all on board with this game. First, I want to cover the production. And what's going on here is not as interesting as what happened during the very, very torture production of remake, but it's still worth talking about. So this game started production in November of 2019, shortly before the release of remake. And one little note I wanted to add, I really wonder when we will stop playing games that were affected by the COVID-19 lockdowns. I think until we hit the year 2030, we're still going to be playing COVID games.

At least that's what it seems like to me. Yeah. I mean, games can be in development for such a long time. Planning processes for games will happen in 2020 that will still be coming out by the end of this decade. And like a lot of games of this size, Rebirth is directed by a handful of folks. And you can go back to our 2020 podcast to learn more about them because the core staff, hasn't changed. So the core group of directors is the same,

but there's one big change. One of them got a big promotion to overall director because Tetsuya Nomura stepped down and became creative director. He's no longer the overall director of the game. And I was skeptical as to how much of a director he was with remake, but that's another discussion entirely.

But this guy is Naoki Hamaguchi. He is the main director of this game. And I thought I'd cover a bit of his career here. We went over at a tiny bit in the 2020 any podcast. But that was four years ago. He's a newer talent, meaning he's only been around for like 20 years. So he's definitely worth discussing. So a little bit of his career. He was inspired to make games after playing Final Fantasy 6. So he's a fan who is now working on the games. He graduated from college in 2003. And from there, he entered Square Enix in the mid-aughts as a visual

effects artist on Final Fantasy 12. And he was a big part of the Final Fantasy 13 trilogy with lead programmer roles on the first two games and a main programmer role on Lightning Returns. So he's a big part of that next wave of Final Fantasy games after 12. So after this, he was a project leader on the mobile title Mobius Final Fantasy. And if you're wondering what that's like after enjoying rebirth, I say you must go out and rent a time machine because service ended in June of 2020. but he was the director of that entire mobile RPG episodic content thing. Wow, I forgot all about that. That also, yeah, that a guy feels like the new guy at Square if he graduated college when Kingdom Hearts was brand new like that.

That just shows you how time is marched on now. Yeah, we did not investigate how old Will is, but this guy is basically R.H. Henry, by that, I mean, 42. too. Yeah, it's interesting to hear you say that he was a, he came up through Final Fantasy 13 so much because that trilogy has been so like influential on how this, you can see a lot of the things that are good in the remake, remake and rebirth kind of get their trial balloon in the 13 games. And it's like, like you just start with like, that's where they started getting really into stagger, which I think is like secretly one of like the amazing things about the combat in this game is the way it uses that stagger system that Square's been playing around

for years, that kind of idea that there are like phases inside the battle that you're building up to. So that instead of just having to like whittle down that one big health bar, you're getting these like moments of like peak and then kind of pulling back from it. And I think that's a rhythm to the combat that's really interesting that came straight from 13 and then which they developed a lot in the 13 sequels. Yeah, I see a ton of elements from 13. and 15 here. A lot of games that didn't really work well all the time, but everything seems to be coalescing

into something that works in this game. Different ideas from the battle system, different ideas from the open world system and quest system. I feel like his experience on those games lends a lot to what's happening here and why it works so well. And it looks like he'll be working on these remakes for basically a decade of his life,

so I hope he's into it and he seems into it because I don't know what the crunch is like, but these are very well-made games, and they're getting a lot of acclaim. I don't know if the sales are backing that up because as of now, this is a PS5 exclusive and it's not really lighting up the charts. But I imagine in 12 to 18 months when it gets a multi-platform release, people will be more into it and it'll see a much bigger audience. Everyone will rediscover it when it hits Steam and be like, wow, it's a brand new game. Look at this.

Yeah, it's funny that I was just thinking, you know, why is this not selling as well as Square wants it to? I mean, I'm sure it's selling enough. but I've been going on the Final Fantasy 7 Reddit just to see how people are talking about this game and there are so many threads that are basically asking the question what is rebirth? What part of the game is this remaking?

Wasn't there just a remake out? People, this game is made for gamer brain people like us. Unfortunately, it cost $300 million and they wanted to appeal to the same people who were buying God of War. But I feel like making it part two of a three-part remake of a game from 27 years ago is not the easiest sell for

the mass market audience they want and that's a big shame it's hard to imagine anybody playing this who didn't play remake like you can i know there are people who played it who never played seven and that's also wild to me given how much this game is in conversation with the source material but not playing remake and then playing this you would just like i do not understand the point of that i can i can see from a branding standpoint too that for at least from a north american gamer standpoint. You hear that four years ago in 2020, they released a game called Final Fantasy 7 remake. And if you didn't play it, then you think, well, then that encompasses the full remake of the game I was told was Final Fantasy 7. And then when you hear there's another

one. And like Bob said, if you're if you're gamer brained, you know, well, this is the next disc. But most people don't know that or and or think you are crazy if you say that. So they, they just think like, is this a sequel to the remake? Are they remaking it again? Like, as far as branding goes, it is confusing branding. You know, people are always saying to me, hey Bob, and I say

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Just head to Squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash retro to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Yeah, actually, I think that with remake and rebirth, we are finally all the way through Final Fantasy 7's Disc 1 content. It took this long, and it took about, for me personally, probably 130 hours, but we have finally reached Disc 2 as a nation, as a people. Yeah, this is what, 40 hours of original content, give or take, that has been expanded out.

So, yeah, I think my clock was about 140, 130, 140. So, between the two, between the two games. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I would say that maybe even this could be 30 hours of content blown out into over 100, because FF7 is maybe a 50 to 60 hour game. It's not as long as a big experience like this would be. day. It was still a huge game, but the standards were different

back then. Yeah, for sure, this game itself, this middle part game, is much longer than the original game. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, like, I just replayed FF6, the pixel remaster, and I remember it being just like the biggest game I'd ever played. I did literally everything, and my

clock read 36 hours by the end. So standards have really changed, but that was a huge game in 1994, but we've gone on to these massive experience. So yeah, that's a little bit about Naoki, Hamaguchi, and just some overall information about this game in case it's new to you. Basically, there's a lot of new tweaks, a lot of new systems, and other improvements compared to Remake. But the biggest overall change is that Rebirth is a true open world game.

So Remake comprised the first Midgar segment of FF7, while Rebirth kicks you out into the open world map, much like Final Fantasy 7 did back in 1997. so remake was not a short game I think I spent like 70 hours with it doing absolutely everything because it came out during lockdown and there was nothing else to do but rebirth is a very big game that basically gives us the rest of the original releases disc one content

and you know there's some tweaks here and there some parts of the story like meeting Sid they're rearranged to happen later but essentially it just really expands on the original disc one content like I think the biggest I guess the biggest gesture I'd associate with this game is just the stretch it out gesture

you know if there's one mini game in FF7 it has been turned into like a two or three hour experience in this they find every way to develop these tiny ideas you might have encountered way back in the late 90s yeah which I would argue is not always to the game's strength I love this game

I think the things it does does well, it does exceptionally well. I think that lack of an editor in the designer's heads, I think is often to its deficit. For instance, like,

chocobo racing in this game, so chocobo racing in the original Final Fantasy 7 is a fairly simplistic mini-game. I think you can kind of button tap to affect things. It's mostly about the chokobo you bring to the race in the first place, though. In this, it's Mario Kart. And it's not good Mario.

cart i'm going to say it is it's more like sonic team racing or something it's a it's a it's a lesser mario card experience they didn't have to do that they could have just left it as like a thing like you know just like a simple little mini game but they have this impulse that everything has to be taken out to like the full what is the biggest budget version of this we could do and sometimes it means you're sitting spending an hour of your life playing subpar mario cart uh because there's good rewards locked behind it. No, the Chocobo race, like I didn't even think,

and I'm an average Mario Car player, but I love Mario Card. And I did like it enough to play what I thought was like, oh, this is like a lot of it, right? But then near the end of the game, they unlocked like nine or 12 more courses. And that's when I was the Jerry Seinfeld Giff of like, no, I just can.

I'm out. I'm out. You can't give me all. I played this enough to unlock some things, and I had a good enough time, but I will not play a full Chokobo racing game. There is always more game. Every moment in this game, there is always just a little more game over the horizon. Just, oh, go back and do these mini games for the higher score. Go do five more combat arenas. There is always more game. And a lot of it's between you and the end of the game. Like some of it's optional But there's quite a bit of that stuff That's just on the path Yeah like I was saying before

Stretch it out is the hand gesture I would use to symbolize this game But a phrase I was thinking constantly Is like oh you didn't have to do that Like when Henry was talking about the Chokebo racing And then you know I'm 80 hours in And it's like here's this thing called gears and gambits With all of these rules and all of these variables And it's the basis

It's a prototype for what could be A full release of something later down the road And I just think you didn't have to I didn't need to it's it's kind of well made at best it's competent and it functions but this probably took an entire team a very long time to execute on and it's optional and it's neat that it's there but that combined with all of the crazy production values just makes me think like you guys worked really hard maybe a little too hard on this one release this game has two different auto chesses it has two different like completely plays totally different versions of auto chess

it's madness it was funny playing this right after like i did 90 hours of like a dragon infinite wealth and then this came out like three days after i finished that i thought i just i got to go straight into it and in the yakuza series you know they have oh it's pool it's darts it's they usually just have your tried and true many games there are tons of many games to play but they don't create a ton of new ones each game game. They may make a few new ones, but when I started of this one, I couldn't believe how many completely

different brand new mini games were put in the game. I was playing this game for a review. And God bless them, they got the codes out about three weeks before the game came out. My wife did not appreciate how little of me was around during those three weeks as I just like,

because I do, you know, I don't believe a reviewer needs to play the entirety of a game in order to review it. I think you can talk about the experience of playing it as you go. But I wanted to finish this one before I put words down about it because it was having a big impact on me. And it's just, there are points

where you're just like, really another stealth sequence? Really, you're going to make me throw boxes now? It's just... Somebody built a system and took it to the director and said, I made this. Can we put it in the game?

And they always said yes. And it's exhilarating, but it's exhausting. It's May 21st. I've been playing this game since March 10th. And my wife tweeted out that every time she looks over at the TV, I'm doing something completely different. I'm playing Rocket League with Red 13.

I'm doing Chokebo racing, Chokebo stealth sections, something completely different is happening on the television every time she sees it. She's like, what is this game? That mentally, as I was playing the game, and I was thinking, I know golden saucers in this game.

And I'm thinking the whole time, like, this is mini-game town, and boy, there's going to be so many mini-games when you get there. And that is true. But when you get to the beach, It's like, it already is the Golden Saucer stuff. It made me think, well, Golden Saucer, there can't be anything left for Golden Saucer if all these minigames are here at the beach.

But no, no, I was wrong. I had that exact same thought, Henry. And I was like, oh, I guess they're doing all the minigames stuff here. No, no, no, no, no. They're just setting you up. Have fun getting beachware for an hour. Exactly, yeah. I wasn't sure how much, like, what Golden Saucer would entail because I had played so many

minigames up to that point, but they add more than what was there in the original, which is, you know, just the overall mission statement of this game. I do want to talk about the tone of the game, which I did mention earlier. And I love this and remake because they both absolutely nail the very weird tone of FF7. The tone that made a lot of people think, well, they could never remake this game. It's just too weird.

And that tone comes from the fact that these developers in the mid-90s had these new tools, and they wanted to do everything with them. Like, let's make a desert level and a snow level, and let's add all these mini-games. And because the depiction of characters was so abstract, you could still buy everything they were doing. It was a very cartoony, silly game with some serious moments. And they retain almost everything from FF7, even the things that some people would find embarrassing, but I find incredibly charming.

And you can see how this approach differs from what they did a decade after FF7 was an original release, where we had the serious FF7 things like Advent Children and before Crisis and Crisis Corps and all that stuff, where we did a podcast about Advent children, during the pandemic. And I remember that era of FF7 stuff, they are so embarrassed of Red 13

and they are so embarrassed of Kate Sith. At best you'll get a fleeting glimpse of them. Like, yes, yes, they're here. They're in the background. We don't want to highlight these weird characters. But in this game, there's a goddamn cat robot who's just leading the party

talking to civilians and no one is batting an eye and it's wonderful. Yeah, it's, you know, even in Advent children, like, Yuffy has to just like sit in a corner for most of the time. It's almost a joke where she shows up, like, hey, I brought all this materia, and she just drops it because it's, materia is meaningless to a movie that you're not playing.

And in, but seeing all of this, like all of the weirdos, all of the things you see and meet, I kept having to remind myself because I didn't have the original game super memorized. But when I'd see a weird character or who's in a ridiculous costume, say a strange thing, I had to go, I had to remind myself, that's just them doing it. it right. Like, this is a correct interpretation and not a softening of them, even though it's in one of the most expensive video games ever made. Yeah, you spend a lot of time with a muscle grandpa in this, and that's canon. Just having your, your weird 3D fighting game with muscle grandpa at the Golden Saucer. And then, I literally had to, I had played Final Fantasy 7 since it came out. I had to go back and look, oh yeah, Dio is, he's, he's in there. He's weirdly important to the plot. Yeah, I played it last when I was unemployed in 2013. It was a great time to play a 50-hour

RPG. And I don't recall every C-tier character in this game, but when I would encounter them in Rebirth, I would look it up on the wiki and I would see the blob of polygons and then look at the 4K rendering of them on my TV. Like, oh, yeah, that's Deo. That's that weird Goblin kid. They're all retained here and they're wearing whatever costumes they were wearing in the original with the, you know, dressed up with 4K graphics and a higher point. polygon renders and all that fun stuff. But yeah, like so many weird things, just like in remake where you fought the hellhouse in remake and, you know, before that came out, everyone was like, well, they couldn't do

the honey be in. That's just crazy. That was just the weirdest thing in the world. Well, they had it in remake. And there are some, like, little touches in rebirth that were in the original that I love. Like, when you're disguised as sailors, you know, jump in the ship to head to, I believe, Casa del Sol, well, Barrett's wearing Donald Duck's outfit, and he's still doing it in four in Rebirth

And then There's Red 13 He's dressed up as a sailor And when they didn't do that in remake Or sorry, in Rebirth I thought well maybe that was too crazy But then they up the ante Because later Red 13 is wearing a complete

Soldier's outfit walking around on hind legs And he enters a card tournament Because he's mad they won't let dogs Enter this card tournament So they make the crazy stuff even crazier Which I am so in love with He does a full like Michael Jackson dance like he does like the

thriller dance in that costume it's so so insane and I yes I love when everybody thinks of FF7 is being like so deadly serious because we for such a long time well Advent children especially gives you that impression and everybody sees all of the you know just screen caps of just cloud saying whatever just being like a bitch in scenes

but when you see these when you see these cut scenes you're like this is the spirit of wackiness and having fun when you're when it's fun time in final fantasy they're letting you have fun they also have characters that say hey fun's almost over guys it's going to get we're about to get to serious town but they let you have fun when it's fun time i mean this is a original video game where the main character processes his grief through snowboarding like uh it's and i think it it actually speaks to something that i think these games do really well the remakes is uh really flesh out and I would say improve the characterization of characters who were in the in the original

game pretty simplistic kind of almost ciphers in in rebirth like cloud's a goofy dude like he puts up this persona which is all built into like the story structure of like this this thing he's trying to be but he's a goofy dude he likes doing fun goofy things and every time the game steers into that you're like oh I get why people actually like this guy instead of just like why I was told he was cool when I was 14. Yeah, I think a lot of people before these games came out, they thought of the Kingdom Hearts version of Cloud or the Advent Children version of Cloud,

not understanding how he was in the original game. And you're right, well, they really developed these characters. I think a big thing, it feels like they took from FF15, were the hangout vibes, because this game is mostly hangout vibes. The story really takes a backseat. It's all about walking around with these characters, hearing conversations, doing quests that develop them even more,

and just, you know, being a cool hangout posse with all of these fun, colorful characters. And I didn't really care that much about the FF15 characters, but I dug the vibes they were going for. But I have more affinity for these characters, and I like seeing that same kind of hangout sesch play experience happening here. Well, they're making a virtue of kind of the fact that the middle act of Final Fantasy 7 is a little listless. It's, you know, it's kind of a road trip where you're just like, Sephiroth went over there.

I guess we'll go see what's going on. And this embraces it. It's a road trip. They are heading from place to place. They don't always have the best reason to go there. But you're there, you're like enjoying the characters and the individual beats more than necessarily worrying about the plot until the plot suddenly like slams in on a giant robot. I love that you can spend time in a mini game, or not minigame, a side quest of,

you know, escorting a cute doggy to meet up with a friend in a new area or learning Tifa's workout routine. And, you know, how many squats can she do? Like, is she, she's so buff. You do wonder, how does she fit in all that time to get so very buff? One segment of the population really needs to know how many squats she can do. They're also very excited to find out how much protein she eats every day. She eats a lot of steak. And she loves the diet. Yeah. Yeah, I guess The one thing you can, you know, ding this game for is the story because, like you said, well, what they're adapting is a listless part of the game that's really borne out of them having all of these new tools, the developers, and saying, like, what kind of environments can we make? How can we have fun in this world with these new 3D tools? Which means a lot of this game is after that big epic flashback sequence is like, hey, let's go to that reactor.

What about that one? That one's pretty nice. And you just go from reactor to reactor. You just follow Sephiroth, kind of. and he's barely a presence in this game too. But that's what the original was like. It was just, you know, cool setting after cool setting, fun treasures, neat monsters,

great music, but it really was, you know, not a lot happening after that first intense Midgar segment. Speaking of kind of where the game picks up, how do people feel about that using the Nibelheim flashback as essentially the tutorial of the game, making that your introduction back into this world? I mean, I really liked how it, one, you need a reset, I think, because you don't want to give players who maybe just finished remake,

maybe just played it that like, this is not a persistent save, your levels do not carry over. So a flashback like that to when Cloud, as far as he remembers it, is a good starter soldier and even get to play it. You get the fun of playing a Sephiroth too. like it's a good palette cleanse to make you not think about how you didn't carry over your levels into this which you shouldn't like I would completely

destroy the balance of the game yeah yeah I agree I thought maybe like some parts of this game that are expanded upon it went on maybe a little too long but I always love that part of the original game and I went into this knowing well there's no way I can carry over my levels and my material but I never thought

if there would be a reason where they would excuse that because I left FF7 remake with all this leveled up material. Did they all get food poisoning or did they all like fall in quicksand or something? Is that why they went back to level one? I don't know but I never thought about it twice. That they still captured the perspective of this is cloud telling you what happened. Even down to the joke of did you peep on Tifa's underwear or not?

And I just I just love if you do it. I didn't do it when I play the demo but then when I replayed it for the real game I was like all right what happens if you do then Tiva and Araf just say like asshole like it's just a great like natural thing like I this is a bigger thing but I just love

how natural this was in the remake too but everybody always wanted to knock like it is such a dumb thing people say about RPGs like oh the dialogue's never natural enough in English they localization has problems everything sounds so much of the dialogue sounds very

natural and delivered like it does the localization is like top notch yeah I will yeah I would say the writing is great I always thought the original FF7 needed a retranslation I'm surprised it never happened officially but the localization is great you get a lot more meaning out of these lines that were never translated well to begin with

the one thing I'll knock it for is the motion capture acting is at times insane I feel like they gave all of these people crystal meth before they did their roles because nobody gesticulates more than characters in this game it's why I up liking cloud and bear because they're mostly just having their arms at their sides and

leaning against things. But every female character is constantly like waving their arms around in unnatural ways. And Will, do you remember, I felt like the, uh, the motion capture acting in F-F-16 was much more naturalistic. This is pure a person in a mascot acting style. I'd say that's, that's fair. Uh, 16, it was trying to be so grounded all the time. Whereas, yeah, this is definitely being very silly at times and like, You know, this was always, like Final Fantasy 7 way back when was, I think, their first attempt to really, really, really make an anime game to some extent, which is, you know, an ambition they'd spend like the next decade at least pursuing, you know, you look at like Xenogers, things like that, really just trying to take these animas they loved and turn them into games. And I think this is kind of building on that Because you know, that big theatricality is kind of how, you know

That's how at least, you know, some, you know, not to generalize about all anime But that's definitely built into the DNA of the art form is that kind of like Yeah I'm making big hand gestures on an audio format, I apologize I mean, I think it is a cultural thing And you can definitely tell when things were mochapped in Japan And it feels like it's all drawing back from a very theatrical style Where big movements have to sell what you're doing to a huge

crowd, even people in the back. But when everybody is doing that in everyone's face, it gets a little silly. I just wanted to point that. I don't know if I'm the only one who noticed that, but it was kind of driving me crazy with a lot of the female characters. It's mostly them who are always like hopping around

and doing this. This is when you bring your elbows into your chest and pull your palms outwards. I don't know what that means. Aerith does that quite a lot. I mean, Ufi is the most guilty of it. Like she is, she is swinging her arms around at all time.

She is, I mean, she's supposed to be a bundle of energy. but yeah that is I see the disconnect too that even even Tifa who is supposed to be the like the most mature or like grounded of the of the women even she you know has big movements and hand gestures and all that and that is where it feels like you feel the disconnect between the amazing lip sync they're able to pull off technically but the English voice actors are not performing they're still putting so much energy into it but the body motions are so big that they'd have to be going and that's right clap like they should be screaming their lines for it to fully match there is a disconnect it works like the over gesticulation

works for Kate Sith because he's a cat robot and that makes sense to me but a lot of the I'm like you're human beings just calm down for a little bit I want to move past that that's not very important I want to talk about the world maps which is a major feature of this game they're big you're given a variety of chokobos

to overcome their various terrain. They're mostly fun to explore, but they're more built around snapping to geometry rather than a more naturalistic way of exploring like you would see in Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom. Which

Traversal often feels a little awkward in places like Gon Gaga where you're like, how do I get up there? There are these invisible walls kind of trapping you and you have to find the singular way to reach a certain area. Other than that, I really like exploring these maps.

They're, I mean, they're big but they're also kind of small and dense in the grand scheme of things. And there's always something new to find. And I like how traditionally with these maps, the elements are usually introduced in a different order every time. It's not like you're going through the world map cycle

with every new map of the six or seven you're given. I feel like they try to mix things up. Yeah. I usually, before I am going to play a game, especially if I'm reviewing it, I try to stay away from a lot of like the early buzz about it. and like the early previews.

So the first time I really experienced this was, they had a play event in Los Angeles where a bunch of people got put in, we got put in a hanger to play, I think two hours with it. So you get through the tutorial and then you leave calm and you're like, oh, they dumped a big bucket of Ubisoft on Final Fantasy.

And like the, yes, the first time Chadley was like, and now you have to go scan a tower to add map data. I was like, I may hate this, but you're right. The exploration, because I've scanned a lot of towers. I've been playing video games my whole life. I've scanned a lot of towers. But the implementation here, I think, is mostly to the game's credit, especially because, and I can go off on this for a long time,

but a lot of it is rooted in the combat. And I think any time this game is making you fight stuff, it is really playing to its strengths. I don't necessarily like everything that's ever introduced in an area. A lot of them have extra friction elements added to them that I think are wholly unnecessary. Like, why do you have to tap three buttons to scan a Lifespring every single time? Or, and a lot of it, it's not even difficulty, it's just friction. Like when you're doing the, you have to track down these summon stones.

And for each of them, there's a little memory game you have to play. And it's like, what is this adding to my game? And that's, again, I'm getting back on one of my theses about this game, which is that it's too damn much some of the time. Yeah, well, I mean, that button thing is interesting because you could, if you just got to that area and scanned the crystal and you just press triangle and scan the crystal and it's done, that would feel like not interesting enough, I guess.

But then if they, but it's not a mini game like the other scanning a crystal game to help you to help you unlock summons. That one at least is like, can you remember to hit these in sequence? So I just wonder, like, why either just have me press triangle once and then you give it to me or make it an actual, you know, real mini game instead of just, well, just hit, hit triangle three times instead of once. Yeah, or give me a reward for doing it in a really perfect way. You know, it's either, it's past fail and there's no, there's no punishment for failing, and I don't want there to be one. But, yeah, I get what you're both saying, and I agree, they often add too much game where there doesn't

need to be game. It should just be, you know, interact with the thing, like the towers. You climb the tower and you just push the button and that's fine. But what I like about these open world maps, I generally have sworn off Ubisoft-style games since the early 2010s. Like, I hate when I get to a map and then a billion icons, have fun.

No thanks. I'm done with that. These, I felt like I could explore naturally enough where I would encounter things and then those things would open up more things than I never felt overwhelmed. And in general, everything you're finding feeds into a system that rewards you in some way. Like the crystals you find or the summon crystals you find,

they open up ways to make new items. And you're also feeding into your Chadley points, which lets you unlock new battle challenges, which lets you build more material. Like everything is amounting to something. And I felt like nothing was truly that much of a waste of time to ignore completely in terms of the things you're doing on the map. So I really appreciate that.

I do think it's somewhere where the aesthetics of the game, really help like even if I don't love doing like tracking down all those summon crystals getting that little hit of whatever that summons song is that plays every time you do one of those it's like oh yeah this game has maybe the best soundtrack I've experienced in a couple of years and getting these little or when you do the the life springs it gives you a little bit of the you know like the the main theme like the it feels so good uh now I am a map sicko I I love going to a tower to make new things appear that shows me, oh, man, if that tower then shows me another tower and I can go to that tower to show me more towers, I love that. Though I don't, yes, the first time I really interacted with that type of stuff was in an Assassin's Creed game, which I, I'm the type of person who plays one Assassin's Creed game every four years and I have a good time.

but they really remind me of the the arkham city game and the arkham games and also the spider-man games that are doing arkum like i you may as well have your little readout bat computer thingy for a lot of those unlock bits like that's chadley basically is your alfred in that but i always love it every time i got to a new area even though the story was engaging with me i was thinking to myself no, I really can't do the story until I go to every possible tower. The only times that then made something frustrating, though, was I would see a tower, but I would learn I need to do like two hours of Chocobo stuff to get to that tower and traverse there. You know, we're going to be.

Can we take a moment to talk about Chocobo Stealth? Like there's a couple of these mini-games that I outright loathe, I will say. Let's talk about minigames in general, Will. Sure. So Chocobo Stealth, not a favorite of yours. No. I don't think anytime this game does stealth, it does it very well. It's a symptom of what I was talking about earlier about, like, they're trying to, you know, there are teams who make really good stealth games out in the world, but you can't make a really

good action RPG and a really good, like, Star Fox simulator and a really good card battling simulator and a really good stealth game all at once. It's just, at some point, you're going to hit your limits. And the, the Chocobo stealth games, and also Mughal houses. I hate the Mughal houses so much. I wish there was an option at the end of that instead of to fly away happily to kill the Mughals. And I know that that's... Especially these Mughals will.

These Mughals are hideous. They're retaining... Everyone was surprised by how they look in this game. That's how they looked in a remake, but I guess there was only just the summons, so maybe not everyone saw it, but I don't know what they were thinking. I hate these guys.

They are horrible. And they're bastards. They're bastards too. Well, they're supposed to be mischievous, I guess, instead of just being bastards. But yeah, no, I, the, the, the Mughal mini-games did get on my nerves by the last one. I think at the very least with the Chokebo stealth, I felt like after the third time I did it, I wanted to tell the game, you know I can do this, please, please don't make me do it every region,

but I did. And then the nicest compliment I can say about it is that they, they seemed to recognize maybe through just Q&A that you need, they checkpointed the hell out of that to make it as not frustrating as possible. Though I then just feel like, then why make me do one each Chocobo? Why? I think in the Costa del Sol region,

I think they let you just rent one and it's the best moment in the game. It's like, oh, thank God. Yeah, I mean, I think I did everything in the game so far, even the things I didn't like. But, yeah, the Chocobo stealth was a weary obligation. In general, though, I think of this game, like a big activity book you'd get as a,

a kid where it's like oh i could do a crossword puzzle i could do a maze i could do a word search oh look i can cut out little paper things and fold them up like they just have something new on every page unfortunately not everyone is going to be as fun as some of the highlights but yeah the the stealth chokobo stuff always a weary obligation i'm glad they checkpointed the hell out of it uh i mean there's like 60 mini games in this i haven't counted them all but obviously the standout is queen's blood something i got weirdly into i'm never good at card games i'm never good at thinking ahead and after playing a few rounds and then kind of hitting a wall, I thought like, oh, I'll never get good at this. Then somehow I built a deck that just

takes everybody down and I actually got kind of good at this. So I will say in terms of innovating in the fake card game space like every one of these games tries to do, this is one of their more successful card games to date. No, I love Queensblood. I finished it the entire run and it was the same for me, Bob, where the first couple times I played it in the first area of the game, I liked it just fine, but I did feel a little lost, but I

then built a deck that just worked with me. Also, you can just restart. It's so nice that when you can tell you're like four turns away from losing, you can just like, whatever, restart, and boom, you're just instantly back in it. The only

thing I like used a guide for ultimately was the final boss is just so hard that I just, my husband looked it up for me, he's like, okay, make your card team exactly this and place them this on each turn. That was the only one I cheated on.

She's a little unfair. She's asking you to do different things than pretty much every other Queen's Blood fight in the entire game. And in another case of you didn't have to do that, there's a dark backstory to Queen's Blood that you uncover as you play more of it. Unnecessary, I will say you didn't have to do it,

but it's so fun and unexpected in keeping with like the goofball tone of the game and henry you're mentioning like a dragon earlier i feel this is basically like a dragon meets breath of the wilds kind of they're just lots of traversal lots of objectives but then in tons of crazy characters and goofy mini games and just a weirdly a tone that's weirdly all over the place but works it's it's amazing too that in this game full of minigames like there's just a full star fox level in this game that's more fun than any gummy ship i ever flew in in a Kingdom Hearts game. That's a low bar. Yes. Yeah, I know. Well, in general, this game makes me feel when the next Kingdom Hearts, the next real Kingdom Hearts comes out, it has some big shoes to fill. Like, this has raised the bar.

Like, now I know that specifically people who work at Square NX can do a Kingdom Hearts type game this good. I cannot settle for what the old level of quality of a Kingdom Hearts game was. where at first I was like, well, it's just what the Kingdom Hearts game is. No more will I think that. Yeah, I mean, Square really tightening their belts lately, so I don't, I mean, I know they're going to finish this trilogy, it seems like it, but I don't know what the future is. Unfortunately, they're going through some hard times.

Well, yeah, they just replaced the head of like Dragon Quest 12 all of a sudden, or the executive producer on it and not like Yuji Hori, but yeah, other mini games I loved it too, the piano one. And I'm not, I don't even have the greatest rhythm, but I really got into the piano game of just, it was the flicking of the two sticks made it such a fun, it felt like a fresh way to do a rhythm game in one of these two. Yeah, it's very fun to kind of have to unfocus your eyes so you can see both sticks at the same time. And then when you're actually hitting the stuff, A, again, you're playing like, you know, some of the best songs from video games ever. and that it really feels satisfying when you're actually hitting all the notes.

It really replicates that guitar hero. I'm really playing the song, feeling. Yeah, it's a complaint. And then you can just play a piano normally. There's just a piano system built in the game if you want to tool around and play your own music. It seems very hard to use if you want to play anything that complicated, but it's there.

They built it. Yeah, again, just a surprising amount of depth to these things. Some things that were there in the original, like the RTS, the Condor Canyon, whatever that's called. Yeah. That's here. They really develop it.

And I am a huge simp when I see these original Polygon characters. And when Tifa, Barrett, and Cloud get transformed into 4K versions of their original character models, I'm like, I want to buy these guys. I want them sitting on my desk while I podcast. These are so charming. And I'm glad they're calling back to that. It's cheap nostalgia, but they didn't have to do it. Yeah, I love it. It was in Integrade, and this just expanded it big time.

And they're having so much fun. Those are the fun, silly, some of the funnest side storyline stuff. Like, he always gave me a chuckle was seeing even the characters just comment on, boy, we look weird, or also just being frustrated. Like, I always love when Barrett especially. It's just funny when Barrett's grumpy in general. Any other mini games to talk about? I mean, we talked about the more in-depth ones like Chocobo Racing and the Mughal Mishif one

where you're rounded up Mughals and chase them around those. I mean, I feel like they're supposed to be annoying, but they are just kind of annoying and your awards aren't that great for them. But they took Moghouse this kind of troll of a minigame from FF7, and they turned it into something much, much bigger in rebirth. And I'm glad they remembered it. It's such a weird part of the original FF7, this arcade game you play that's just kind of like a visual novel about Mogg and his wife falling in love and having kids. You know, another one I did like was the shooting gallery in the pirate shooting gallery. I like that one at the beach because it was, I didn't use, I don't know how much you guys used the PS5 motion stuff for it. But that was one I did enjoy using the motion for aiming as opposed to just the joystick, which I did most other times.

You could use that in the game. On the topic of the PS5 integration, the one that can die in the fire is their update of the, sit-ups, the Crunches game, where they're using the reactive triggers and you have to push it halfway down and then all the way down. That is, oh my God. I think that is the angriest this game made me. And I probably spent two hours doing one of the optional, the mind-flare fight in the arena, the one where you have to kill the mind-flare first. I gave up on that one. I gave up on that. Hellish, hellish. But still, not as bad as, all right, hold the trigger down. Halfway. Now push all the way. Nope, did it wrong. Tifa just

completely wiped out. Yeah, I stopped at the crunch the crunch minigame when you get to that level and I looked up a guide like, what am I doing wrong? I can't really read the meters or what I'm supposed to do. And the guide said, number one, turn off adaptive triggers. Just turn it off completely and then you can finish this mini game.

And that's true of anything with adaptive triggers. I never bother turning them off, but I feel like holding down R2 on a chocobo and that little bit of resistance is going to lend to some kind of carpal tunnel further down the road. And another one of my favorite side missions in the game that turned into a minigame, but only because it was a good troll, was in Gun Gaga, you have like a get my chickens for me mini game.

And you have to keep pulling on the box just so to get the chicken to follow you back. And the third one is so far away from town. And they go like, well, time to start guiding it. I was like, no, no way. And then you get attacked and it's a boss fight to finish the side mission. I was like, oh, thank God. That was such a great troll that they make you think you're going to have to make the chicken walk like 10 times the distance you've done the rest of the game. I was worried about that.

But unfortunately, that quest has an anti-bird ending that I can't get behind. It's dinner. It's dinner time for those that they're graduating from Poultry University there. You do have to be careful about which of those side quests you do. because if you do them like I do, you end up accidentally taking a dog on a date. Oh, I see. No, I don't want that.

I get, yeah, I have lots of date thoughts, too. I think it's indicative of this whole game that we've been talking about the game for an hour at this point, and we've mostly talked about the mini games. That's the game. They made the entire game out of the mini game. It's oops-all minigames, FF7 Rebirth. I want to talk more about the characters, though,

because so again doing the stretch out motion if there's optional content in the original it's mandatory here I will say that they want to step too far of making Gong Gaga a 15 hour segment of the game when it's literally two screens in the original so I was like man this is pushing it

but it's it's so weird to think now that Ufi in the original game was just completely optional you could miss her entirely and you could miss I mean her village is not in this game spoilers but you could just not encounter her and skip it entirely

but here she's there with you from the beginning following off of Integrate the DLC from the last game and that's because again they want to double down on all these characters and see what makes them tick in a way they didn't have time to do in the original

or you know enough of like writing muscle to do in the original. This game is made with a lot of hindsight so yeah hangout vibes learning lots about characters and there's more to all of them outside of their They're rather simplistic portrayals in the original game.

Yeah, Barrett continues to be deepened to such an incredible level. They all are. But like every time, you know, Barrett's flashback, it's the tragic backstory that I mistakenly thought before was just like, oh, yeah, it's kind of typical or predictable or whatever. But he is played so well, like they lay out his backstory so well. when he comes to the town and everybody's just so shitty to him and you find out why. And then on top of that,

every time he takes off his glasses to show his pained beautiful eyes, you just go like, oh, I want to just hug this man. He's just a big old softy. Yeah. That's another thing that people said way back in the day. Here's why you can't remake FF7. There was a laundry list.

One of them was Barrett. Some people could see him as a stereotype. He looks like Mr. T. He talks like Mr. T. Well, those two aspects are still true of him in this game, but the writing builds him into something more than, you know, the Mr. T archetype. And I think the voice actor has said as much,

the English voice actor, that I want to add depth to this character that was lacking it before. And I think they accomplish a lot with him. Yeah, I love that he's one of the mini games or the CyQuest is where you're, you know, taking a delivery to someone's kid. and just him bursting into tears thinking about when Marlene's going to grow up. I was like, oh, this is just so beautiful. It makes him into a big sweetie pie dad.

Like, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's very charming. Along those same lines, I love the way this game builds on what I think was probably the single smartest, like, character shift from the original, which is building up the relationship between Tifa and Ereth. Like, they are not just like the two women who are hanging out with cloud. These, these two people are friends. and they happen to, and they're both very worried about Cloud for very good reason as the story makes clearer and clearer.

But the game is really, it is not interested in rivalry stuff, it is completely interested in, these two people really like each other, and some of the most enjoyable scenes in the game are just the two of them spending time together. Yeah, I really like the areas in the game. Usually when you find a new town, you all split up, and then you can talk to all the characters.

It's kind of like persona e-social links, where you talk to characters, hopefully give the right answer, change a relationship with them. It's an extension of what was going on behind the code in the original game that all led up to who you would take on a date here. There's more going on. Unfortunately, with that social link system or whatever you want to call it, I found the UI for it impossible to read.

It's like, oh, the green smiley is now a blue smiley. Did I do wrong or is that good? Yeah, they give you these props that almost feel like a telltale game of like, oh, your thing is shifted. like it's basically feeling like Blan Tifo will remember you said this kind of prompts in it but it's never

it's like more gamified than in the tell tell games that often tried to just keep it vague for you but this meanwhile wants you to see that they're happy faces but it's still unclear like if I was working towards when it came to the

date that I knew was coming I decided to just go with the flow I was like well whatever my choices were I'll get the date I get. I wasn't working towards one or the other or any particular outcome. And I ended up with Ereth. And I was like, maybe that's because I felt like I talked to all of them the same, but I played with Ereth the most. She was on my team the most. So maybe it just came down to that. This is a little bit of a mechanical spoiler. But in the, in the, when you finish the game, it, it lays out basically every single point you can get with people for the relationships. Like,

It codifies it in interesting ways. And also, and I think this speaks to how this game does New Game Plus really well, it literally lets you say, like, hey, who do you want to take on the date if you replay that chapter? Like, all of that stuff gets kind of shown to you to kind of demystify it. But, again, you get a lot of points for doing side quests. I did too many side quests with the dog. I had to take the dog on a date. Yeah, I guess previously you not taking one of the girls on the date was a joke.

It was sort of the joke you had to work for. like I think Barrett was the was the optional date in FF7 but here a lot more thought is put into it than that I appreciate that but also the thought of New Game Plus gives me a panic attack I see my own funeral when you when you say those words it's yeah no I the new game plus on it is that that was when I thought I don't know if I can do this but when I looked at the date scenarios it was pretty funny to see they the Barrett one is even deep is like deeper and it's of course you know, just him giving him like Barrett giving Cloud dating advice for girls. But then the other one that's just like the boys night out and the bros on the Ferris wheel together. That I think is my favorite of all the comedy ones. Now I've shifted to feel, yes, Tifa's the right girl to be with. The game is telling you like you should be with Tifa, not, not Ayrith, as I once thought. I joke about the Red 13 date.

It is genuinely, like, moving and interesting. Like, there's moments where he's like, yeah, I think something really bad is coming. You've got to be careful, man. And it's like, oh, yeah, that's actually... And, like, the arc they do with that character in this game is, A, very funny. It's built up as such a reveal. Like, who is that mysterious high-pitched voice appearing at a different point?

No, it's just... Turns out the dog's just been talking in a gruff voice for fun. I want to go into the production values. It's related to what you just said, Will. I was reading interviews with the director, and apparently they could not determine at which point the player would reveal the true Red 13 voice and how that would affect. different missions. So they had to record every line doing gruff voice and Nanaki voice because

they were like, well, you could come back and do these side quests as Nanaki. It'd be weird if he was still using the gruff voice. So we're going to have to do double duty on this. That's incredible. There's a lot of clever little touches in this game that play like that. Like in very vague terms, there is a event that happens at the end of the game that is perceived differently by one character than the rest and he plays mechanically different in the aftermath. Everybody else comes into a particular fight with their limit gauges

maxed because they are freaking the hell out and one character does not and noticing that you're like they really are paying attention to detail with this stuff. Yeah, I don't want to linger too long in the production values because it's kind of in my perspective it's just not as interesting but I am very impressed by what's going on here. This is like the third PS4 game or sorry PS5

game we've ever gotten so every year we get a new one it's like wow what are they doing next but I am really impressed but again it's one of those things like you didn't have to do this when you go to a hotel and you see every room is decorated differently and you're like god damn it how many man hours did this take is everybody okay do you guys need to lay down

but you mentioned the music earlier well and I love I can't get over how great the music is and just how much of it is there because honestly I played a remake in a pandemic fuchs I have no memories of it. And going into this, once you get out to the world map, I'm like,

I love the world map theme in FF7. It's one of my favorite works by the composer. It's going to get kind of old. They find so many remixes of it. There are so many remixes of the Chocobo theme. There are so many remixes of different battle themes. This game is just trying so hard in that department.

I appreciate it so much. Like, when you get on a Chokebo, you get about a minute of Chokebo music, and then they're like, we know you're sick of this. Here's the World Map music again. for this area and areas will often have like two or three different battle themes so great i'm glad they were very mindful of that it's never boring and uh for a game like this i would be tempted to pop in a podcast because it's a lot of you know chewing through these quests and exploration but

the music was so good that i could rarely do that it's it's eight discs the soundtrack like that's how huge the soundtrack they're selling is and there's just so many so many variations on music like all over the place like well just when you're hearing the bow wow wow wow song and then you get in a fight during that side mission and this is just like the tiniest sliver of the game it then hits to the battle version of the stamp theme instead and it's a completely different like song and then it easily threads back into the other one and even like they make the plot have so much musical importance down to erit's big song which I love that song so much like it gives her a big you know Broadway ballad uh Disney princess

style song be fitting her character and it doesn't feel unnatural they earn it too they set up they set up Jesse went was an actress here before erith you know she can sing we're going to hear sing and it it all fits tonally in the world they've made on top of it just being like a beautiful song to hear that is full of like thematic importance for Erit's story. Yeah, I've been impressed by production values before. I think this is the first time in my head I thought, can I tip the game developers?

Will they let me do that? I feel like I'm a broken record, but I don't want every game to look like this. No game should look like this. I don't know how it was possible to make this in only four years, but they somehow did it. But it is astounding the level of detail that I wouldn't have minded if maybe they cranked it

down 30 or 40% it still would have been a gorgeous game but they were somebody was clearly trying to impress with this and it is very impressive I do not like to think

about the human cost of this game I do not want to think about how many hours on average every employee was working on this thing and the credits are that long

to make you know how much was put into it I but yeah so I do love the production values of it as long as I can dissociate from the likely hour

the human toll it took. It just is nice to play a game that does feel next gen. Like I hate to sound, you know, like a graphics connoisseur, but you get so tired of these games that are, you know, cross-platform and that it doesn't feel next gen. And again, next gen for a generation that started in 2020, like even, even the Spider-Man game, I know how the PS5 only Spider-Man game does things that a PS4 couldn't but it didn't feel special enough to me like a real oh you're you're you're you pay a lot of this

PS5 look at what you're getting this did feel like that like this one really really felt like that except when you're looking at generic NPC's faces yeah okay that's true that's true my wife Nina Matsumoto she's been a guest on the show um she

had a great point that the the NPCs often look just like regular people that you would see shopping at Uniclo and it makes everyone else look like a cosplayer. So there's a weird mismatch. When everyone was flat shaded

in the original game, the distinction between the characters and the NPCs was not that big. Here, it's like your cloud and then you're talking to a guy in a V-neck and blue jeans. And it's just like, well, what the hell? I don't know how they could fix that.

They'd have to spend a lot of time dressing up these characters. And I don't want more production on this game. They've had enough. Yeah, when you see everything has such a ridiculous amount of production value in it,

When there's something that just is them taking it a little easy, it does stand out more than it would if things, if they were cheaper on some other stuff. Can we talk a little bit about the game's combat kind of in depth? Because it's a, it's a really, it's, I know I've already gushed about it, but it is very, as someone who was like lukewarm on the combat of remake, like it was very impressive to me at first, and then I felt like the complexity got away from it a little bit. Rebirth is I would play

another 10 games that work off of this basic framework you know it's using the version of active time battle that they came up within remake where

you can attack as much as you like but you're building time as a resource that you are then spending to do anything more impressive than an attack and I think that is

such a good way to treat time in a game like this and to gate what you can do when you have so many abilities at your disposal. It really gives you those... When we talked about 16, Bob, I talked about not having enough choices when I was fighting.

I am making choices constantly in these fights. Yeah, we mentioned that during the entire podcast. Please listen to it if you haven't listeners out there. But yeah, once you get about 10 or 15 hours into F16, you kind of done everything you can in combat and then there's another 45 hours remaining here, I felt like I was always on my toes. and I feel like more than ever, thanks to the synergy abilities,

you are encouraged to use every character or to swap between them actively because with every ability you use, you are building points towards using a synergy ability, which is sort of like a Chrono Trigger tech ability where you're teaming up with a character to do a really cool, flashy effect that's powerful. But yeah, every character plays differently,

but they're not so complicated that it doesn't take more than a few minutes to wrap your mind around how Barrett is different than UFee and how UFee is different than Kate Sif. I really like how much variety there is there. And I also like how the game will often not give you a choice as to who you're controlling. It's like, okay, here are your party members. Fortunately, everybody is varied enough that almost any combination can work with any battle.

And I do like that. They all feel different, but if I'm stuck with two people who usually aren't paired together, their abilities will almost always complement each other and make it viable to play as them, as that party. I think to the leveling system lets it grow at a good pace. And I worried when I played the game, I was enjoying the combat so much that I was going to be like over-leveled. I never felt over-leveled. Like I felt like every battle, just about every battle I did was a challenge. And if I wasn't, you know, planning it out correctly, I could just as easily die.

And even, and I also did appreciate that. you are in a multi-tiered boss fight, like if, say, the frog man is chasing you in the tank, but you're like 45 minutes into this thing, they do just tell you, well, you can restart from the beginning of this tank. Now, could their text be more clear on screen that says, do you want to restart from this segment of the battle? And I have to, like, Google, does this mean it'll be the thing I just did and not the start of the game? But at least they give you the option once you Google it. figure it out. I really love the way the different characters play.

Like late in the game when you're doing things like there's a late game challenge that essentially pits you against two of the summon fights at a time that is, it's brutal. It's, it's, it is not new game plus content. It's on, it's, it's off the main path. It's the Gilemesh Island stuff. And those fights take a ton of thinking and planning about who am I bringing to this battle. Well, Odin's in this fight. And his whole thing is if he, if he ever hits you, he gets mad at you.

and we'll end the fight on his own. So I've got to bring Ufi to that fight because she can, she's a blink tank, essentially. So building a party, building like a, the materia builds for those characters, like it was really interesting from a tactical point of view. Like I do not usually go for like murderously challenging fights in games like this,

but I really felt myself responding to the system and like, how do I build towards what the game is trying to like hit me towards? Yeah. In the original game, I would often not use certain characters. I was like, oh, Kate Sith is kind of lame in terms of his special abilities, even though the characters M57 were very interchangeable in terms of their function. Here, they're more unique. They have unique abilities. But because of that, I liked swapping between them. I had three different sets of party members that incorporated everyone. It's like, oh, I'm bored with the Barrett, Kate Sith Cloud. Let's do Cloud Ufi Arith. Or let's do the other combo. I loved always having. a different setup and keeping the battles fresh. And I really like how every character is so well developed mechanically. Even Kate Sith, who I feel was kind of undercooked in the original game based on what you could do with him. Here, I love controlling him.

I love summoning the giant Mughal and seeing like what kind of weird things can I do when that big guy is in battle. You can jump off of him. You can jump on him. You can have himself destruct. It's very cool. The dice component of it working in live combat, I know. never thought they'd pull it off when i i after the remake i thought how can how can kate sith work in

this thing or eat and you know red 13 was one i didn't think i liked it the very first i i didn't think he was totally for me i didn't use him a lot but then after his showcase section where it's you have to be him and barrett for for his dungeon like i he finally clicked with me and he was like my my like my big final uh one of my last groupings i used in a big fight was erith red and red 13 with cloud like i usually use that trio uh near the end of the game that became my standby ones it's only because they made me use them and sometimes in games where they force me to play as certain characters that i haven't been playing as that's a real turn off to me and i'm just like rushing through it But almost every time that happened in this game where they made me play as somebody I didn't normally play and they became the lead character for their dungeon, I learned to appreciate them more than I had been.

Yeah, I will be the dissenting voice on that point and say that Kate Sith never clicked for me and that his solo dungeon, almost solo dungeon, but that is one of the downturns of the game for me. But it just means I didn't play him enough. It's on, it's my fault. I can say he's a little trickier. but I found his ability is just very fun, especially, like Henry said, the real-time dice rolling where you can actually affect the die roll

if you plan it right. That's very neat. If you did anything other than throwing boxes in that stage, I think people would like the Kate Sith section of a more. And Henry mentioned dungeons, especially after coming off of FF16, which I guess kind of had dungeons. I love these.

Now, they're not like real brain burners. At best, the puzzles are on par with like Tomb Raider 2013. but I really enjoy how big they are how much stuff there is to find in them and how each one kind of has a traversal gimmick be it the Red 13 scaling the walls or you know the grappling hook things like that

they find ways to make traversal fun not all of this game is just you on a giant world map it would get kind of old if it was just that there are lots of big long set pieces where you're in these distinct areas separate from the world map and I I saw some complaints about the dungeons being too large but I really like sinking my teeth

into these it was a nice break from the giant open worlds i i do think that some of that might be coming from the part of the game you haven't gotten to yet bob the the the last really big dungeon is really big and really long and it comes to the time when the plot is accelerating but the play is not so i do think that there is a there's a certain amount of fatigue that builds up there shortly after what the game very clearly labels is the point of no return. You know, that dungeon is, it's laid out in an interesting way,

and I like how they handle the, I'll be as spoiler-free as I can here, but yeah, I like, there is cross-cutting of like, meanwhile, this, that, I thought that was pretty clever, but pacing-wise, especially after I learned what you do after that big dungeon,

I was like, boy, this is a whole lot to give me right before an eight hours it felt like it's five hours to me that the final actual boss fight of the game yeah you know I guess once I'm 90 hours in and the story is coming back in a big way maybe I won't be as into oh boy a big dungeon I am kind of ready to move on from this game but I am enjoying the stretch it out aspect right now but once I hit 100 hours I think I'll be looking at my watch and say all right let's let's wrap it up rebirth I'll be doing the wrap it up motion instead of the stretch it out motion Henry, I want to address this to you. And we're going to talk in vague terms.

how do you top that final boss fight when they go that extreme and use that much material? Yeah, I... It feels like they've used everything. I really... So the ending, yeah, okay. So the ending in the first game, that already felt so big to me of remake, because they said, I felt their thought at the end of remake was, you haven't seen, you're, we're not going to make you wait till the end of a third remake game to, fight Seferoth here. Here's a big Seferov fight right now and this is the Seferoth fight you

wanted to see even though it doesn't make sense in the old way the game works. But now in this one, yeah, there are so many levels to it and it is so bombastic and huge. Like huge, huge. Like maybe you could come with it. I think I'm coming at it with more of a sense of wonder of like how can they top this by integrating what the actual. let's say the third game is the actual ending of original FF7 I could see how they could integrate all that into a big kingdom hearts ridiculous fireworks factory that probably takes a 12-hour boss fight

but yes you're right they use so much of what I would have thought they'd save for the big bombastic ending of the final game and remake so as somebody completely ignorant to what's happening here I will say something that made me worry about the first game and what would come after was the element of this part of the game where it's clear

forces beyond your control are trying to reshape the story. It's trying to say like this ain't your grandma's remake, basically. We're going to swap things around and then the note remake ends on had me worried. Like go back to the 2020 podcast, I thought,

oh God, are they just going to make, just go their own way after this completely? And then the answer is no, not really. This is about 80% the same. But it sounds like things are shaken up in a way that might make me worry about part three. Let's call it Resurrection.

It's almost impossible to talk about without spoiling. It is, it both is and isn't, is basically the best, I can probably say. It is Schrodinger's ending, me almost like it's. They are doing everything they can to both allow themselves to follow the plot of the original game as much as they can while also keeping this metal layer on top of it. um which and like as someone who you know i'm been thinking about final fantasy seven since i was a kid in some way or another i'm very excited and as someone who's susceptible to like what you could call the no more of bullshit i'm i'm very susceptible to this idea of like oh we're literally in a fight with like the forces of canonical storytelling about whether or not we can this story

stays on the rails or not uh i do think remake makes the right or rebirth makes the right choice in not making that the focus for most of it's run. I think that would be get kind of untenable. Well, it's funny how it's funny how they, you kill all the whispers at the end of remake. And then it's, it feels like it's the middle of this game where you start seeing whispers again. And the characters are almost like, now we were done with those guys.

That was my opinion, actually. Now, I mean, I looked ahead a little bit just at a guy to see, okay, what does this stop adapting. Where does it leave off? And I was like, I'm okay with this because this is a very long game. But what you're telling me makes me worry because in this game you meet Sid, but you don't get him in your party. I think you meet Vincent. He's not in your party. There's no Rocket Town segment. They push that down the line a little bit. There's a lot of things I still want to see adapted at this level of fidelity with this quality of storytelling. And I'm worried that, like I was worried with remake, they are going to

go their own way. I don't know if these fears are unfounded, but I guess that's something to worry about four or five years from now when the game is actually released. I will bet you that the basic plot beats of the last third of Final Fantasy 7 will be there. I bet you go back to Midgar for a big climactic fight. I bet there's, you know, like things like the going to June on and like the big battles with the weapons, and I'm sure it ends at the crater. Like, again, the third act is also moves very fast of that that original game. I don't know that they'll ever get around to Rocket Town. I think they were

kind of like, we got a lot of towns in this game already. Maybe, maybe we miss this one. Yeah, you know, I would have, I would have glad to take in Rocket Town and skip Gun Gaga entirely, but I guess including Sid and including another character in your party, that's a lot of work. Yeah, the, this... Especially when he

come so late in what would have been the kind of back quarter of rebirth. When we talk about production values like that they, every character plays so well in their combat that if they were to build one for Sid or Vincent in this game, that actually would be like the tipping point of like two, they did too much. And like I can see why they wanted to save both of those guys presumably for the third game. I get the feel from the ending that the that the third game would also be mostly the plot of the continuing.

and not breaking. I did worry too after the end of remake that it was going to just break from the story and like, well, this is all new now and no more has got a lot of ideas. But I think they tempered this one well of like sticking so close but not in a boring way to the plot that I think they'll do the same for three until the last 10%, which will go crazy. Probably as crazy as any of these games have gone, maybe even crazier. and maybe then at the end of that it sets up for a it'll give the classic

No More a tease of hey maybe five to ten years from now you'll get a really crazy brand new story that plays out of this ending Final Fantasy 7 so very tired Any other final thoughts about this game I will say that I've been on a real

Final Fantasy kick lately because I got Theatrhythm Final Curtain Call or whatever it is for Swiss And it reignited something in me like, oh, right, I love this series. And since then I played through FF16, FF6 pixel remaster, and FF7 Rebirth. And I'm going to keep seeking out other Final Fantasy games. I just, that game was such great propaganda, just to remind me. And this kind of gave me everything I like, and it kind of exceeded my expectations in terms of what I thought it would be.

I mean, it takes a very good game to win me over. It's an open world game, because I've just frankly played too many of them. and they're all so big. But this one, it did everything I wanted to. A lot of it is nostalgia, I will admit. But if I could try to look beyond that, at its core, it is a very well-made game with perhaps too much going on. It's a little too eager to impress.

But I do like that sincerity of, like, just giving me too much of a minigame and making 10% of it mandatory. And it's like, oh, we have all these other tracks for you at Chocobo Racing. Or we have all these other RTS matches you could play. Or, hey, do you want to get really good at gears and gambits? No, no.

take it away from me but I'm glad you worked hard on it I think that the game for me I think the game it paid off the idea the simple idea of you saw these amazing cutscenes on the PlayStation what if you could walk around in these cutscenes and it looked way better

it looked as good as your memories were from 1998 when you played it in America it looked as good as it did in your memory but that is a fleeting feeling or it can't sustain 90 hours of a game but they the Square Enix doing their version of the open world gameplay that I am maybe slightly tired of when it's in the out of the Ubisoft game factory it did add a lot more to it and I don't know how they up it do they just give you a bigger map in the next one do they is just more characters

or a bigger map. I don't know where it probably could go beyond of like, no, this, now it is definitely too much game. But then again, this is, maybe the poor sales of this game is that it's too much game for a lot of people. It's, it's a tremendously impressive game. And it's, it's, it's probably my favorite Final Fantasy game since, I don't know, 12. Maybe, maybe even going back further than that. It's a very, I say it again, impressive product. There's so much of it. And if it was just a lot of stuff, I'd be a lot cooler on it. But I find the fighting so good, and I find the basic storytelling so good that it like, it anchors everything else that the game is doing. I am willing to put up with a lot of dragging a cart along so I can sneak behind a

Chokebo or playing Star Fox or playing Rocket League or throwing boxes or et cetera, et cetera, if it means I'm still getting to spend time with these characters and to get into these fights. That being said, it should be a war crime to make me look up lore from Final Fantasy the First Soldier to understand who the character in the cutscene is. I'm looking at you, Glenn Laud Brock. I guess also apparently, apparently will, there's an entire novel out there that basically explains how Tifa got her hat. I think so. I think it's a

I think it's about her recovering from her injury at Nibelheim technically but yeah. Yeah, it's Yeah, but no, but Glenn Lodbrock. Well, I mean, there's so much I need a chart just to explain like, well, did you, to explain what where Zach is in any given time perhaps

and it's all and to know that it all depends on sometimes a fleeting vision of Stamp and what stamp looks like in this world that tells you what universe you're looking at. And also every... Yeah, that is actually how you track the... That is how you actually track the

timelines. It's what a breed of dog stamp is. Yeah, it's crazy. They revealed it if you look at the ending of the first game, stamp is a different breed. That was where... And it's only for a second at the end of remake when Zach is alive and Walking Cloud

then just for a moment a chip bag with stamp on it goes by but it's a different breed of dog that it was supposed to be your tell of see this isn't the same universe stamp doesn't look the same and that follows into even more subtle gestures in this game it sounds like i have several four-hour lore videos to watch when i'm done with this and actually when i'm done with the game but i guess i will add that i was sold on remake immediately because midgar is my favorite part of the original game often i would just load it up and play through that it's like a very satisfying 80s to 10-hour experience. I was worried about this because, like, I think you were saying, well, this is a very listless part of the original experience. And I thought, I'm not as sold on this. I want to see what they do with it. But they made into a better, more developed experience. And I'm very impressed by that. Because Midgar, it's so driven. You're constantly under pressure. You have all these objectives. And it's a very, like, tight-knit little area. Here, it's like, oh, walk around, find stuff. But they found a way to make that compelling and never boring. And

And that, like, huge credit to them for renovating that part of this original experience, I'll say. Yeah, it's such a, it's a huge commitment and you have to have a PS5 to play it, but it is, it's so far, if you, I, well, I guess I was going to call it my game of the year so far over the games I've played, but I have been playing a lot of Hades, too. It's a tough, that's a tough balance here. but it's I it is maybe my game of the year well I'll get back to you in six months thank you to henry and will for joining me today uh this has been retronauts you can find us on twitter in blue sky as at retronauts and if you want to support the show and get a ton of full length bonus podcast on top of that head on over to patreon.com slash retronauts we are fan supported and signing up for just five bucks a month we'll get you access to two full length bonus episodes every

month and we've been doing those full length bonus episodes since january of 2020 so we have four complete years of bonus episodes that you have not heard if you're not a patron lots of great topics and again you get access to that entire back catalog and weekly columns and podcasts

by a contributor diamond fight if you just sign up at the $5 level at patreon.com slash retronauts I'll talk about myself last let's go around the fake room here and find out where we can find you guys online

Will what's going on with Will Hughes first off you can check out my writing at the AV club I write a weekly column called Game Theory where I basically talk about whatever I've been playing this week. If you'd like to hear me speak to the bottom of my intelligence, you can check out Everything to Guppie on the Duck Feed podcasting network. Everythingtoguppie.com.

It is where I put all my worst thoughts, being Gary Butterfield, who's been on the show many times, just being our worst selves. It's a lot of fun. And Henry, how about you? You can follow me on most social media at H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G or talking Henry on Instagram, And, you know, my full-time gig is with Bob, where we do the Talking Simpsons podcast network of shows.

We cover The Simpsons in chronological order. We're in seasons four and 14, Talking Simpsons. You can find that wherever you find podcasts, and we have tons of cool guests. We have some really cool ones we just had lined up, and we are supported at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons, where you get a ton of bonuses like us covering Futurama and King of the Hills. Hill and Batman the animated series and even a six-hour podcast once a month about an animated feature film that we go super in-depth on. That is all at patreon.com slash talking Simpsons.

And of course, I have been Bob Mackey. You can find me on Twitter and Blue Sky as Bob Serbo. But that has been it for this episode of Retronauts. We'll see you again soon for another new episode. Take care. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.