Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Part 2 of the problematic, sorely under thought through cardboard world building, bloated to bursting themeparkification of ff7 and the assassination of its characters, locations, dramatic moments, and legacy with no place or time for subtlety hitting the player on the nose with everything as if the writers were scared absolutely anyone in the audience would miss something. It feels like they were only concerned with dozens and dozens of hours of forced side quests that kill the pacing but need to be completed to advance the story or unlock story important character context moments later on and as before introducing bus loads of instantly grating samey forgettable new characters that do nothing for the story but take screen time away from the main party and other story important characters who are unfortunately travelling through the plot in a loop of; go to new place, hit roadblock, help everyone in area, road block opens for completely unrelated reason, progress. There is an average of two hours of narratively inconsequential fluff for every location in this guided tour through ff7 land, some locations twice or trice. The removal of the tongue-in-cheek saturday morning cartoon elements of story convenience found in the original game's story are replaced here by this cloud coo coo land logic that just makes every character seem stupid for going along with it, as if they are acting against their own goals so the events of the original game can play out somewhat close to how they played out before.

With that said as with most ps5 exclusives it looks pretty, the animation is great, and the actors do the best they can with the material they are given, it is hard to find fault there, though cracks do show in the latter half of the game. But damn, given the calibre of the talent involved if only square enix never made the decision to follow the multi-verse fad nonsense and instead stuck firm to a one-to-one remake of the original story with a few modern gaming conventions thrown in to update the game for modern hardware and gaming trends, this trilogy really could have been indomitable and not the puppeteered corpse that it is.

No point lamenting the road not travelled, fundamentally this game fails and misses out on greatness exactly where the previous entry did only twice as hard because it doubles down on all the failings of its predecessor, and that is because of the godawful writing. It is a testament to the strength of the original story that even this game's loose interpretation still connects with people.