Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: Losing the Plot in a Recurring Dream

Spoilers, obviously.

I once had a dream that recurred onto itself. This was not a recurring dream, I've never had this dream a second time. This was a dream that told a story, finished the story, but since I was still asleep, my mind needed programming to fill the time, and it decided to play it over again. The dream's story was simple: a boy and a girl were in a SciFi hover bike race around a swamp. They were rivals who fell in love during the journey. But during a late race turn, the girl was killed trying to impress the boy by overtaking him, going too fast, and crashing into the swamp. The boy lives and wins, but is heartbroken. It is a basic idea but effective - by winning the race, the boy had lost what was most important to him.

Then my mind started the story up again. The boy and girl were alive at the starting line of the SciFi hover bike race. However, I knew how the story went this time. And because these characters were not real, merely extensions of myself, they knew it too. And that meant everything was different. Nobody could change the plot, yet the tone had shifted radically. What once was a fun romance, was now this sad march forward towards the inevitable ending. This was not a dream you forget easily. My subconscious was doing some very cool metafictional stuff.

I'm not nearly as creative when awake. If I could write while asleep, I would have some real banger pieces. So I've never really been able to come up with a good use of this idea. Unfortunately, I do not think Square Enix has managed to be successful with their own recurring dream either in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

It is a unique incident in gaming history that most of the same team of SE veterans such as Yoshinori Kitase, Tetsuya Nomura, Motomu Toriyama, and Kazushige Nojima all are still here, still working on this same game thirty years later. Just like many of their fans, they can never escape this dream of Midgar, Sephiroth, and Meteors. We have here another story about a boy, a girl, and inevitability. In this production team's previous attempt to retell the original Final Fantasy VII, they could not simply recount and replay the story as it happened before. They wrote-in a literalized force of fate called the Whispers in 2020's Final Fantasy VII Remake, the first episode of their three-part remake of the 1997 PlayStation 1 game. The Whispers were their admission in some ways that you can never tell the same story twice. The audience knows what is coming, you know what is coming, and in some ways, that knowledge possesses the characters like a physic virus. To pretend that the foreknowledge does not exist is be dishonest as a storyteller. 

Now we're in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the middle chapter of the retelling, and arguably the most essential. This is the chapter where the legendary tragedy that so deeply defines FFVII and really this entire series occurs. If any scene needs to be done well, it has to be that scene, you know the one. Unfortunately, the metafictional apparatus is just not adding anything interesting. This should be an exciting revision of these events from a new perspective. Instead, it's a frustrating and confusing experience. FFVII has a baroque plot (made more baroque by a very bad original translation), but it is a very easy game to read emotionally. Those emotions are timeless and universal. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's conclusion leaves me unsure exactly what I'm supposed to feel.

I'm going to be defensive and back peddle a lot in these next few paragraphs. I want to be clear: a bad ending does make a bad video game. Some bad endings can completely ruin a game (*cough* Bayonetta 3 *cough*), that is not the case here. Heck, one of my favorite games of all time has a very abrupt and unclear ending, making you unsure what the heck happened and whether the world ended of not. That game is called Final Fantasy VII, came out in 1997 on the PS1. I love that game so much I wrote a joke walkthrough for it. For better or worse, that arrogant piece of high school obnoxiousness and tastelessness has defined my identity as a writer forever.

I need to be clear here: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is an immensely good video game. If this were a hypothetical Final Fantasy XVII,  this would be the single best Final Fantasy game ever made. If you filed off the serial numbers and turned this into a game divorced entirely from the expectations and baggage of 1997 (sorta like turning Cloud into Squall, or Cloud into Lightning), I would have nothing to say but effusive praise. This is the first game in two decades to be as big, as varied, as fun and funny and full of unlimited potential as my inflated Old Head expectations of what a truly great Final Fantasy should be. Final Fantasy XII was the last one to hit like this for me. FFXIII, FFXV, and FFXVI all had merits, I'll begrudgingly admit that ever after shit talking them for years. The problem is that they all feel like compromises to me. They have great gameplay but without the freedom of variety and the joy of customization, or they have scale but bad combat and a half-finished campaign. VII Rebirth is the whole meal and more. It is amazingly impressive on a dozen levels. We are spoiled by this production. In the 2020s, video games are a fatter, more expensive, so large that they are a more dangerous and unstable medium than ever before. But I rarely feel spoiled by a game like I do with VII Rebirth.

Really as a remake of FFVII, this is better than I could have possibly have asked for. There are times when my crew is marching through locations, say, Junon, and I am stunned. "They did it, they really did it.", They turned Barret, a Mr T. rip-off stereotype into this loving team dad figure who is as much the heart and soul of the party as the love triangle of Cloud, Aerith, or Tifa. And also is thirsty for violent leftist revolution, because he's the team realist. Most scenes are at a top of the line in terms of production and performance, all these characters are lovingly rendered. You come to love all of them, since they're fun people with big hearts.

Yuffie is the best character in VII Rebirth. Yuffie! The one everybody hated and left to rot on the Airship! She's the most fun character. She sings her own theme song and has a great toolkit in combat. (Cait Sith is still bad, but I'm not asking for miracles here.)

VII Rebirth all the issues I had with Remake. It is adapting a much larger stretch of the old game, so we do not have the problem of multi-hour dungeons being made out of spaces that were one single screen on the PS1. The sidequests are great. Chadley is an annoying brat but his suite of open world adventuring is addiction, I had to fight myself against 100%ing this game. Plus, the dodge roll actually works this time! VII Rebirth is finally pulling off the decades-long goal that Square Enix has been attempting since the PS2 to create a combat system that is both fulfilling action and strategically-rich.

So 95% of VII Rebirth is a masterpiece. Square Enix has not lacked from good games in their catalogue, this might be the game they've ever made. There's a mostly optional minigame called Queen's Blood, the newest card game in the long tradition of Triple Triad. Queen's Blood might make my Top 10 List of Best Games of 2024 all on its own. So it really hurts me a lot when this game does not stick the landing. It nails the beginning so well, the iconic Nibelheim in flames scene is done exactly as you'd want it. Every date in Gold Saucer is a well-written.

But that scene, you know the one? I can't pretend otherwise, this particular adaptation is a fucking disaster.

This was probably the largest and most-discussed point coming into Rebirth. Some of us were wondering how Square Enix would take a very linear RPG and turn it into a modern open world game, whether that was even possible. (It was! I love this game!) But for most fans, the big question was the one even the New York Times had to ask: "Will the creators kill Aerith again?" We can drop the pretenses of Spoiler walls here, we all know Aerith dies in the first game. And we know she is going to die in this remake. I heard plenty of theories from the plausible ("we get to save Aerith this time") to the questionable ("they'll murder Tifa instead") to the utterly ludicrous ("Cloud will die and Zack will take his place"). ...That final one was actually mine, I'm not good at fanon speculation, as it turns out.

What even opens all this speculation was the issue of the Whispers and the conclusion of FFVII Remake back on the PS4. That game ends on this big Advent Children battle in the sky against Sephiroth. Importantly, the party seemingly defeats the Whispers, which in theory knocks open all possibilities and potentials. "We are no longer following the set path", Remake proudly declares, and to prove it, it brings Cloud's mentor, Zack Fair (and less importantly a minor character named Biggs) back from the dead. This is an enormous change in the story that should open us up to everything. Instead, on the PS5, that change seems superficial and largely irrelevant.

In Rebirth, the story actually plays with arguably more fidelity to the original than Remake. If you were worried we'd lose the big emotional scenes with Barret in Corel Prison or Red XIII in Cosmo Canyon, or even Mr. Dolphin's dumb minigame in Junon, don't fear. Everything happens as it should. Zack and Biggs are off in their own pocket dimension of an alternative timeline. They're on screen for only about two hours, which sounds like a lot until you remember Rebirth is an enormous game that took this writer 70 hours to complete. Most of their screentime is spent contemplating why they're here, searching for a purpose that the writers curiously have not given them. Biggs winds up dead anyway, and Zack only interacts with the "real" story in the final boss sequences, which is such a convoluted mess of multiverse junk that he's basically just a minor cameo.

The phrase "Kingdom Hearts-ass bullshit" gets tossed around a lot. That is because Kingdom Hearts, fairly or unfairly, has become the poster child for confusing, over-complicated, and impossible to explain storytelling. I like Kingdom Hearts, those will never be bad words in my vocabulary. But by the end of this game, we're 100% in the worst excesses of Kingdom Hearts plot hyperbolic hyper-physics gibberish. Aerith is in a superposition between alive, dead, and a hallucination. Zack's universe has collapsed or maybe it hasn't. The Black Materia is either real or fake, Sephiroth has held and lost the Black Materia like three times, plus there's two different White Materias. Sephiroth is trying to conquer the multiverse, he's been defeated twice in surreal dream-like final boss fights but seemingly unphased, and Cloud has fully lost his mind. Maybe two characters actually know what is going on, and one of them is playing Hannibal to Cloud's Will Graham, so you cannot trust anything he says. I would not mind all these Proper Nouns or these advanced quantum anime questions, if not for the fact that I don't know how to feel about all this. What do I do with this???

The real flaw of all of this is ultimately that we lose that scene, you know the one. It never plays out properly. And that scene is an incredible moment, even with the shock erased. You can only be "spoiled" once, and if the surprise is the only thing the work of fiction achieved, it was not a particularly good work of fiction. FFVII still lands the gut punch whether this your first playthrough or your fifth. The simplicity is what nails it. Sephiroth murders Aerith brutally in an FMV, then we cut back to the blocky Popeye-shaped polygons. Which look silly to our modern eyes but in motion once you believe them to be fully alive characters, they are not silly in the slightest once the drama unfolds. We have the stark comparison of Sephiroth's arm-outstretched monologue with Cloud's complete disinterest in any of these plot machinations. What are monocromatic Plot Materia and Promised Lands and messiahs compared to the cruel pointless tragedy that befell his party member?

"Shut up", he tells Sephiroth. "The cycle of nature and your stupid plan don't mean a thing. Aerith is gone. Aerith will no longer talk, no longer laugh, cry... or get angry..." It is blunt, but it works.

On the PS5, this scene kinda plays out, but without any audio. It happens seconds after a complete fake-out scene where Cloud actually saves Aerith, so you've completely lost all sense of reality. We then launch into about an hour of long, often-frustrating giant boss fights against weird aliens and various nonsensical transformations. FFVII originally has one boss fight without the usual boss theme, with Aerith's sad dirge playing over it. It is such a simple idea and such a heartbreaking one. FFVII Rebirth tries to do this, thought it cannot hold itself back fading the audio into a a full-orchestral action theme. This is not the time to be thrilling, game, your tone is all wrong. Plus, you could easily get stuck if you were unprepared with your Materia load-out on specific party members and then have to restart the entire sequence, which sucks ass. The Jenova fight in the original is not hard, it is just there to punctuate the ruin before we can cut to Aerith's burial FMV. (Which either is or isn't in the new game, I don't know.) And then we shift discs, another bit of punctuation.

Rebirth really thinks it can land this ultimate emotional moment by bringing Aerith back to life and in your party for the final phase of Sephiroth's fight. But, it is too soon. The sequel movie, Advent Children did it better. The ghost of Aerith is the final hand to push Cloud forward during the climax of the fight against Bahamut. She is the final link in the chain of all the party members supporting and loving Cloud in his struggle. This is the only time she takes an active physical role in the movie, since she's been gone for years. I teared up back in February when I rewatched this movie in theaters. 

In FFVII Rebirth, Aerith has been gone for all of mere minutes, you never had a chance to miss her between all the stages of this bizarre fight against... he's literally called "Bizarro Sephiroth". If this were hours later, or even deep into FFVII-3, it would it hit hard. Here, I don't care, I was too busy worrying that I could not beat one of Sephy's phases because I forgot to give Barret and Red XIII any offensive magic Materia.

The real failure for me is not that they blew it on that scene, you know the one, it is that Rebirth barely takes advantage of any of the dramatic irony. We know the ending already. For all of Square Enix's bluffing that things might go differently, we know the sacrifice that's coming. Aerith is our Isaac and the plot is a depraved god. She herself may be dimly aware of this, but we rarely get interiority for her. She's an extremely well-written character with great scenes, great comedy, but by the end of this game she's off playing 7777-dimesional chess against Sephiroth and we're totally lost. How come Cloud is not aware of what's coming? This is where an army of Whispers pushing us towards inevitability would actually work. Rebirth, not Remake would be the game where we'd want to fight against fate.

This is where a party of adventurers running around the world completing mindless tasks on a vast checklist would function as purposeful procrastination. A kind of forced-obliviousness to pretend that what has to happen may never come. For many players, it may not, you might burn out around Costa del Sol, and thus Aerith can live forever. If moving forward means losing one of your closest friends, I'd rather do so much minigaming that I never complete the quest too. I'd rather do dating mechanics, card games, pirate treasure hunts, a still-shitty version of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, and whatever else is out here in the vast toy chest of distractions that fills FFVII Rebirth. This game is an adventure of so many colors and tones, which should be a masterpiece. Because all those pleasures should have the bittersweet quality of the final days of fun before terminal predestination takes it all away. Like the final birthday party for a dying family member, where the cheer is forced, sure, but that cheer also means so much more.

Every so often in FFVII Rebirth, but not frequently enough, Aerith stares off into the horizon and asks whoever is nearby, "where is Midgar?" Even a continent away, out on an adventure with new friends that love her, she sometimes get homesick. For those brief moments, Aerith might be aware of what's coming, and might wish to turn back. She can retreat home to Sector 6 and live out her time in peace. Instead she presses on, and that she chooses to press on should be beautiful, inspiring, and tragic. 

I wish I could say the ending of this game does that choice justice. But no, it is a mess. The human quality has been completely eroded under some strategy to get the internet buzzing with speculation and theories for Part 3. Well, I don't care about theory-crafting anymore. I just want to see the remaining parts of FFVII done well. I could not care less about the multiverse or the Whispers or how many different breeds of a cartoon dog there are.

Luckily there still is one more game. Maybe in 2028 I'll laugh at myself and my ignorance for misunderstanding the greater purpose here. The more this goes on, it is increasingly obvious to me that this will just be the same FFVII story with a lot of cruft added. It is not Evangelion Rebuild where it is an antithesis that can synthesize with the original story's thesis. I am deeply impressed by how much fun Square Enix could make chilling with Cactuars and very ugly Moogles. But I am equally cynical that the old guard of Nomura, Kitase, Toriyama, and Nojima do not actually have anything interesting to add to that old dream of their's.