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.
