Bonus: More thoughts on Final Fantasy VII, Remake, and Rebirth

This is a companion post for my proper review of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which you should read first for my overall thoughts on the game. There will of course be spoilers for Final Fantasy VII and its remakes below.

My Final Fantasy VII Rebirth review was in draft hell for over two years. I started writing scattered thoughts about FF7 and its remakes as I played them in late 2023 through early 2024 with no real thesis in mind, just wanting a place to talk about their stories. And then Rebirth came out and I had a bad time with it, and my ramblings evolved into a full-blown formal review focused on the reasons it didn't land for me. As you can imagine, these factors meant a lot was left on the cutting room floor.

But I still think a lot of this stuff is interesting. So I'm trying something new this time: adapting those scattered fragments that didn't fit into the main review into sort of a "deleted scenes" post! This one's for the sickos for whom approximately 13,000 words of me talking about Final Fantasy VII simply wasn't enough.

The remakes have been great PR for the cast

Final Fantasy VII Remake felt like a goddamn miracle when it came out. By all accounts, it should not be as good as it is. It shouldn’t even exist! It was one of gaming’s great pipe dreams on the level of Half-Life 3, something fans had been fantasizing about since… well, basically since Final Fantasy VIII came out and had realistically proportioned character models with proper texturing, honestly.

Moreover, FF7's creators had spent years making it seem like they just didn’t get their own story and characters, watering them down and sanding away everything interesting about them in various spinoff games and Advent Children. As much as I love Kingdom Hearts, they tend to turn the FF characters into the most boring versions of themselves. Those worse depictions of the cast overwrote many peoples’ memories of the original game, and led many to believe that FF7 never had an interesting cast to begin with.

And then Remake happened. The characters finally felt like themselves again for the first time since 1997, reminding everyone why we fell in love with them in the first place.

Cloud was no longer just an edgy, mopey, emotionally distant pretty boy who only cares about fighting Sephiroth and maybe also being sad about Aerith. He’s invented this fake stoic badass persona, but beneath that he’s a lovable doofus who’s easy to fluster, and he's also capable of being pretty affable. Aerith is no longer just the demure Girl Who Dies with a mystical connection to the Lifestream. She’s once again the upbeat, feisty, extroverted girl who’s tired of being cooped up in the slums and is eager for adventure. The world rejoiced upon seeing her hit a man with a folding chair. The whole point was that they inverted the personality stereotypes normally associated with Aerith and Tifa's classes. They made the brawler the reserved and cautious girl next door, while the healer is the extroverted go-getter. That's why they're fun! The world seems to have only remembered this thanks to Remake.

The real star of Remake was Barret. After years spent being sidelined in spinoffs and written off by fans as one big Mr. T joke, Barret got to shine as the gruff but deeply compassionate leader of Avalanche who wears his heart on his sleeve. So many of the best emotional moments in Remake go to Barret, especially with how beautiful of a job John Eric Bentley is doing voicing him. His rousing speeches about the fate of the planet. His rage and sorrow over the loss of his comrades and the entirety of Sector 7 along with them, which gives way to a solemn determination to keep fighting Shinra. His emotional reunion with Marlene upon realizing that his daughter is still alive. He’s also capable of being hilarious when he needs to be, having great comedic chemistry with his teammates. Really, the man’s got it all, and I am so very glad that these remakes have cemented Barret’s place as one of the best Final Fantasy characters.

I’m pleased to say that Barret does, in fact, continue to be one of the highlights of Rebirth, with some strong moments throughout the Corel chapters. But I think it’s the secondary characters who really shine the brightest, thanks in large part to the increased screen time everyone gets across the board.

The thing about the party system in FF7 is that, a lot of the time, the characters not in your current party might as well not exist. Inactive party members are implied to be wandering off on their own parallel adventures, taking a slightly different path until they reconvene with Cloud in the next major story location, and they can be called to swap in via cell phone. I do think this framing is fun, and I like the bit in the Corel mines where the backup party can be seen taking a different route on their own, but the game doesn’t do much with it. In practice, it typically means that you only get to see two of your companions’ reactions to many story events. You could argue this adds to the game’s replay value, encouraging you to use different parties to see different dialogue, but this approach always kind of bugs me. If I like a certain party member less for gameplay purposes and don’t tend to use them in battle, this also means I’ll see less of them in the story, which means that the moments where they are relevant to the story will have less of an impact because I’m not very attached to the character.

Given Vincent became so wildly popular that he got his own spinoff game, it's kind of hilarious looking back at the original and remembering that he isn't much of a character. He gets two scenes, and both of them are optional. You get the scene where you find him in the coffin and recruit him, and you get him finding Lucrecia in a cave. That's pretty much it! He'll chime in with random lines if you have him in your party, but I barely used him, so to me he was just the weird guy who stands around on the bridge of the Highwind. The same is still kind of true in Rebirth, but I'm looking forward to them doing more with him in part 3 once he's a full-fledged party member.

Yuffie, though, got a whole hometown area with two side quests of her own, including the biggest story-driven side quest in the original game. She felt so much more crucial to my playthrough than Vincent, even though I didn't use her as often as Barret, Tifa, Aerith, or Red XIII. In Rebirth, she's now a mandatory party member, so she gets a much-deserved spot as a proper member of the crew. It's fun having her different perspective on things as a slightly younger character from a whole different culture, bringing a very different energy compared to the core Avalanche gang.

But the party member with the biggest glow-up in Rebirth has to be Cait Sith, who was easily one of my least favorite party members in FF7. Within the context of the original game, he’s introduced as this random talking cat doll guy in the Gold Saucer who just kind of arbitrarily tags along for no apparent reason. I didn’t like his RNG-heavy Limit Breaks, so I didn’t use him in my party, which meant he was almost completely absent from the story until the big plot twist halfway through the game where he’s revealed to be the traitor telling Shinra about the party’s whereabouts. Because I hadn’t gotten to know him as a friend beforehand, this moment would define the character for me. He’s the Shinra narc. Sure, he gets an “emotional” sacrifice scene at the Temple of the Ancients, but that’s mostly played for laughs since Cait Sith 2.0 shows up in like the very next scene for a very weird bit of comic relief while Sephiroth is possessing Cloud and making him attack Aerith. After that, he mostly just becomes the guy who chides Barret for Avalanche’s way of doing things and talks about how his way of trying to reform Shinra from within is better. He sucks! What a loser. Get this guy out of here.

And then Rebirth came along and made me like Cait Sith. He's now given a much more proper introduction, and the fact that the whole party gets to show up in more story scenes means he gets way more opportunities to play up his fun showman personality. The animation work that plays up how cute he's trying to be and his thick Scottish accent also add some very fun wrinkles that the original game simply couldn't convey. We'll still have to wait and see how part 3 deals with the fallout of his betrayal and Reeve's perspective as a Shinra employee, since none of that is really resolved in Rebirth with how quickly you're whisked off to the finale, but he gives an excuse about how he wanted Shinra to send troops into the Temple first because he knew it was full of death traps and didn't want his new friends to get hurt going in first. Which... kind of works? It's a start. And also no matter how much of a herb Reeve ends up being in part 3, the stark difference between his real personality and the way he comes off through his remote control catboy fursona is extremely funny to me.

Also did Reeve give Cait Sith a snatched waist and thunder thighs on purpose, or...?

Barret and the planet

A common critique of FF7 is that the story kind of forgets what it's about after you leave Midgar, as the hunt for Sephiroth and the complexities of Cloud's true identity take center stage and Shinra becomes a secondary concern. I agree the Midgar section is where the environmentalist, anti-capitalist themes are given the most consistent focus, which is probably why some critics struggled to pin down what Rebirth is "about" compared to Remake, but I wouldn't say the rest of the game forgets about those themes. You continue to discover more places where nature has been ravaged by Shinra elsewhere in the world, as well as more cities with an upper class literally living above a destitute lower class, like Junon and the Gold Saucer. Almost everywhere you visit is either a place destroyed by Shinra or a place where people go to try and forget how bad things are elsewhere.

Of course, Sephiroth's summoning of Meteor and the appearance of the WEAPONs are also basically an ecological disaster caused by Shinra's carelessness and greed. They're much more sudden and dramatic than real world climate change, but that's pretty much what they are. The stuff in disc 2 about feeling hopeless in the face of this apparent end of the world as we know it and needing to fight for the future anyway really resonates today, and the ambiguous but hopeful ending brings these themes into focus with the image of nature reclaiming Midgar 500 years in the future. The path to get there won't be easy, and we'll still have to deal with at least some of the effects of climate change, but a better future is possible. The world will keep turning. The results may only be visible generations from now, but that day will come if we fight for change now.

I wouldn't say that these themes are handled flawlessly, though, and that's largely because of Barret's arc in the original game, which I can't say I find particularly satisfying.

There's definitely a lot of good stuff there—even the stuff about Barret being an ex-coal miner who latched onto Avalanche mainly because he wanted revenge against Shinra. I like that Barret isn't perfect! I like that he got into all this for personal reasons but still ended up fighting so hard to save the world. I like that Avalanche are antiheroes with blood on their hands. It's more the place Barret ends up as a character that rubs me the wrong way, particularly after a certain argument with Cait Sith/Reeve on the Highwind late in the game. Like, Mr. Narc over here who thought he could steer Shinra in a better direction from the inside (and failed miserably at this goal) is really gonna lecture Barret over the damage caused by the reactor explosion? Really? And then Barret basically capitulates and is like you're right, I was wrong, we shouldn't have blown up the reactor, I was never really fighting for the planet, that was just justification for my actions, but I guess I'll at least fight for Marlene. I can't tell how much of this is the wonky, rushed translation ripping out nuance and how much is the actual intent of the original script, but Barret becoming an oil baron in Advent Children doesn't exactly inspire much confidence.

Mainly, I just hope that part 3 is able to land somewhere more satisfying for Barret, where he can admit he got into all this for selfish reasons and that he's done bad things without the game forgetting that he was right about Shinra. Like, so many of the best, most highly praised moments in Remake were Barret espousing his ideals and inspiring his teammates to keep going. He might not have joined that cause for the "right reasons" at first, but he's become a good leader nonetheless! Remake also gave him an easy out for the Mako reactor explosion by saying that the bomb only damaged the reactor, while the actual explosion and the resulting deaths were an inside job designed to stoke the public's fears over Avalanche and Wutai. If they still land on Barret being like "attacking the reactor was a mistake and my entire ideology was just a front for my desire for revenge" when he didn't even blow up the reactor this time... man, I don't even fucking know. Please don't do that.

Rebirth actually has a bit in one of the Corel side quests (the one with the bird) that sort of addresses this tension. Barret admits that he began fighting for selfish personal reasons, but still emphatically declares that "Shinra's going down." This is a rare instance of Rebirth stripping moral ambiguity from the original game that I'm actually relieved to see, and I hope it's a sign that Barret will still be allowed to have a spine and actually believe in his stated beliefs in part 3.

Aerith or Tifa

This is the most substantial section that survived until the article was almost done in 2026. I ultimately cut it because I ended up being less bothered by Rebirth's handling of Aerith as a love interest after playing the final chapter and seeing the multiverse date scene, so some of my complaints here ended up being moot. We'll have to wait and see how the love triangle is handled in part 3. Nonetheless, I'm preserving this for posterity.

The big question going into Rebirth was, of course: will Aerith still die? Before we answer that, we have to back up a bit and discuss Cloud's love life and how the two games frame his love interests, which greatly colors the events at the Forgotten Capital to me.

Around the time Rebirth came out, I actually saw some people insisting that FF7 doesn't feature a love triangle. Which is funny, because FF7 is that rare story where I actually love the love triangle. There's basically none of the typical bickering over Cloud between Tifa and Aerith. If anything, they both love to team up and tease Cloud together, which I find way more fun. But both of these potential ships also remain largely implied, and the focus is on the trio's internal conflicts rather than external ones over who should date who or Aerith stealing away Tifa's man or whatever. People turn all of this into a dumb shipping war regardless, but in the actual text both relationships are integral to the story. There's a fascinating emotional messiness here that adds to the story's melancholy. Both of these potential ships for Cloud feel overshadowed by prior tragedies, as well as a reluctance for everyone to reveal their true selves.

With Aerith, there's the question of how much her fondness for Cloud is colored by her prior relationship with Zack, who Cloud is unknowingly copying. There's definitely supposed to be some uncertainty there, which only further fuels Cloud's identity crisis, but Aerith also knows that Cloud's similarities to Zack are a front. On their Gold Saucer date, she says how she wants to get to know the real Cloud. She's interested in building up that relationship into something deeper, moving past her surface level nostalgia for what she had with Zack. The tragedy, of course, is that she'll never get that chance, because Cloud only comes out of his shell and recalls his true self after Aerith dies.

Then there's Tifa. She's had a crush on him since they were kids, but she worries that she's waited too long to make her move. When Cloud suddenly reenters her life in Midgar, she's eager to try and pick up where they left off, reclaiming the life that was stolen from her in Nibelheim. But it may be too late. He's a completely different person now. She gets him involved with Avalanche just to try and get close to him again, but she soon learns that Cloud’s memories are all wrong and something is seriously wrong with him. She bites her tongue about all this, worried that she'll never get a third chance if she confronts him about the truth and he has a breakdown. So she settles for living a comforting lie.

In my playthrough of FF7, Tifa's life was complicated further by Aerith, who I had Cloud pursue romantically. I actually think this makes Tifa's arc much more compelling in the long run. Tifa's trying to get Cloud's attention again, but this new and different Cloud is kind of falling for this new girl... who then dies tragically before their relationship can really go anywhere. Tifa becomes much more of a focus in discs 2 and 3. Cloud reaches his breaking point as his delusions are shattered, Tifa saves him and helps him remember his true self, and the two of them can finally be honest with themselves and each other. But still, the whole time there's this feeling that they'll never be the same after losing Aerith. Even the ending plays into this, with Cloud reaching out for Aerith in the Lifestream as Tifa reaches out for Cloud. Cloud and Tifa may physically be together, but the ending is really all about Aerith. The first and last image of a human being you see in this game are both Aerith. Her absence looms large.

There's something so tragic and beautiful about all this to me. There are no neat and tidy happy endings in FF7, and Cloud's feelings are often left up to interpretation, but there's just enough stated here for me to fill in the gaps and create an incredibly compelling arc. Cloud and Tifa may end up together, but there's still that undercurrent of melancholy due to this immense loss. They may never fully recover the part of themselves that died with Aerith. They still miss her to the very end of the story. But they have to find a way to keep on living in spite of that. It's what Aerith would have wanted.

And then there's the way Rebirth handles all this.

Despite expanding the hidden affinity ratings for your party members into a whole gamified system you can keep track of to try and win the favor of your faves, most of Rebirth's main story actually takes a pretty firm stance on who Cloud's girlfriend is "supposed" to be.

For most of the journey, the correct answer is Tifa.

Tifa gets way more to do in the story, and she and Cloud get a big romantic moment where they almost kiss after a possessed Cloud nearly kills her and knocks her into the Lifestream in Gongaga (again: this is very weird), and then later if you get Tifa as your Gold Saucer date they DO kiss! Slowly and tenderly while fireworks go off in the background and everything! Meanwhile Aerith still likes Cloud, sure, but she's kept at arm's length, and the game is sure to remind us that she's really supposed to be Zack's girlfriend by popping over to the alternate timeline where he's taking care of a comatose Aerith. So she's not allowed to kiss Cloud at the Gold Saucer. Only Tifa gets to do that.

They leaned so hard into emphasizing Tifa, in fact, that I highly suspected that they were building up to a big twist where she somehow dies at the end of the game instead of Aerith.

Yes, yes, I know they said that the remakes will still ultimately line up with Advent Children, where Aerith is dead and Tifa is alive. But I thought maybe they'd kill Tifa in Rebirth, and then in part 3 Aerith would find some way to take Tifa's place in the Lifestream or something, sacrificing herself to "set things right." Would that be a good story? Fuck if I know. But Tifa dying instead of Aerith was the only way I could rationalize what they were doing here for most of the game. Why are they doing so much with Tifa now when disc 2 was her time to shine in the original story? Why wouldn't they do more with Aerith in the last game where she's alive? How is her death supposed to hit the same in a version of the story where they're so firmly sidelining her and pointing you towards Tifa? And also where they keep alluding to Aerith's death from the original, to the point that they literally have alternate timeline Marlene have a premonition and spoil that Sephiroth is supposed to kill Aerith for any new players hours before it happens? Even the variant of the cover art pictured above seems to hint at the question of which of the two girls Sephiroth will kill.

But I wasn't married to this theory completely. They could do anything with it. I just thought that surely this must be going somewhere after all that hullabaloo about freeing the party from the chains of fate in Remake. Even if it was all just a redirect to give us false hope and surprise us with Aerith's death all over again, they'd at least have to do her death justice. We're not just going to do the same story where Aerith dies but worse. Right?

Right?

Thoughts that were cut or truncated from Temple of the Ancients section

Cid and Vincent have to mostly sit out this four hour dungeon where a bunch of very important story stuff happens because they won't be playable until part 3. It's honestly funny how Cid just waits outside and is absent for a bunch of key events he was there for in the original, making him feel emotionally distant from the rest of the party. He's just the chauffer in this game. Vincent spends all of his meager screentime in Rebirth aura farming. But, I mean, it's Vincent. That's what he does.

The party makes it outside just in time to see Sephiroth stab Tseng. Surprising no one, the way Square has woobified the Turks post-FF7 bleeds into this new version of the scene. Naturally Tseng doesn't die—they already retconned that in the original timeline years ago. But the messy nuance of Aerith's emotions are gone. In the original, she admitted that the Turks were bad guys, but she still couldn't help but feel some level of connection to Tseng just because he was one of the only people who had been in her life since she was a child. It's a humanizing moment that shows Aerith's compassion, but it also shows how sad and lonely her life has been that she has connections to so few people other than her former captors. In the remakes, of course, the Turks have to be painted as more noble and sympathetic, like when they felt so bad about having to drop the Sector 7 plate and commit mass murder in Remake. They're framed less like villains and more like cool antiheroes who just so happen to be pitted against the party, but they really aren't so bad.

After a new series of "trials" in The Rooms That Make You Relive Your Traumatic Backstory added so that all of the party members can get one last dramatic scene of their own before the end of the game, the party reconvenes and Aerith gives this meandering inspirational speech. The dead are still with us, but that makes it hard to move on, but we can learn from our trauma and grow, but "true strength comes from our ability to forgive," and so let's focus on the future and not the past. Given it happens in the same spot as the scene with Tseng, I can't help but tie that bit about forgiveness back to him.

Also, while the dungeon still ends with the temple imploding, they got rid of the fun detail that the entire temple IS the Black Materia, and that it has to compress down into a usable form. I don't really know why they did that. That detail was always really cool to me. But Aerith claims that the Black Materia Cloud gets is a fake, and while Cloud says this is a trick in the moment, maybe it's the truth, and they'll have to go back and get the real one created out of the compressed temple in part 3. Who knows.

From an early draft of the conclusion, before I finished the game

Rebirth is as big as it is because it’s trying to create a modern equivalent to the day one experience with FF7. The original game was a big game for its time, and many players’ first experience with 40+ hour JRPGs. Stepping out of Midgar for the first time and discovering this great big world map full of secrets and diversions was a revelation for many players. To adapt that to current sensibilities, we now have a massive open world game that’s several times longer than the original. The problem is that there’s a world of difference between giving a kid in the ‘90s a 40-hour game and giving an adult in 2024 a game that could take them over 100 hours. Adults just don’t have the same amount of free time, and these days there are way more games coming out every single day. I’ve got other shit I want to play! So much other shit! My backlog is huge, and even more games that I wanted to play came out in the time it took me to finish Rebirth! Not to mention the fact that I have a job and other things I want to do with my day besides playing video games. After a while, the huge amount of content here started to feel less like a treat and more like a burden. Not just because it’s long—I've played and loved longer JRPGs than this—but because it’s so clear that it didn’t need to be this long. Because I just played a version of this game that covered the same amount of story in 15 hours, and in many ways I think it told that story better.

Stray observations

• I still can't believe that they wasted the perfect title for part 3 by choosing to call the Crisis Core remake Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion. Why would you do that. What the hell are they going to call the final part of the trilogy where The Reunion happens now
• I can't decide if I'm annoyed by the way every time you run through a town (or especially any building interior) you party members will constantly knock over a bunch of chairs and other props and make a big racket, or if this is so stupid that it wraps around to being funny.
• I almost lost like two hours of progress due to selecting “retry from checkpoint” on a game over screen at one point instead of “retry from last battle.” Thankfully I was able to quickly reload an autosave and get back to where I was, but if I really had to redo the whole Cosmo Canyon chapter I may very well have dropped the game for good then and there.
• We really are getting three whole games capped off with Epic Sephiroth Battles, aren't we? I allowed it in Remake because we had no idea if the other parts would get canceled, and it would've been a shame if we never got a Sephiroth fight set to One-Winged Angel in this battle system. It also helped sell the idea that the story was diverging, and they were never gonna let the Motor Ball on the highway be the final boss. Now, though, it just feels like fighting him multiple times along the journey undercuts how climactic finally facing him felt in the original.
• I struggle to care about Zack as some kind of optimistic beacon of hope when his whole story is that he was the guy who was like "yeah being a SOLDIER is awesome!" and then Shinra got him to do a bunch of horrible shit and killed him and left him dead in a ditch. I'll always have some fondness for Crisis Core since it was actually my first exposure to FF7 growing up aside from internet osmosis, but Crisis Core was a mistake.
• I do not have it in me to dissect the changes to the lore for the Gi, who are now alien refugees who came to Gaia and then their spirits couldn't join the Lifestream when they died so they created the Black Materia to blow up the planet and end their suffering, and what this means for their relationship with the Cetra. There are some pretty bad ways you can read it that make the Cetra look like assholes. I am simply too exhausted to think about it that hard.
• The Shinra plant living in Cloud's house from the Nibelheim cat quest is played by Cindy Robinson, so she just sounds like a middle aged Amy Rose.
• Glenn. Fucking Glenn. The black robe guy haunting Rufus who brings up some shit about Wutai that'll probably be relevant in part 3. To have context for who the hell this guy is you have to have played a mobile game. Also he has spiky blonde hair, so there's a nonzero chance he's Cloud's dad. We'll have to wait and see, I guess. I am braced for Wutai to be very stupid either way, though.
• I'm glad Nanaki gets to ride a Chocobo
• How did they fuck up the lighting in the Fort Condor minigame so bad that low-poly Barret looks white
• Does Chadley being a silver-haired creation of Hojo's make him Sephiroth's half-brother, in a way? Is he going to be the secret superboss in part 3?
• Bow wow wow