Game:

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (2024)

Duration: 2:15:30

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This is FF7 Rebirth, the sequel to FF7 Remake.

I really, really enjoyed Remake when it came out. Beat it 3 times, even 100%'d it. At time of writing I'm not done with Rebirth, but I'm quite a ways in and so far the game has not disappointed from its predecessor. I love the combat and the polish that almost everything has. Rebirth is slightly less polished than Remake due to it having a lot more variety with open world sections to explore and not just being completely linear. But that also has the obvious pro of there being more game to play and more things to do. It feels like an appropriate improvement from the previous game, taking advantage of the fact the first game laid a lot of the ground work for them and giving us more actual game to play.

The game has a rather mystifying start where we play as Zack, a character who by all rights is supposed to be dead, witnessing events that didn't play out exactly as they did back at the end of Remake, where the party gets stopped before leaving Midgar and Shinra catches them. But after that 10 minute long intro sequence, we kick back off where the story ACTUALLY left off with the party having some back story explained by Cloud, with us actually playing through the flashback.

For the flashback, we start off playing as Cloud who is mostly the same as he was in the last game. Balanced and reliable. He can enter Punisher Mode to change out his balanced moveset for a counter-focused one that has less mobility but hits harder. His Punisher moveset has been changed, however. In Remake, it focused more on a single enemy with powerful swings. Now, it focuses more on crowd control, but the combo is longer to reach the high damaging finisher. I do kind of miss the old Punisher moveset, but the crowd control does give more utility for majority of the game. He, and every other character, can now also do Hold Square attacks where he'll perform a wide range attack in Operator and a heavy finisher attack in Punisher, so if the combo feels to long, you can end it faster with that.

In Remake, characters would auto-jump to enemies that were flying so your attacks could hit them. That doesn't happen in Rebirth, so to get Cloud to hit those enemies you have to do a dodge. After dodging, his Square attacks will change into faster sword swings that shoot off shockwaves. It took me a while to realize that was how that worked and utilize them properly, even though the game's tutorials do tell you.

After our first fight, we play as Sephiroth for a brief moment. And later when we make for the Mako Reactor, we'll get to play as him again. The game even automatically selects him as party leader so you don't have to keep switching to him. Because obviously you're going to want to play as Sephiroth the one time in the game you're able to. Sephiroth is basically a full fledged character with his own moveset, playstyle, limits, and whatnot. I was honestly still trying to get a feel for how to use him and remember how to actually play the game again by the time he leaves the party, but it's still really cool to get to play him. He's got a parry focused moveset, which are usually overpowered in action games, just really hard to master. And I suck at them lol.

1:25:20 - Materia Guardian - Here, we fight our first boss. The game tries to introduce Synergy attacks here, but I didn't really get how they worked until later after using them more. Basically, doing actions that drain the ATB gauge build up a Synergy bar. Once enough bars are filled for each character, they can use their Synergy Ability. It's a powerful and flashy co-op attack, basically a mini-limit break with some bonus effects that range from increasing the total ATB gauge to 3, increasing Limit Break level (which gives you access to Lv2 Limit Breaks), granting infinite MP temporarily, or just hitting hard and increasing enemy Stagger time. Synergy Abilities can only be done once per battle however.

You can also use Synergy Skill by holding R1 and pressing the face buttons. These vary depending on which two characters are in the party, but the X/O ones are always the same. For Cloud, that gives him Counterfire, which counters enemy projectile attacks and nullifies them. I don't use this near as much as I should, but it's really good because it works on a lot more than you think it would. Basically anything that isn't a melee attack you can assume it works on.

Alright, that's enough talking for one video description.

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