I had to two main gripes with Final Fantasy VII: Remake. The first one was the it wasn’t a remake of the original, but a sequel, marketed as a ‘remake’ of the legendary title. The second, that Nomura’s nonsensical approach to story telling had turned Final Fantasy VII’s original Sci-Fi/Fantasy tour de force into a bizarre sequence of events worthy of Nomura’s Kingdom Hearts’ reputation for absurdity.
Still, despite all of that, Remake did a faithful job in recreating some iconic moments, and translating Nobuo Uematsu’s ageless score into a powerful nostalgic soundtrack presented in full orchestrated glory. It was hard for me to completely dislike the game, given the nostalgic vibes that the game produced for me.
For Better or Worse…Final Fantasy VII: Remake is an Official Sequel to the Original Game
FFVIIR’s ending completely deviated from the original game’s ending of the Midgar section. Rebirth further embraces its role as a sequel. Despite my initial misgivings, in my opinion, this (the decision to go full blown sequel) is a good thing.
Old school fans of the original game should no longer fear that Nomura will ruin the original cannon, because Remake is a sequel, and the original game still stands alone within its own epic storyline. Nomura can still ruin the overall Final Fantasy VII universe, but at this point, Rebirth should be an interesting game for fans old time fans, if only because there is hope that Aeris/Aerith can be saved!
Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, at least according to the trailer, will have players visiting familiar territory in Unreal Engine 4 visuals (more on the engine below), while following an altered storyline given that key characters have knowledge of the events that took place in the original game’s timeline, and our cast already experienced an epic showdown against Sephiroth in Midgar.
It will be interesting to see where the story goes from here, and how Zack Fair (who apparently survives in what seems to be a 3rd timeline) plays into the entire – increasingly convoluted – tale.
Impressive Visuals?
Well, if you have payed Naughty Dog’s and Guerrilla’s latest games, then FFVII: Rebirth isn’t going to wow you. It is a game running on Unreal Engine 4, as opposed to Unreal Engine 5, and despite being a PS5 exclusive game, it doesn’t look as good some of the cross-gen work from Sony’s western studios.
That said, JRPG fans are used to “behind the times” visuals on their games, and Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth is certainly an impressive looking game within the scope of Japanese made RPGs.
Watching glimpses of Nibelheim, and Junon in the trailer is certainly a powerful, and exciting experience. Even if FFVII: Rebirth is not up to the task of matching Forbidden West in terms of visuals, the game certainly nailed down the artwork and design part of Final Fantasy VII, perfectly. The CG scenes in FFVII: Rebirth are some of the most impressive rendering work that Square Enix has ever made, and the in-game character models look fantastic as well.
The New Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth Trailer Actually Has Me Excited for the Game
I am still angry that the (Compilation of) Final Fantasy VII expanded universe has taken the aforementioned title into the realm of the absurd. Still, even an old head like me, who holds the original game on top of a high pedestal with religious reverence, is tempted by Rebirth’s modernization of Final Fantasy VII’s visuals, updated music, and iconic characters.
I have to admit, going for the sequel angle instead of going for the remake that everyone wanted might have been for the best. Nomura can no longer ruin the original, and at least, old school fans like me can enjoy Square Enix’s own official fan fiction of the game, and some unpredictable possibilities for our beloved characters.
By defeating the arbiters of fate, our heroes gave themselves a new opportunity at changing their destinies. We shall see in 2024 if the wait for episode two (in this saga) was worth it.
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This page has some incorrect information.
The game is not verified to be running on Unreal Engine 4 nor 5. We don’t know yet. What we do know is that UE4 was severely holding episode 1 back and causing severe technical woes on both the console and PC versions of the game and a big part of their jump to PS5 exclusivity was precisely because of technical issues with PS4 being supported as well. This lends a reasonable chance it will be built upon Unreal Engine 5, but again, we don’t actually know for sure if they made this jump or stayed on Unreal Engine 4. This article shouldn’t have incorrectly claimed UE4 , especially absent of any source or evidence beyond some questionable if not inaccurate judgement of its visuals.
The game’s open world actually looks better than Horizon Forbidden West and you’re overlooking critical details.
1. Horizon Forbidden West uses an incredible amount of repeated assets and just makes it look flush with dense spamming of textured grass and low quality trees/brush being everywhere. It has a bit more variety of plant life compared to the first game which was e specially bad with regards to this but it isn’t nearly as asset rich as Final Fantasy VII Rebirth shows in its limited trailer nor are the assets often as good as what we see in the still unrelated Rebirth’s trailer compared to Horizon Forbidden West which is a fully released game. This is further proven by the fact that we already have a rough idea of Rebirth’s install size from info shared and it dwarfs Horizon Forbidden West’s landing at an approximate 150 GB up to 500 GB due to use of two 100 GB Blu-Ray discs confirmed of which is likely using PS5’s newer compression tech to get a ratio of up to potentially 60% reduction due to compression.
2. Horizon has extremely limited enemy variety and character variety as well as quality while Rebirth’s are almost certainly richer, as it is open world unlike episode 1 than the first episode which already beat Horizon.
3. There is a high probability you are basing your judgement also on the original trailer released which had extremely low quality per Square Enix’ usual failure to provide quality resolution trailers often landing regularly at 480p~720p.
4. I think your judgement, no offense, is skewed due to your personal flair for specific types of views as you even compared Horizon to Red Dead Redemption II which actually doesn’t look nearly as good (not even close) compared to either of these two games.
I think the rest of your article is fine, though.
I have to disagree as RDR2 looks much better imo, especially in 4k and I prefer the animations and character models from Advent Children. Not sure how you can argue that a company that provides 480p to 720p trailers for a hundred million dollar release has better textures. That’s a really big culture problem. Have you played episode 1? They have non-HD textures in the game on PS5 which is a combination of poor QA, laziness and not using 8k textures base which modern games all have to do now, for a few years tbh, to be AAA. Just read an article that says Japan needs 100k new programmers this year and can’t find them. Major brain drain is killing FF and JRPGs.
Even Elden Ring has 720p textures on my 4k XSX that look jarring in gameplay. Elden Ring is clearly a 4k port of the 720p Dark Souls engine from the 360 and PS3. Maybe you need glasses or should play a game like Metro Exodus. FF16 and Eldren Ring are basically 8 years behind AAA games in the graphics department and it’s so bad, Japan is trying to import skilled game makers because SE is such a shit show with literal 10+ year project windows like FF15 which was originally made in their engine then ported to an old Unreal engine just to get it out the door. (Google it.) With an XSX or PS5 on a nice, new TV, you can literally see all the errors in FF16, Elden Ring, etc. and it looks a little silly with the lighting, which looks 15 years old now.
It’s a bit unfair to compare to TLOU, one of the best looking games of all time, Horizon however is pretty mediocre other than the cutscenes.