When the original Final Fantasy 7 was released on the PlayStation 1 in the UK I was 8 years old and I remember having to wait for my dad to finish it before I was allowed to play it. I got to watch some parts of his playthrough but the wait to play it myself was agonising. When I finally did get my hands on it though, it was worth the wait and was a formative experience for me. Even though 7 isn’t my favourite of the series, it is one of the best games I have ever played, even now in my mid 30s, and when Square Enix showed what a remake of its most iconic title could look like on PlayStation 3 as part of a tech demo my imagination went wild.
When that tech demo became a reality with 2020s Final Fantasy remake I loved it despite its somewhat divisive take on what a remake was and when the second part of the trilogy called Rebirth came out in February 2024 I knew I had to earn its Platinum Trophy but boy oh boy I did not expect it to be such a long journey to get it. So let’s have a look at what Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has in store for a trophy hunter.
As you would expect from a large-budget Playstation 5 exclusive title, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is a gorgeous game. The character models, which were already impressive in Remake have all been improved upon, and the world itself is beautiful and full of details as you run through it. The areas are diverse and full of unique and interesting landmarks and ecologies, and none of them felt boring or bland to look at. I played on performance mode for the entirety of my run but even sacrificing some of the visual quality to hit a consistent 60fps the game was still able to stop me in my tracks to look at some vista or detail for a moment. There are some moments where some of the details looked a little fuzzy, and I did notice some missing textures or pop-ins, especially towards the later half of the game but for the most part, Rebirth looked amazing and keeps up the Final Fantasy series trend for pushing graphical quality higher and higher.
Perhaps, even more impressive than the visual quality of the game, is the audio that accompanies Cloud and his crew around. I loved the soundtrack to this game so much. There are some incredible re-arrangements of classics like Ahead on our Way, and Cosmo Canyon, but there are also some amazing new tracks to go along with them like Stamps theme which plays in a couple of sidequests. Each of the regions you travel to has its own main theme, as does each dungeon, and each track has a travel version and a more punchy combat version that always kicks in so flawlessly when the combat starts. It’s amazing just how many different tracks there are, and I’m sure I had heard at least three different battle themes in the Grasslands area alone. A good soundtrack is something that I consider crucial to a good video game, and Square Enix almost always knocks it out of the park with these and I can’t wait to listen to this soundtrack as much as I listen to the originals or Remakes.
When Remake came out in 2020, I was impressed by the boldness the team took in the way they chose to remake the original, not only graphically but in gameplay and narrative too, adding wholly new elements to keep players on their toes. In 2024 I am stunned by the brave decision to remake Final Fantasy 7 as a WarioWare or Mario Party game or at least a Yakuza inspired one. The amount of side content is astounding if I’m honest and not just in the way of side quests or combat challenges like Remake, but in sheer minigame volume. All of the classics from the original are here, Chocobo Racing, G-Bike, the 3D Brawler, all improved to an insane degree, with Chocobo racing being a brilliant Mario-Kart-inspired affair. But on top of that, there are a bonanza of new additions of varying quality and fun. There’s a football minigame where you play as Red XIII against other random animals, there is a game where you beat up cactuars with Yuffie or Aerith, theres a carnival shooting game, there is a fall guys inspired minigame where you are a frog trying to stay on a platform, theres even a minigame for picking mushrooms. There is Queen’s Blood, which is the coolest side content Card Game since the Witcher’s Gwent, and I swear Square Enix you need to make an app version of Queen’s Blood you will make so much money.
The strangest thing is the decision to make many of these mini-games not optional. Square Enix seemed so proud of their insane collection of diversions that the story often stops to ask you to do something weird and wacky like ride a dolphin through a race course, or sneak up on an unsuspecting chocobo to progress through the main scenario. All of this feels right though, the original game had these moments too, and it’s a huge part of why it’s considered such a classic.
This is all before we even get to the more traditional side content that open-world games have. Each region has World Intel that you must collect for lovable robot boy Chadley, which includes Climbing and activating towers, scanning crystalised lifestream shards and completing combat encounters with specific goals, like staggering an enemy or killing it before it uses a certain attack. When you are doing a completionist playthrough, all of these add up to a staggering amount of content that the main quest can sometimes feel like the side content that you do in between clearing out the map.
That isn’t to say the main scenario is bad, or lesser in any way. It’s actually the opposite, the main story is brilliant, but I want to avoid spoilers so I will not go into too much detail on it. Seeing so many moments from the original but with the graphical power of modern tech never fails to amaze me. The story being told follows the same pattern as Remake did, with the bones of the story being mostly the same as the original, but everything is more fleshed out. Every one of the main party is more, realised and more personal, and a huge part of that is the way the actors portray the characters. It makes the events they go through hit even harder this time around as the game makes everyone so damn likable. I didn’t really care too much about Aerith in the original game, and I didn’t like Yuffie at all, but in Rebirth I love them. Yuffie is one of my favourite characters now, partly because she kicks all kinds of arse in combat but mostly because she is played so well in the game.
One of the things I really loved about this game is how funny it is, and how earnest the characters are. Rebirth is almost constantly throwing something ridiculous at you, just the same as the original did, to the point where it seems to be able to laugh at itself just as much as it laughs at the characters. Not many games pull off varying so wildly between emotional themes of trauma and losing yourself to now we are going to race chocobos without losing the narrative thread completely but FF7 managed it so well, and Rebirth perfects this.
There are so many little elements of extra character building, and one of the game’s greatest ideas was not separating the party when travelling very often. Even if you only control three people in battle, your other companions are always close, so there is usually some background chatter as you travel, and it makes the group feel a whole lot closer than was possible to portray before. Other parts of the story and world have been expanded in the same way too. Areas like the Mythril Mines, which was an area made of maybe four screens in the original is now a whole explorable area that takes like an hour to get through. Gongaga is not just a town and reactor, it’s a whole jungle now. The lifestream crystals you scan for Chadley give lore about the world and its history, and each region has shrines to Summons that as you explore you will sometimes get bits of myth about the Summons that were worshipped in the area. It’s things like this that I think really highlight why I enjoyed the time I spent with the game so much, its everything I loved about the original and Remake part 1 just, theres more.
This goes for the combat too, which makes up a large part of the game. The main system returns from the remake, you hit things with quicker, weaker attacks to build up ATB, and then you spend that ATB to unleash more powerful attacks, or spells, but now there is more focus on party tactics. Each party member can unlock synergy skills and abilities, skills are no cost abilities that you can access while blocking and have a range of effects like, performing a counter, or guarding two characters at once from damage or charging up a big powerful true charge slash from Cloud. These seemed less useful to me in my initial normal difficulty run, and I hardly used them, but in Hard Mode these can be incredibly useful in certain fights, and one fight in particular I died on like 8 times before I realised I had a synergy skill to make it easier. The Synergy Abilities on the other hand, I use all the time. These have a cost, called Synergy, that you earn by using certain ATB commands. Once you have used enough ATB with two characters they can unleash a synergy attack, which will do a ton of damage but also have a secondary effect, like raising your Limit Break level, allowing you to use a stronger Limit Break, or granting you a small window where Spells cost 0MP to use.
Learning how to use these skills and abilities, as well as creating a good build with the Materia you can obtain is crucial, as in general Rebirth is a fair bit harder than Remake was, even on standard difficulty. The combat challenges you have to do if you are going for the Platinum trophy are incredibly difficult and some of them took me three or four evenings of attempts before I was able to beat them. Despite the difficulty though, combat is fun and engaging and it can be incredibly tactical on the harder difficulty not only with what skills you use in the battle, but with what materia you come equipped with, and what party you use to make the best use of their synergies.
This leads me to my only real gripe with the game, and that’s its Trophy List. There’s just too much. The game took me nearly 150 hours to finish my first playthrough. That was being as completionist as possible, getting every other trophy except the one for finishing the game on Hard. To do this, you have to do every single Chadley World Intel event, of which there are over 150. You have to do every single Side Quest, find every Materia, find and master every Weapon and defeat the game’s (admittedly very cool) superboss.
And this isn’t even the longest part, there is a trophy called 7-Star Hotel which requires you get the top score on every minigame on its normal and hard difficulties, including the ones that are story-related like the Junon Parade. It also asks you to do all of Chadley’s VR combats, including the Brutal and Legendary difficulty ones. There are 88 different things you will need to do for this trophy and it really does mean doing almost everything the game has to offer.
This trophy, thankfully does encompass most of the other trophies in the game, so you will be slowly unlocking them as you go but man at the end it did start to feel like a slog, and then at the end of all of that, you have to playthrough the game on Hard, which even having finished everything else, is still pretty challenging, even it feels kind of like a boss rush with being able to skip cutscenes and avoid most of the open world fights.
I will say this, and it will obviously vary from person to person but, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, might be one of the hardest Platinum’s I’ve earned. The last few VR challenges for Chadley were crazy hard, and sometimes felt unfair with how quickly you can get destroyed if your not careful, or learn those perfect parries and dodges. There are lots of videos out there that are super helpful with tips on how to get through them, but even having the right build, you still need to execute the strategy well, or you might find yourself on round 9/10 and dying to an unlucky combo, before having to start again.
The hard mode run itself is also really tough, not being able to use items, and not regenerating MP apart from at the end of chapters, makes a lot of the bosses incredibly tough, especially when you know its the first boss in a string of 3 or 4 in the same chapter. Unlike the VR challenges though, the difficulty in Hard mode always felt fair. Learning the moves, getting the right build together and practising them always felt rewarding when you finally did it.
Once you have done everything though, you will earn the Platinum Trophy “The Planet’s Hope” and congratulations if you do as this was a toughie. It took me 174 hours in total by the end of my run but it was a damn good run.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is going to live in my head for a while, as I wait for the conclusion to the Remake Trilogy, and even with some of the trophy frustration I felt in Rebirth, I don’t think I have ever been more excited for a game to come out. Rebirth is a game that literally tries to do it all, and it almost succeeds despite sometimes feeling a little bloated with side content. Despite this though, I would rather they carried on this trend in whatever Final Fantasy VII Re-third game ends up being called, than having to scale the game back and losing out on so much of the heart that Rebirth has. I can honestly say, at the end of the day FF7 Rebirth is everything I wanted a remake to be, and a whole lot more.
Leave a Reply