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Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (PC) Review

I should preface this review by saying that while I didn’t max it out, I fully played Final Fantasy VII Rebirth on PS5 last year, and even had it as my overall number 5 pick for the best games I played. So, “Yes”, on its own, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is already a good game. Had I had the PC to play last year, it likely would have been higher. This is an almost pristine port with only two issues I’ve seen.
Without giving too much away, y’all know how this game starts out. While Remake was set entirely within Midgar, this game metaphorically has you opening the exit door from the city and hitting the road onto a whole new adventure. You go from region to region, as you try and chase down Sephiroth and stop his evil plans.
Unlike with Remake, you start your party off with five characters, which increases to seven playable characters eventually. The four originals from Remake, Cloud, Barrett, Aerith and Tifa largely play the same, though there are some tweaks to each one. The new characters of Red XIII, Yuffie and Cait Sith all have different combat mechanics to make them distinctive. And “Yes”, I do know that Yuffie was the playable character in Remake’s DLC, but it wasn’t part of the main game, so it doesn’t count.
There is a very formulaic way to how this game is structured that is both good and bad. The world is split up into seven different, distinct regions, but one practically doesn’t count. Within almost all regions are various sidequests and activities for you to do. Almost all regions have towers for you to find and activate, for example. Once turned on, these towers show the various side stuff you can do in the region. Basically, combat simulations, summon crystal finding, with Protorelic and Lifespring tracking down are in almost every region. This is really the bread & butter of the game.
Each “main” region though, also has bespoke content, in the form of sidequests from NPC’s, and specific minigames setups. For example, in the first region, Grasslands, the way you hunt down the Protorelic (MacGuffin) pieces is to chase down a group of dumb criminals, as they scurry away with it, like it’s a Scooby-Doo cartoon. However, in the Corel regions, you have to use a Cactaur statue to find Cactaur rock formations, and then do some battles against legions of Cactaur enemies.
These large region chapters are generally separated between smaller, more linear/concise story chapters. It also generally alternates, one will be a more free-roam chapter, and the next will be more story-focused that is linear. This is really the main crux of the game, and you’ll be going through the big areas, to the smaller story bits, as you proceed.
Put frankly, this is an amazing port of a PS5 game. I was already impressed with the port work that Square did with Final Fantasy XVI, and this one is even better. I had an almost flawless playthrough of Rebirth, with the game only minor (and I mean like 2 or 3) FPS dips, only occurring during the most busy sequences. I set the game to run at 90 FPS, and it might have only dipped like once or twice, total, so it practically doesn’t count.
The key words above though is “almost flawless” and that was my weird issue with it. When I first launched the game, it did a fairly long “building shaders” thing, which is fine. The menu popped up and it was no problem. I hit the start button and from the second I got into the first cut scene, all in-game audio was skipping every four seconds. Music, sound effects and voicework, were all doing this. I even had a fairly early FMV de-sync the audio and video, Barret’s mouth would be moving but the audio was slower than the game.
I busted the graphics mode to low, no fix. Set the FPS limit to 60, even 30, and no fix. Updated my video driver, no fix. I did notice though, that the start screen’s song actually played right, it was only once I got into the game did it start hiccupping. I also eventually noticed that it only happened when I had my PS5 controller plugged in from the time of starting the game. So, the way I weirdly fixed it, was to start the game, with a controller, get into the actual game, then plug a controller in. Once I did that, it was fine. And even after that, if I had the controller plugged in from boot up, it was fine. I went back and cranked up the video settings, and it still worked like normal, so maybe it was just a weird glitch with the controller’s audio part, interfering with the game.
The only other negative with Rebirth is that I really wish Square would include a benchmark mode. This game and FF 16 would really benefit from this, as you could fine tune your system and how you want it to run. Final Fantasy XV had its own separate benchmarking tool so I don’t know why the later games don’t include something similar. It would actually be helpful to test the various graphical options you have at your disposal.