Do not start the Final Fantasy VII experience with Rebirth

The Story of Final Fantasy VII: Reinterpreting the Tomb-Rader to FF7 with Experiment and a Game Interpreter

Final Fantasy VII is an important evolution for the franchise. It manages to be both modern and old fashioned while sticking to its 32-bit roots. It is not a good place to begin the multipart story for Final Fantasy VII, despite what its creators might say.

“By implementing these changes,” Hamaguchi says, “we bring about this new sense of wonder and excitement and anxiety in a positive sense that I believe is key to a work of entertainment.”

The second point was to recognize that FF7’s story had to be changed and to figure out how to implement it effectively. Hamaguchi and Kitase worked to create a sort of guessing game with Rebirth, designed to keep players on their toes.

Modern reinterpretations of classic games is not a new trend, but it is different because it falls between a refreshed current-gen version and a complete remake of the Tomb Raider trilogy.

“So much more detail is possible in what we’re able to portray and express in much of these scenes,” Hamaguchi says through an interpreter. We can show some of the things that the original creators intended to but could not with the technology at the time.

Zack’s resurrection isn’t a problem for the players of Final Fantasy 7, but it’s going to get better at it

But Kitase says Zack’s resurrection wasn’t done in response to his popularity but because bringing in characters from across the FF7 universe, popular or obscure, was always the plan.

​​In my years of loyal service to the Final Fantasy series, I’ve kept abreast of most of FF7’s lore spread across multiple spinoff games that either star or feature music from one of my favorite J-rock artists. And the one defining throughline is that it can get pretty confusing.

This wasn’t too much of a problem in Remake, but things get a lot more complex as Rebirth starts. I wondered if introducing copies of Cloud and Aerith would mess with the already complicated story for players who didn’t go through a Gackt phase.

Hamaguchi didn’t promise that the story would be too long to follow, but said you wouldn’t require my level of FF7 lore understanding to follow along.

“There’s nothing that [a player] wouldn’t understand because they haven’t played the spinoff titles,” he says. Everything you need to know will be addressed in Rebirth.

Some sections were too departure from the original and that was one of the major criticisms. Moments like Remake’s Wall Market section, which once represented 20 minutes to an hour’s worth of gameplay, spiraled out into hourslong slogs that unnecessarily padded relatively inconsequential sections of the game.

Hamaguchi admits that it wasn’t the side stories themselves that were the issue, but that players couldn’t decide whether to pursue them. I felt touched by the tragic history of one of Don Corneo’s men, but didn’t want to go through a sewer dungeon to hear it. There are a number of ways to catch ghosts, or find a lost wallet.

Those sorts of side stories shouldn’t be as disruptive as they were in ReMake, says Hamaguchi. “For Rebirth, the volume of side contents is quite massive,” he says. The players are now able to choose when they play side contents.

Some of the “side content” you can choose from is well worth the detour. The protorelic quests — a series of treasure hunting quests in search of a collection of mysterious artifacts — in particular surprised me with all the different activities you participate in. There is a group of criminals in the grassland area. In Corel, to win the protorelic housed there, you fight waves of cactuar to rack up points; while in Junon, Cloud and the gang are returned into their polygonal forms from 1997 to play the Fort Condor tower defense mini-game.

On a purely technical level, you can play Rebirth first. In a way, the game stands alone, telling a story of a group of friends heading out into the big wide world to chase down a villain intent on destroying it. There is a recap video which you can watch before playing to catch up on what happened. The new games, Rebirth in particular, also do a great job of expanding on and clarifying the convoluted story of the original, which — despite its length — felt lacking in a lot of areas.

The first chapter would make things worse because they are still pretty complex. So while you could start with Rebirth, the experience would probably be a lot like when I jumped into Kingdom Hearts with the third one — which is to say, confusing as hell.

There is an emotional and catastrophic side. This franchise has a lot of appeal because of its characters, as well as the new system where you can track how someone feels about Cloud through conversations and optional side missions. If you skip out on Remake, you’ll be missing a whole lot of context covering the often complicated history between characters and why you’d want to connect with them at all. On a date with Tifa, you have to experience what they went through together.

I can not tell you what to do. But if you really want to get the most out of this collection of games, it’s best to start at the beginning. If you want to experience all of what Final Fantasy VII has to offer, you should first play the original. That’s because not only do the remakes expand the story but they also change things in notable ways, and understanding those changes can be powerful.

Yes, that means a lot of hours spent fighting monsters and fiddling with Materia. (Hey, at least I’m not saying you should watch Advent Children.) But the franchise also gets very meta in pivotal moments, using ingrained memories of the original to subvert player expectations. I am not going to say nothing about the end of Rebirth, because… it is one of the most pronounced. Go play the original in order to understand it.