Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Embodies the Ballooning, Unsustainable Trajectory of AAA Games
You might be tired of hearing this by now if you follow videogames closely, but the game industry is not doing well at the moment. Every month, we reach a grim new milestone for the number of developers laid off so far this year; the current total is well over 11,000, which already eclipses last year’s similarly disastrous count of around 10,000.
There are plenty of explanations for why this is happening. One factor is that during the COVID-19 lockdown, there was a brief spike in gaming revenue that led to a hiring spree, only for sales to come back down shortly after. Interest rates are also high, making it difficult to convince investors to finance new games.
Of course, this is only part of the situation, and there’s also a more evergreen explanation: our current economic system largely only works for those at the top. A good case study here is what recently happened with Bungie, the legendary studio behind Marathon, Halo, and Destiny, who just laid off over 200 employees despite the critical success of Destiny’s latest expansion. Their CEO, Pete Parsons, who spent millions on a vintage car collection over the last few years, failed to take any form of accountability, like a pay cut, despite being the individual most directly responsible.
Another issue for big-budget games, and basically every other form of blockbuster entertainment, is that they’re financed based on the whims of C-suite executives who largely only care about profits going up dramatically. Yes, this is how businesses work, but it’s a dynamic in conflict with making interesting art. These expensive games are beholden to whatever trends are in vogue at the moment, such as how every other open world game has adopted the hallmarks of Ubisoft’s successful Assassin’s Creed series or that we still have waves of hero shooters chasing Overwatch’s largely evaporated success. Fundamentally, AAAs are bound to the economic system in which they’re made, one where every big new game needs to be a home run swing that’s larger and more expensive than the last so that they draw in a greater number of players (even if this isn’t how it actually works), all to appease shareholders chasing the phantom of exponentially increasing profits.
To make these bigger and bigger games, budgets have ballooned, as evidenced by how Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 cost a whopping $300 million, triple the cost of its predecessor. With these massive price tags, an already volatile industry becomes even more unstable, and many AAAs need to sell several million units to break even. As a result, big-budget titles are coming out less frequently, and when they do, they tend to fall into a small group of market-tested templates.
These games keep growing in scope, but ironically, their increased size limits what they can actually be. We’ve reached the point where an alarming percentage of celebrated AAA releases aren’t even sequels; they’re remakes of things we’ve already played. Plenty of these are great (the Resident Evil 2 and 4 remakes are excellent, for instance), but even compared to ten years ago, it feels like possibility spaces are rapidly collapsing for this scale of experience as publishers collectively hit the panic button to bring back beloved older works instead of making new ones.
When the Final Fantasy VII remake project was announced, many fans were ecstatic. Its importance to videogame history is well documented, and whether it’s the memorable cast of characters, incredible soundtrack, anti-capitalist themes, impressive visual framing, or unforgettable moments, it’s near and dear to many (including yours truly). Having played it for the first time recently, it holds up remarkably well thanks to the strong imagery presented by its fixed camera angles and how it successfully portrays our loveable band of eco-terrorists battling a looming corporate menace. While the game’s many spin-offs miss the mark on what made the original so special, its legacy endures regardless.
Given this mythic status, it almost makes sense why Square Enix decided to turn this PS1 game from 1997 into not one, but three games, a sprawling trilogy where each individual entry is as long or longer than the original (presumably anyway, the third installment isn’t out yet)—how else could you come close to matching the impact of this titan? While the first chapter, 2020’s Remake, stretches the introductory segment of the story to its extremes, it still embodies much of what’s great about this approach, and 2024’s second installment, Rebirth, carries on many of these boons.
As for Rebirth, one of its best qualities is how its many additions bolster the central cast, using its rewritten script, voice acting, and abundance of new scenes to justify the remake treatment. My biggest problem with the original is that although its characters are interesting and have compelling arcs, the dialogue itself is frequently clunky and awkward, sometimes failing to elegantly communicate the game’s ideas (many have blamed this on a stiff English language translation over the years, but I can’t personally say for sure). By contrast, the banter here is bouncy and playful, fleshing out the relationships between this party as we prod deeper into these characters. Probably the best example is how Tifa and Aerith are portrayed as having a much closer friendship, and whether it’s their hangout session at Costa Del Sol or constant quips and inside jokes, the bond between them is a highlight in a game that excels at this kind of writing.
This middle stretch of the story is fundamentally a road trip tale, and they nail the most crucial element here: it’s simply fun to hang out with this crew. The convincing performances (Britt Baron’s empathetic take on Tifa is probably my favorite of the bunch) and general warmth between our scrappy band make it so that even when the overarching plot is stretched thin (more on that later), it’s still a joy to make it to the next pitstop.
As for how each of these locations is expanded, the additional time spent in many of these places helps strengthen the narrative’s themes, particularly around how Shinra has wronged and exploited these communities in pursuit of profit. We learn how the company dismantled the Republic of Junon, leaving its citizens disenfranchised and under the boot heel of natural resource-guzzling sociopaths. We meet protestors, talk with fellow organizers, and find allies in anti-Shinra strongholds like Fort Condor. And at the same time, we also see the opposite: people who have given in to the influence of capital and view any who disturb “progress” as “terrorists.”
The time spent in these places overlaps with the backstories of the main cast, such as when we see how Shinra leveled Barett’s working-class hometown, a sequence rendered in all its melodramatic glory by John Eric Bentley. All these asides culminate in a late-game moment where nearly every member of the main cast is transported back into a defining, traumatic moment caused by Shinra, each sequence landing thanks to how well Rebirth has built up this crew and the company that wronged them. While this lavish presentation comes with downsides, namely that it exchanges some of the original’s quiet, contemplative qualities for blockbuster film presentation, many of these moments are bolstered by strong voice acting and writing, which gives these scenes their own strengths.
And beyond making its world feel convincing, the game also takes this exhaustive approach to its battles, resulting in one of the best hybrids of action gameplay and turn-based RPGs I’ve played. There’s an alarming number of unique creatures stuffed in here, each with their own attack patterns and vulnerabilities. These little particulars matter because you can stagger enemies and deal big damage by targeting their weaknesses, something you’ll certainly want to do during tricky boss fights. On top of this, every playable character has their own moves, each with particular uses, and Rebirth adds new mechanics like Synergy Skills and Abilities that grant different techniques based on your team composition.
Your characters have well-defined roles, and whether it’s Tifa’s proficiency at blowing up bosses by increasing stagger damage, Aerith’s mastery of magic, or Yuffie’s dynamic style, the characters feel substantially different and are each fun to use. This variety fixes a problem from the original, where your party members felt somewhat interchangeable because they could be slotted with the same abilities. There’s a lot going on here, but these particulars create a tactical richness that harkens back to the turn-based combat of the original while adding its own twists. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine they could bring to life the enemy variety and complexity that helps make it all work without the big budget (at least while maintaining this level of graphical fidelity).
But while Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s indulgences set up exciting battles and provide additional room to flesh out its characters, eventually, it begins to feel like the sheer enormity of the game’s scope was a mistake. Even after taking a relatively “balanced” approach in my playthrough where I avoided the deep, dark urge to 100% every area, I spent around 90 hours on it, which would be fine if a substantial chunk of this didn’t feel tedious. The main problem here is how the game handles the overworld; when you leave Midgar in the original, the perspective zooms out, and a little chibi Cloud roams around until you reach the next major destination. These open fields and mountains in between towns were more of a sketch than a detailed landscape, allowing the game to put more emphasis on its more hand-crafted areas.
By contrast, the open world in Rebirth is presented like most modern games, as continuous and connected to hub areas, and while the map isn’t entirely linked, each open world is quite large. On its face, this sounds exciting. In reality though, it’s filled with repetitive, uninteresting objectives and a million towers you need to climb, drawing from Ubisoft’s tired open world formula. There isn’t any mystery or wonder when exploring this space, as you’re usually just following a map marker that leads to a similar objective you’ve seen several times already. Even worse is how all this side content is tied together by a figure more feared than Sephiroth himself: Chadley. This Shinra-created cyborg is well-meaning, but man, he truly cannot stop talking. After completing objectives and seeing an overlong animation showing that your “World Intel” points went up, Chadley will prattle about things you probably don’t care about.
Given how much work was put into Rebirth’s other elements, like its cutscenes or combat, I understand why the open world is filled with so much recycled material. Instead, though, I wish they had delivered a much smaller space designed around unique situations (you know, like in the original or even Remake) instead of blowing up the scope of the setting to such titanic proportions. It would have benefited the experience if they kept chibi Cloud and the abstracted overworld, allowing it to zoom in on the areas worth seeing instead of making us wade through uninteresting minutiae.
Further filling the space are way too many mini-games, a good number of which feel like they were designed in a lab to inflict maximum psychic torment. While there are some gems here, such as the excellent card game Queen’s Blood, there are many more frustrating, weirdly difficult detours (why is the end of Fort Condor like that?), some of which you must engage with to push the story forward. The side missions are similarly all over the place, and unfortunately for me, some are good and interesting, meaning I couldn’t just ignore them. I knew I was doomed to complete most of these, many of which contain good story bits but aren’t very fun to play, after one included an adorable aside about Barrett contending with his daughter growing up.
Yes, much of this torment was self-inflicted, as you obviously don’t have to do much of what’s here, but the game clearly wants you to; you get rewards, like unique materia (these are used to perform actions in combat) for completing these objectives, and Chadley literally shames you when you neglect these chores. Even if you only engage with some of this stuff, it drags down the narrative’s already lackadaisical pacing. Every few chapters, you find yourself in a new open world area, each threatening to send you down a rabbit hole.
Then there’s the overarching story. Although I enjoyed most of this journey, even during its best parts, I couldn’t help but question the decision to split this single tale across three expansive videogames, especially as things went off the rails in the last act. For the second time now, they’ve built towards a false climax that lacks real catharsis—two times now, we’ve fought Sephiroth and sort of saved the world, likely undermining the true finale while introducing a lot of convoluted nonsense to justify it.
And although I’ll admit that I was initially optimistic about the fate-shattering, metatextual turns introduced in Remake, it’s become clear these elements are actually here to deliver one of the most hackneyed, fan-service-oriented tropes in modern pop culture: multiverse shenanigans. Rebirth’s head-scratching last few scenes burned through my goodwill with convoluted delivery and uninteresting twists that left me detached from what was on-screen. By the final shot, Cloud was basically right where he started the game emotionally (after all, his big story-defining turn from the original hasn’t happened yet), while they completely botched this rendition of the most talked-about twist in videogame history.
By themselves, many of the decisions made in Rebirth’s denouement seem like they can be chalked up to commonplace lousy writing, but they all stem from challenges introduced by breaking a single game into three massive AAA releases. Stories frequently have a rising and falling action, a three-act structure that builds, climaxes, and resolves as our protagonist faces their foe and the ideas they represent. It’s kind of hard for this trilogy to successfully do that when it’s splitting a single work into three parts, and the attempts to simulate this structure without meaningfully changing a lot of the underlying plot beats results in a lot of big fights with Sephiroth that feel narratively inconsequential despite their visual grandeur.
On top of this, the remake trilogy faces a central problem: how do you make a game about the literal destruction of the planet even more monumental, with even higher stakes? The “solution” is to have the story not only be about the end of this particular reality but other ones as well—multiverse stuff. The execution of this premise is not only convoluted but robs the story of much of its impact; who cares if “our” Barrett or Tifa dies if there are countless others?
The Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy has a lot of weight to bear. It’s a follow-up to a game that made great use of its early polygonal graphics, fixed camera angles, and rudimentary cutscenes, as it delivered one of the most iconic backdrops the medium has seen. You can see how a publisher would be tempted to “improve” this setting with cutting-edge modern graphics and design, hoping to recapture the breakaway success of what came before. But did it really need to be three games instead of one, each so large they take nearly half a decade to create?
While some of the decisions around the project, like it being a trilogy, seem uniquely hubristic and greedy at first glance, in reality, it’s a perfect embodiment of where the industry has gone during the last decade. For instance, this isn’t a new game, it’s a remake of a beloved one from the ‘90s. While the original was already a beefy, 50-hour experience, these reimaginings need to be longer, bigger, and “better,” rendered with absurdly labor-intensive detail. Its open world borrows from many other modern games in this style, which prioritize throwing “content” at the player to increase its playtime, regardless of how interesting much of that actually is. It is undeniably larger than the original in almost every way and was made by more people for way more money.
But much like the world it depicts, one rushing towards disaster, this doesn’t feel sustainable. Game budgets have ballooned drastically due to the endless push for increasingly realistic graphics and bigger environments. This higher cost has put additional pressure on new AAAs to not just be a modest success but a blockbuster, or jobs are on the line. Despite the arms race among publishers to put out a “AAAA” game, at a certain point, the many hours that go into making a tree slightly more realistic just aren’t worth it; a good chunk of people simply don’t care that much. Nowadays, many of the most successful are made by smaller teams who sidestep this rat race entirely because many players are looking for something entirely different than what’s found in the most graphically impressive, expensively made new products. Although games at a smaller scope have plenty of development problems, and certain sub-genres are overrepresented, it still feels like a space where developers are afforded to do weird things.
But despite this, because the financial world only cares about big swings that not only make profits go up, but make them increase dramatically, these games continue to grow in scope, even if this isn’t beneficial creatively. There’s a lot to love about Rebirth: its main cast and the performances that bring them to life are brilliant, its battles are tactically rich, and it exudes humor and charm. It was clearly made by people who deeply care about this setting and these characters, and this effort shows.
But as the remake project continues, the decision to split this work into three games seems to have not only potentially backfired on a business level (this middle chapter’s sales have seemingly underperformed) but narratively as well. Final Fantasy VII ends on a grandiose, unforgettable note as our characters stare down the end of the world. It doesn’t get bigger than that, and despite Rebirth’s increased graphical fidelity and development costs, its attempts to raise the stakes fall flat.
Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.