The open experience in the story bleeds into the incredibly massive open world. My goodness there is a lot to do. There are a lot of entertaining side quests and impactful rewards aside from that are separate from the storyline. I felt like at every moment of me following the campaign, I was showered with opportunities to explore and grow my team and their builds. There is a great balance and enough of a tease to do other things in the world that players that want to take their time in the game will love the exploration while others that want to just play the story won’t be bombarded with random other things. I usually hate open world games, but Final Fantasy VII Rebirth not only got me excited to explore, but has got me the motivation to try other open world games.
Now, the game isn’t totally open all the time. I would say about 20-40% of the time you are locked into areas because of the story or mission happening at the moment, which makes sense…but also felt a bit too limiting. If I want to race chocobos, I want to race them whenever I want! This brings me to another small gripe, controlling other characters. Most of the time, the player will control Cloud as they explore the world, but players eventually get to roam around for a mission or two as other characters, using their abilities in the open world. This is awesome and a dream come true for some fans, but this time controlling other characters is locked to those missions. I wish, wish, WISH that we could switch between them all the time. This could’ve allowed the developers to put various hidden treasures and enemies behind different terrain and traversal that is used by other characters, like unlocking new abilities in a metroidvania that encourage exploration in past areas. But alas, I can’t complain too much, it is still fun to play with what we have in the game. Along with being locked into certain characters for certain times, players are also forced to complete a wide variety of mini-games and middling tasks time which felt more like a hang up on my progress than another new fun thing to do, but this only happened a handful of times. It makes sense to do this a couple of times to show players all of the offerings of the game, but these stretches of games and forced missions became a bit tedious at times. Not enough to be annoying, but enough to slow down the pacing of the game overall.
