It’s a common refrain I’ve seen in reviews: unlike the kinda-on-rails roller coaster ride of Final Fantasy VII Remake, its sequel, Rebirth, feels like an oddly aimless walk in the woods by comparison. There’s a diversion around every corner: racing Chocobos in the Grasslands, perfecting our parading skills in Junon, tanning on the beach at Costa Del Sol, living it up at the Gold Saucer.
So many sidequests, so much random battlefield intel for Chadley. Not enough sticking it to Shinra, the evil corpogovernment that rules the world of FFVII. Not only does it feel weird to be fucking around at all the little pleasure centers in this rendition of Gaia, it feels wrong. We should be doing more, fighting back harder. The tone is off, the tempo is bad, everything is just… not right.
The sense that things aren’t right permeates FFVII Rebirth, of course. It’s a deviation from the path set forward in 1997. We get various Richard Kelly-style asides focused on an alive-and-breathing Zack Fair trying to nurse a comatose Cloud and Aerith back to life in a quickly-decomposing Midgar underplate Sector 5 while a tear in reality widens in the distance. We get Sephiroth appearing to Cloud telling him that things aren’t the way they should be constantly. Hell, even as we enter the various theme park villages and high-tech casinos, it’s hard for our heroes to not comment on how wrong everything feels: Nothing should be as it is. Everything is fucked up beyond normal fucked-up parameters. Why are we enjoying ourselves?
But I think the feeling we feel goes beyond the game. It lives in our playing as well. It feels wrong to be sinking a hundred hours into a game like this right now when shit’s burning down around us. Darkness is falling; we shouldn’t be on a road trip with our buds again.
Vestiges of Final Fantasy XV arise here in every small moment we share with our virtual friends, the incidental banter, the bonds we grow. And yes, it feels wrong to be reliving this kind of journey, this camping trip, when in the game and all around us so much seems to be at stake and no time must be lost, but people fall in love at the barricades all the time. What do you think Emma meant by “if I can’t dance, I don’t want any part in your revolution?”
It is not wrong to feel dissonance here, to play this series of distractions turned into a JRPG and say to yourself, “I don’t know if I should be doing this;” but it is just as important to acknowledge that you can give yourself permission to have fun here in this moment. We aren’t going to win through austerity, by depriving ourselves of sources of joy. There will be time for tragedies and heartbreak in equal measure. We can’t let that overwhelm us.
The planet’s dying. It’s up to us to save it. We are up to the task, but we have to be prepared for a long and circuitous journey. It may not always make sense. But if we trust in our friends and ourselves, if we keep a song in our hearts and a game in our sights, we can win.
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