There’s a section at the start ofFinal Fantasy 7 Rebirthwhere Cloud walks real slow. Like, hold down the bumper buttons to drag yourself along slow. It’s supposed to highlight the devastation and helplessness Cloud feels as his village, family, and way of life are destroyed by the man he idolises. It’s supposed to leave you feeling as weak and useless as Cloud did. But my overriding thought was that it went on a bit.
I know I should engage with the themes of the text! I get it. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is an emotional journey and four years on fromRemake, has to put us back in the mindset of witnessing the Sector 7 plate crash down. Speaking critically I think it’s an effective opening, even if all I really wanted to do was get back into actually playing the game. But while I can understand the reasoning behind the slowdown here, I’m not so forgiving the rest of the time.
Catching Chocobos And Hunting Bandits
I’m halfway through Chapter 4 of 14 and I’ve already had to put up with several stealth sections. These sections are auto-fail too, meaning you have no choice but to suffer through Cloud’s agonisingly slow creeping. These sections aren’t all that difficult, but they can still feel disruptive to your overall rhythm.
Do you remember in the olderAssassin’s Creedgames when they still kept up the premise that you were an assassin? They would say things like ‘complete the mission: kill that guy’ and ‘optional objective: don’t get spotted’. I don’t think I ever got the mission bonus for fulfilling all the optional objectives. Staying hidden is no fun when I can just run out and stab somebody.
Maybe that’s not fair. I enjoyed the slower, more meticulous Assassin’s Creed games a lot more. Though I admit to relying on a smoke bomb or four, skulking around trying to reach the target can be quite enjoyable. But that’s because the panic button was always there. If things went wrong, you were thrust into a fight for your life, and these were often some of the most entertaining sequences around. The fact the game reacts to your lack of stealth makes sneaking more rewarding, because you’re actively making life easier for yourself.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s Stealth Is Immersion Breaking
But in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, you don’t get to deal with the consequences - everything just restarts. One of these incidents was sneaking up on a chocobo, and was just teaching you the basics of stealth. That gets a pass. The second chocobo stealth section included coal carts you could move by throwing rocks, and at least that cuts through the overall dullness of the activity. Let’s call that a draw. But the bandit stealth section is an unnecessary agony.
In the Grasslands, you have a series of missions to track down the hapless bandits from Remake after they stole Chadley’s previous MacGuffin.Can’t do without that, ol’ Chadders. In one sequence, the bandits are roasting meat on a barbecue. Rather than just run up to them and slash them to ribbons with your trusty Buster, you need to skulk around their minions by rolling between gaps in shipping containers. If you’re spotted, they run away.
Chadley suggests you ‘lie in wait’, but rather than waiting in the gut you’re trying to reach, you instead just hold down the restart button and are back at the beginning of the course. It’s pretty short and, aside from Cloud’s rolling hitbox causing him to snag on the containers, not very difficult. But it is quite annoying, especially as the concentrated maps make tearing through all of the open world quests relatively breezy.
Stealth games are not my favourite genre to begin with, but at least those games have layered approaches to being silent but deadly. More action-oriented games like Final Fantasy just take stealth sections to mean ‘go slow for a bit’, and I hope these are front loaded rather than a constant nuisance in an otherwise stellar game.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
WHERE TO PLAY
Final Fantasy Rebirth is the second part of the FF7 Remake project. It continues the story of Cloud Strife, a former SOLDIER turned mercenary who joins Avalanche, a group of eco-terrorists seeking to save the planet from the malevolent Sephiroth. As the party pushes out of Midgar, leaving the Shinra Corporation devastated, where will their paths take them?
