Final Fantasy 7 Rebirthbreaks one of the cardinal sins of game design: it has a section where it forces you to walk really slowly.
To be clear, games should be able to do whatever their creators want them to do. It’s a broad and expansive medium, requiring only some means for the player to interact and some kind of display to communicate progress. Take away the means of interaction, and you’ve just got a video, no game. Take away the display, and you’re just holding a controller. Besides that, I say, go hog wild.
Some angry gamers said thatGone Homewasn’t a game when it came out back in 2013 because you were just walking around a house, and the derisive term “walking simulator” was born. A decade on, though, Gone Home stands out as an important watermark in the medium, a moment when the developers at Fullbright questioned whether combat was necessary for a first-person game to be rewarding and interesting to play, and found that the answer was a resounding no.
So, though I defend the right of a video game to do and be things that are outside the norm, to use every tool in its arsenal to communicate its story, thereisone tool that I always hate seeing make an appearance. That tool is the forced slow walk.
This shows up often in video games when the developers want to communicate that your character is hurt, drugged, tired, drunk, dazed, or otherwise not fully in control of their faculties. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth uses this technique during a scene that was available as part of the demoSquare Enixmade available onPS5ahead of release. So, it isn’t much of a spoiler to say that, in that scene, Cloud is trying to make his way through a burning village, and moving slowly as he walks through fiery streets. The goal seems to be to conjure the feeling of being in a nightmare where something horrible is happening and you’re powerless to stop it.
I always find this trope annoying, because it takes games that otherwise feel good, and makes them feel bad on purpose. Aside from that personal grievance, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s take is basically inoffensive. But Square Enix stablemateNieR: Automatadid this far more annoyingly, with a scene where you a) had to cover a much greater distance and b) could fail.
That possibility of failure is the bigger problem. I don’t mind a game trying out a new mechanic, but I don’t want the section when it tries that new mechanic out to also be difficult. This was a problem I ran into while playingSerious Sam 4for review a few years ago. That game has a one-off mech sequence that is significantly harder than anything else in the game (at least, it was, in the pre-release build I played). I don’t mind a one-off sequence. I don’t mind a game being difficult in places. I do think it’s bad design to dump both on the player at once, asking them to learn something new that they won’t use again, and putting them through hell in the process.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth doesn’t do that. Its slow walk sequence is unfailable, and actually pretty good. It even has a bit where Cloud falls to his knees and you have to use L2 and R2 to pull yourself forward. It works for the story Cloud is telling to his friends, a memory of being powerless and afraid. It’s the exception that proves the rule. It’s still my least favorite tool in the toolbox.
