Last year, I played over 100 hours ofThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The year before, I put about 70 hours intoElden Ring. Both of those games were terrific, the kind of open-world game that other developers will be looking at for years and learning from. These were games with the potential to alter the fundamental shape of the genre. This year’s big new open-world game,Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, isn’t. That’s a good thing.
When an open-world game gets elevated to “Most Anticipated” status — like TotK and Elden Ring did prior to release — it’s usually because they’re promising to take players to unexplored corners of the open-world genre. Plenty of gamers buy and sink hundreds of hours into games likeFar Cry 6andAssassin’s Creed Valhalla, but they don’t rise to the same level of hype that precedes a release likeCyberpunk 2077. When we basically know what to expect, it’s harder to get excited.
That’s why each release fromRockstaris met with breathless excitement. True, we know what it will be in some ways. you’re able to expect a big open world where you can cause chaos and get chased by cops (in old time-y and modern varieties). You can expect an antihero, or several, at the heart of the story. You can expect linear missions that often keep you on frustratingly narrow rails. Those things haven’t changed much sinceGTA 3. But, every time a new Rockstar game comes out, it’s extremely exciting to see how much more detailed and engrossing the studio has made its world, how many more side activities there are to flesh out the world, and how many new ways to interact with the game there are that add to its overall feeling of reality.
Nintendoonly recently entered the open-world genre, but its games already have a similar level of anticipation. PreviousZeldagames, like the original NES game and The Wind Waker, were open-ended, but Breath of the Wild was the first to adopt (and, at times, subvert) the genre’s conventions. Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom were each mechanical revelations in their own ways, with Breath of the Wild offering a radically open take on the genre where basically everything was skippable. Tears of the Kingdom carried that forward, and also introduced a variety of new ways of interacting with the world that made it exciting to explore Hyrule all over again.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, on the other hand, isn’t really changing the game in any major ways. It borrows a recent innovation fromGhost of Tsushima; as in that game, you’ll run into animals in the world that will lead you to points of interest if you follow them. Its approach to its card game Queen’s Blood feels like a riff onThe Witcher 3andHorizon Forbidden West’s integration of Gwent and Machine Strike respectively. Its combat is a high point, but that’s fully lifted from its predecessor. And its towers are straight out of an Ubisoft game.
Mechanically, it isn’t anything new. If you’ve played the big open-world games in the past decade, everything it’s doing will feel familiar and comfortable. Instead, the surprises are entirely narrative.Final Fantasy 7 Remakeestablished that the story we knew from the original game could and would change, so in Rebirth we’re watching to see how Square Enix will handle this beloved story and characters.
For that reason, it makes more sense for the gameplay to be rock solid, but not groundbreaking. Rebirth is giving players something mechanically comfortable in a game where they can expect to hit some rocky narrative road. During its prologue, the game reminds you early and often that it’s taking Final Fantasy 7’s story in some strange new directions. For that to work, it helps to have a familiar structure that (for players who play mainstream single-player games, at least) will feel like home.
