Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth swamps its exhilarating tribute in open-world bloat

polygon.com:

I had over two weeks to play Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and I spent most of the last seven days asking myself: Do I say that I loved this game, or that I hated it? It’s time to put pen to paper and the truth is, I still haven’t decided. I did love this game; I did hate this game. My waking hours not spent on my day job — over 90 such hours, by the time I saw credits — were nothing but this game. “A Lot” is a reductive but justified way of describing it, in every sense of that phrase.

[Ed. note: This review contains spoilers for the original Final Fantasy 7 andFinal Fantasy 7 Remake.]

Final Fantasy 7 — the original — is a game with history. Hell, it’s a game that is History, with a capital H. Widely considered responsible for a huge boom in sales of Sony’s PlayStation when it came out in 1997, it was a three-disc behemoth with then-stunning 3D cutscenes, ridiculously detailed pre-rendered backgrounds, a combat system focused around modular character building through materia, and a mid-game plot twist that is now functionally synonymous with the word “spoiler.”

For people like me who played the original, the ghost of that ultimate spoiler hangs over Rebirth’s head, sword of Damocles style, even more than it did for Remake: “Are they going to kill off Aerith?” Answering that question is a major motivation for even playing the game.

What’s more, every “Compilation of Final Fantasy 7” release has added layers of narrative complexity and explanation to the surprises and twists found in the original. This is a proverbial genie that Rebirth simply cannot stuff back into the bottle. How do you make a Final Fantasy 7 game surprising in a world where Aerith’s death and Cloud’s real identity have been widely available info for over 20 years?

This isn’t a concern for new players, but for returning ones, it’s a big deal, and Remake’s promise was that this new series of games wouldn’t simply be a big-budget, modern retelling, but a new story. After all, the final boss of Remake was,