Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Is The Goldilocks Of Open World Game Design

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s open world is just right. Unless a game has an easy platinum such as 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ghost of Tsushima or 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, I rarely return to games after hitting credits because I’m not all that interested in busywork. I’d rather move onto the next thing and take a chance on new stories and characters instead of spending dozens of hours being a rotten completionist. This is especially true with modern open world games, most of which are put together in such a way to keep your atte꧙ntion for as long as humanly possible.

But Rebirth is different, and I’ve already spent an additional 15 hours exploring its world and taking on new quests and missions long after hitting credits. I’ll have to explore its endgame in greater depth after release, but right now I want to talk about how its updated🌌 world draws you in but seldom overwhelms you. Everything is worth doing and comes with tangible spoils that build upon countles💯s gameplay systems and mechanics that I wanted to see through to their logical conclusion. Not one thing is left on the cutting room floor, and that is quite a big achievement.

Rebirth’s Open World Understands Your Time Is Valuable

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth - The gang arrive at Junon Harbor

How does it stand out though? With a regular playthrough bound to hit 60 hours for the large majority of people, Rebirth evidently takes its time and isn’t afraid to get in🧔to the weeds. Few chapters are shorter than a couple of hours, thrusting you into vast biomes to explore and so many massive story sequences where you fight multiple bosses in a row while exploring vast dungeons themed around classic locations. There’s plenty of downtime when you’re taking a break from the narrative too, with the game being split into six distinct regions housing their own distinct methods of traversal, side characters, and quests to explore.

When first arriving in a new region the game is eager to get a Chocobo into your hands, or a buggy if you happen to be exploring the relentless Corel Desert that surrounds Gold Saucer. The iconic birds can run, fly, bounce, and dig for buried treasure, while also acting as a fast way to get around if you don’t fancy trouncing about the place on foot. Aside from a couple of major towns and settle♍ments, each region is home to side activities that ask you to hunt monsters, accrue summon materia, climb towers, and follow a series of narrative quests in which you will eventually obtain a mysterious object known as a protorelic.

While these will often involve fighting monsters, more often than not, you’ll engage in minigames unique to each region like Fort Condor. Time has been taken to ensure that not all side quests are a generic laundry list of things to do, and while those activities do exist, what you’re getting in exchange makes itౠ more than worthwhile. Regions aren’t too big either, and odds are you’ll be able to climb a mountain and take a look beyond the horizon and everywhere you could possibly go is visible. No empty space or needless expansion, everything has its place.

Even after 80 Hours, Rebirth Keeps On Pulling Me Back In

I was in a unique position where I had to barrel through the 🌃game to meet an embargo, which I’m historically terrible at doing. For Rebirth’s first three regions I did everything, from major side quests where I learned more about my favourite characters to generic battles in which I had to defeat monsters while completing random objectives. No stone was left unturned, and to my surprise I felt a tinge of sadness as every single icon in the Grasslands changed to a muted grey. So I moved on, and it wasn’t until the embargo approached I told myself to leave a few side activities behind. But doing them means I’d build up affinity for later events in the Gold Saucer and could be missing out on crucial gear and moments. Somehow, this open world had cast a spell on me that didn’t depend on quality over quantity.

While there are echoes of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Breath of the Wild and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Witcher 3 in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s open world, it is also surprisingly old school in its execution. You’ll climb a Ubisoft tower and have your map updated with a few distractions, but you can still discover them on your own terms if you’d rather explore without guidance. With each tower only giving you four activities at most, it never fee꧟ls egregious or overwhelming. The benefits are substantial, be they experience points, rare materia, or snippets of lore provided 🏅to you by Chadley that build on a world we’ve never known this intimately before. The open world presented to us is one that has been built around its characters first and foremost, and that’s why it works so well.

Rebirth’s world is also inherently familiar to someone like me that grew up with Final Fantasy 7, and the same will be true for millions of others. This world was previously depicted with basic 3D graphics, CD films, and othe🌟r releases like Crisis Core. But this may be the first time Midgard has been realised to such an extent, fleshed out to the point where we can𒁃 walk from place to place and examine exactly how everything is connected. While it isn’t how I imagined this world would be built as a child, it’s pretty damn close.

There’s a density to the lore and characters I didn’t expect from Rebirth, and time and time again it has brought the familiar story to new heights. My biggest question is how the inevitable third game builds on this foundation. Does it fold in 𝔍the world present in Rebirth into its own, or will it be yet another standalone effort that justifies its existence all over again? Time will tell, but I’m already on board.