On the Mechanical Richness of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Last year I wrote a post here complaining about the mechanical flatness of FFXVI. Playing FFVII Rebirth I could not help but compare it’s delightful mechanical richness to 16’s flatness, so I decided to write a post celebrating it.

First of all, there is the materia system. It’s such a powerful game mechanic, I can’t help but wonder why so few games have copied the core concept. The magic comes from three parts.

1. Reifying powers into concrete items.
2. Giving these items their own development paths.
3. Making some of the powers meta-powers, changing the way others behave.

These three things together open a combinatorial explosion of character builds that is fun and intuitive to navigate, while feeling much more organic than a sphere grid like system. Decoupling the powers from characters lets you try out a maxed materia with entirely different characters. The meta-powers increase the size of the possibility space multiplicatively.

The materia system also interacts with other mechanics, making all of them richer. In my post about 16 I complained about how boring the weapons were. There were two stats, but they only changed in unison, making all weapons simple upgrades of the previous one. Rebirth takes full advantage of the separate Physical and Magical attack stats, but the materia makes things even more interesting. Do you want many slots, but a weaker weapon? Fewer slots, but more connections? All interesting choices, making most weapons occasionally relevant throughout the game.

And all mechanisms in the combat system benefit from the tweaks materia enables. You get the traditional fun with elements, but materia enriches blocking and character switching systems just as well.

And the combat system in itself has so much to offer. It’s still a bit slow for my taste (in the OG you get to enter ATB commands all the time, in Re* you have to wait for ages; I’m not that entertained by being able to pit pat tinsy bits of damage & dodge while I wait), but it’s definitely not mechanically flat. The way synergy abilities give you more to do while waiting for ATB and synergy skills incentivize switching between characters makes the combat even better than in Remake.

I do have a couple complaints, though. It is annoying how long limit breaks take. Way too many times I started my limit break not even half way to the stagger time of a boss and the stagger ended before the final blow. I even died to Sepiroth once, with a millimeter of his life remaining, because of this.

Also, Sepiroth is way too weak in the Nibelheim flashback. I suppose they wanted to keep the gameplay interesting for the action game nerds, but it fails to deliver the impact of the original. It was brilliant how they showed Sepiroth’s power with game mechanics by making him one-shot everything. In Rebirth, he is hardly stronger than Cloud. (Yes, his numbers are bigger, but with action combat you don’t really have time to see them. He does not feel different.) Sepiroth’s Limit Break, (Limit Break!) did not even finish off the flashback boss.

I also wish the Relationship Level affected the combat. It could eg. make synergy skills with the corresponding character cheaper. But it’s cool that the connection does go the other way.

These are minor nitpicks. As a whole FFVII Rebirth has embarrassingly rich mechanics, well tied to the story. I do hope they give us properly overpowered nonsense in part three, to keep in line with the original. Perhaps gated to be useless until you earn the second star, that was a fun OG idea they didn’t use yet.