this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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And it honestly breaks the flow of the story sometimes compared to the original. Rebirth's added content felt like busywork at times to make it seem like a bigger game than it actually is.
The Honeybee sequence in Remake is peak tho, and I'll fight anyone that says otherwise.
Personally I've loved how much they have fleshed everything out. Like, Johnny was such a completely missable, non consequential character in the original and now he's a prominent side character. Just one example of many where they've taken a small part of the original and they have added a ton of context or fleshed out content around it.
A lot of the stuff is optional too, which I think strikes a solid balance. If you don't like the content and find it busy work, you don't have to do it. If you do like it, it's there for you to enjoy.
I'm usually with you on the "skip the quests you don't like", but it really doesn't feel like an option for this series. Each of the remake games are priced at $70USD and it's not even a full story, technically speaking.
It feels really bad to not do side content, because it feels like you're not getting your "money's worth" psychologically. But the side content varies so much in quality depending on the chapter that the game just feels like a drag. It especially sucks because the OG FF7 is such a well paced story IMO, with a good balance of action/plot vs silly downtime.
OG had three CD's, three major acts, across a pretty epic journey. Breaking it up into three parts is really not that surprising.
Personally, I love the expanded development of characters like Jessie.
I don't mind the expanding in Remake as much as Rebirth tbh. Remake's does expand a lot of side character's, but they feel relevant to the story. Marlene, Avalanche trio, hell Yuffie's little side story, they're all good additions. EDIT: ALSO Wall Market! Best addition by far.
Rebirth is where I think it went off the rails a bit. The game really feels unfocused with a lot of the side quests, and it really drags a bit until you get to the last quarter of the game.
Maybe it'll feel better to revisit once we have the entire trilogy. But man, paying $70/ to play Rebirth feels a bit bad when it came out at the same time as the new Yakuza and Persona remake priced at the same point.
You know what's fascinating about that?
I'm pretty sure that every CD had the entire game and all the art assets for every town / place you could enter on the world map. Every enemy. All the music.
The only difference between each CD was the FMV cutscenes contained on them.
At least that was the story / rumor at the time. For optimization they could have reduced the art assets and music to only areas you could enter at that point in the game, and only enemy models you would see, but supposedly that wasn't the case.