One of my enduring memories of the original Final Fantasy 7 is turning a corner, getting in a random battle, realizing I'd walked into a dead end, and then having two more random battles trigger while I turned around and walked back. What I'm saying is, Final Fantasy 7 was not the kind of game that cared about our limited time upon this Earth.
At least the open world filler of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is optional. So while it may be a waste of our brief lifespans to follow a bird to a quicktime event, and then listen to Chadley tell Cloud what a good boy he is for clearing a map icon, it's a lot easier to avoid Rebirth's brand of timewasting. At least, it is if you play on easy.
While normal difficulty starts out fine, the boss fights soon balloon into multi-stage affairs and wow do the hit points bloat. Some of the enemies end up so spongy you could wad them up and absorb a pint of beer. The dynamic difficulty option is no help. You'd think this might keep things at your level whether you engage with the optional fiend hunts and world intel missions or not, but it's actually designed to level things up for players who grind for hours, then complain they've trivialized all the combat that's left. Dynamic difficulty doesn't actually rationalize things back down for those of us who think side content should be optional, because that's what side means.
Played on easy though, Rebirth becomes a game where you don't have to worry about memorizing every monster's elemental weakness and pressure mechanic, and where you don't have to climb every Ubisoft tower, complete every virtual battle simulation, repair every chocobo stop, etcetera etfuckingcetera. Instead, you can pick and choose from a menu of amuse-bouches to have with your main quest meal without ending up like Mr Creosote.
Well, sort of. I found a couple of activities I liked, and tracked them down wherever I could. The first was Queen's Blood, a card game that is the Triple Triad or Gwent or Pazaak of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Every settlement has some players you can compete with, earning new cards for your deck if you win. Beat enough of them and you unlock a tournament with a master, and that leads to a bizarre storyline in which you uncover the sinister secret behind this seemingly innocent card game.
The second side activity I committed to was moogle mischief, where you find moogle huts shaped like toadstools, then enter the spacebending psychedelic rainbow wonderlands inside them to round up a bunch of mooglets by rolling around while they throw bombs and banana peels all over the shop. You can tell me this isn't a metaphor for Cloud doing a bathtub full of drugs, but I won't believe you.
The second moogle mushroom was on a cliff I could only climb after wrangling the local area's unique chocobo by doing a stealth mission where I had to crouch-walk behind moving mine carts. And to enter the town where the first Queen's Blood master lives, I had to do a sidequest where I escorted a sickly whippet through monster country. So yeah, it's difficult to pick and choose only the tastiest parts of the Final Fantasy-flavored platter in front of you.
Which is why I'm so glad I dropped the difficulty a couple of chapters in, and relied more and more on the option to speed up dialogue and cutscenes to 1.5x by holding down the right trigger as the game went on. (I am the person who watches YouTube videos and listens to American podcasts at double speed.) Thanks to that, I managed to wrap Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth in a fairly taut 45 hours. Which is still 10 hours longer than I spent on Final Fantasy 7 Remake, even though I did the sidequest where you have to find all the missing cats. Here's hoping Final Fantasy 7 Reunion either trims some of the side dishes, or at least makes it easier to ignore them.
