Final Fantasy VII Rebirth - coming to PC on January 23rd

[Mauman]

Still no official announcement regarding sales, but there's this

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is ‘underperforming’ sales wise, analyst claims

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is reportedly underperforming commercially.

That’s according to Daniel Ahmad, director of research and insights at Niko Partners, who said the PS5 game has been faring worse than its predecessor following its release in February.

“Rebirth is underperforming sales wise”, he said on X.

“It’s selling about half of what Remake sold in the same timeframe and looks like it’ll have a weaker tail (prior to any PS+ like release),” Ahmad added.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake was released for PS4 in April 2020, when the console had an installed base of over 100 million units.

Shipments of the game topped 3.5 million in its first three days, according to publisher Square Enix, which hasn’t announced Rebirth sales data.

Source: VGC

That's what happens when you pull a bait and switch with the first one. Many of the players just looking for a remake and not some time fuckery sequel are going to jump ship.

 

[MasPingon]

Still no official announcement regarding sales, but there's this

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is ‘underperforming’ sales wise, analyst claims

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is reportedly underperforming commercially.

That’s according to Daniel Ahmad, director of research and insights at Niko Partners, who said the PS5 game has been faring worse than its predecessor following its release in February.

“Rebirth is underperforming sales wise”, he said on X.

“It’s selling about half of what Remake sold in the same timeframe and looks like it’ll have a weaker tail (prior to any PS+ like release),” Ahmad added.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake was released for PS4 in April 2020, when the console had an installed base of over 100 million units.

Shipments of the game topped 3.5 million in its first three days, according to publisher Square Enix, which hasn’t announced Rebirth sales data.

Source: VGC

That's what happens when you pull a bait and switch with the first one. Many of the players just looking for a remake and not some time fuckery sequel are going to jump ship.

Doubt that's it, do you think there are millions of original FF7 players waiting for remake? Those people have about 40 years old now, maybe 1/5 of them still got time to play games.. More probable this is a matter of platform, a lot more people got PS4 then PS5. I had to buy one to play it myself. I'm sure 1:1 remake wouldn't be as succesful.

 

[cruel]

So, it seems that you don't pick your date for the Gold Saucer, but the game does it for you. It does so using a bonding system that works in 'mysterious ways'. The result: I had a date with a dog.

Sent from my KB2005 using Tapatalk

 

[mediocrepoet]

So, it seems that you don't pick your date for the Gold Saucer, but the game does it for you. It does so using a bonding system that works in 'mysterious ways'. The result: I had a date with a dog.

Sent from my KB2005 using Tapatalk

Better to hang out with man's best friend than some thot that will just give you herpes, bro.

 

[911 Jumper]

Still no official announcement regarding sales, but there's this

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is ‘underperforming’ sales wise, analyst claims

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is reportedly underperforming commercially.

That’s according to Daniel Ahmad, director of research and insights at Niko Partners, who said the PS5 game has been faring worse than its predecessor following its release in February.

“Rebirth is underperforming sales wise”, he said on X.

“It’s selling about half of what Remake sold in the same timeframe and looks like it’ll have a weaker tail (prior to any PS+ like release),” Ahmad added.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake was released for PS4 in April 2020, when the console had an installed base of over 100 million units.

Shipments of the game topped 3.5 million in its first three days, according to publisher Square Enix, which hasn’t announced Rebirth sales data.

Source: VGC

That's what happens when you pull a bait and switch with the first one. Many of the players just looking for a remake and not some time fuckery sequel are going to jump ship.

Honestly I think the whole project is a spectacular waste of time and resources. I thought splitting a JRPG into multiple parts released several years apart was a bad idea back when they announced it. These kind of games need to be complete self-contained experiences. A lot of people probably feel as if they have to play Remake again to “refresh” and prepare for Rebirth. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that [having to play Remake again] is putting people off.
I've also heard a number of people say that there's too much stuff to do in Rebirth, the number of mini games present seems to be a common complaint.
It really does sound as if they have again padded out the latest entry in this project with lots of unnecessary stuff.

 

[cruel]

I've also heard a number of people say that there's too much stuff to do in Rebirth, the number of mini games present seems to be a common complaint.

That's true. I think there are 20+ mini games or so, out of which maybe 3 are fun (Run Wild, Chocobo racing, chasing Moogles). You can skip 90% of them with no consequences, but if someone is a completionist and wants to 100% the game, well... good luck I can't even imagine the frustration.

I'm skipping most of the mini games I don't like and some of the side quests, and I'm still going at 73 hours / 81% game completion. I'm pretty sure I will cross 80h, maybe 85h. 100% is easily 120h+.

There is definitely someone higher up in Square forcing devs to stretch the games to make them long, even at the cost of quality - same thing happened with FF XVI. Another example of a very solid foundation diluted by low quality of sidequests.

 

[911 Jumper]

That's true. I think there are 20+ mini games or so, out of which maybe 3 are fun (Run Wild, Chocobo racing, chasing Moogles). You can skip 90% of them with no consequences, but if someone is a completionist and wants to 100% the game, well... good luck I can't even imagine the frustration.

I'm skipping most of the mini games I don't like and some of the side quests, and I'm still going at 73 hours / 81% game completion. I'm pretty sure I will cross 80h, maybe 85h. 100% is easily 120h+.

There is definitely someone higher up in Square forcing devs to stretch the games to make them long, even at the cost of quality - same thing happened with FF XVI. Another example of a very solid foundation diluted by low quality of sidequests.

I can't see Square Enix doing another remake project on the scale of FF7R again. That rumour about the FF9 remake being much smaller in scope doesn't suprise me. People were clamouring for an FF7 remake since the days of that PS3 FF7 tech demo so that undoubtedly would have driven interest for Remake. But I think many have had their fill with Remake. Generally speaking there seems to less enthusiasm in regard to Final Fantasy. Even in Japan, FF games aren't doing the kind of numbers they used to do.

 

[Pyrite Pachyderm]

FF 10 was a series of corridors, 11 an MMO with shit gameplay, 12 played itself, 13 was three games of the director wanking to his notCloud wife, 14 is another MMO, 15 was an unfinished boy band journey, and 16 was DmC. Remake fucking up everything with time ghosts only helped sour people on the brand. There hasn't been a good Final Fantasy mainline game in a long time.

 

[Sukhāvatī]

 

[cruel]

Whoever designed the final boss fight of Rebirth should really rethink his career choice and go back to breeding horses or sucking dick. 2h of constant boss fights, each multi-phase, no way to save in between and final boss having a magical one-hit KO if you don't stagger him during a few second window. What a shit game design, I have no words.

Sent from my KB2005 using Tapatalk

 

[Yuber]

FF 10 was a series of corridors

Are not most FF games a series of corridors? FF7 too was for the most part just corridors you follow, maybe it is the minimap that makes it more visible.

12 played itself

How? Do you mean the gambits? You could always input manually everything with your mainchar and only leave the other party member on AI if you like.

 

[cruel]

Finished the game after 94 hours - this includes most of the side quests, but nowhere near close to 100% the game, with most of the mini games & collectibles skipped etc. Hard game to rate.

Good things:
+ much better game than Remake in almost every aspect: improved combat, interesting boss fights, less shitty side quests
+ one of the better 'modern' combat systems actually: keeping a nice balance between intensity and tactics (buffs, debuffs, dangerous status effects, weaknesses, targeting specific body parts)
+ well designed, intense and memorable boss fights
+ decent difficulty
+ tons of heart and effort put into making this, and it just shows; complete opposite of your typical Ubisoft cash grab
+ very nice chemistry between the cast, many dialogues that make you laugh or smile
+ great enemy variety, keeping things constantly fresh
+ each party member plays completely differently and feels very unique
+ the game does a good job making you to know other party members by rotating the squad
+ excellent music
+ zero diversity crap
+ must-play for any FF fan, feels like a 'proper' FF game, as opposed to FF XVI
+ a lot of attention to detail and small things that make you aware how much they wanted the game to feel 'special'
+ 3 (out of 20+) mini games are actually fun
+ zero bugs / crashes

Worse things:
- story is a complete mess: whispers, black cloaks, parallel universes, just wtf
- open world is boring and repeatable; clearly they rushed this or had no idea how to fill it properly
- pacing issues: 2h of intensity may be followed by 3h of boredom
- main story is way better than the side content
- tons and tons of mini games, at some point it's just too much (fortunately skippable / optional)
- few parts of the game are designed in a retarded way: few boss fights not balanced properly, combat encounters forcing you to hit specific objectives etc.
- the game doesn't respect player's time at times

8/10. If you liked Remake, you will like this for sure, as it's a much better game overall. If you hated Remake, not sure if I would recommend it. I don't regret playing and had fun most of the time, but sometime around 80h mark, I just wanted the game to end.

 

[Yuber]

8/10. If you liked Remake, you will like this for sure, as it's a much better game overall. If you hated Remake, not sure if I would recommend it. I don't regret playing and had fun most of the time, but sometime around 80h mark, I just wanted the game to end.

I Found Remake only max OK so 5/10. But because it is not a 1:1 Remake as promised I rate it 3/10.
I think Rebirth is MUCH worse than Remake. Literally garbage. If I see Aeris one more time waving her hands beside her head like a mentally ill I die

 

[Rahdulan]

Since it's relevant to this getting a PC port faster - Squeenix commits to aggressive multiplatform releases instead of console exclusives.
https://nichegamer.com/square-enix-...aggressively-pursue-a-multiplatform-strategy/

Square Enix has announced a new business plan that will see the company shift away from console exclusives like Final Fantasy VII Remake and Final Fantasy XVI.

The new strategy will see the company “aggressively pursue a multiplatform strategy” that will see its games release across all modern platforms – including PC, Xbox, Nintendo, and PlayStation.

This is a massive shift in the company’s policy which frequently saw games release exclusively, sometimes seemingly permanently, only on certain consoles like PlayStation 5 or Nintendo Switch.

 

[Damned Registrations]

- the game doesn't respect player's time at times

Is it doing that shit from the last game where there's a bunch of narrow passageways everywhere that take 10 seconds to shimmy through, each fucking way, just so you can explore a corner of the town that has like one guy with filler dialogue or a chest with a potion?

 

[Ash]

FF 10 was a series of corridors, 11 an MMO with shit gameplay, 12 played itself, 13 was three games of the director wanking to his notCloud wife, 14 is another MMO, 15 was an unfinished boy band journey, and 16 was DmC. Remake fucking up everything with time ghosts only helped sour people on the brand. There hasn't been a good Final Fantasy mainline game in a long time.

 

[cruel]

- the game doesn't respect player's time at times

Is it doing that shit from the last game where there's a bunch of narrow passageways everywhere that take 10 seconds to shimmy through, each fucking way, just so you can explore a corner of the town that has like one guy with filler dialogue or a chest with a potion?

A little bit different way this time. Stuff like: hold a button for 5 seconds to push stuff or open the gate; VERY slow puzzles involving pushing a cart; 'immersive' sequences when you need to SLOWLY push R2 / L2 to crawl and repeat n-times; forced walking sequences etc. Fortunately, not very frequent, so while noticeable, can be tolerated.

 

[911 Jumper]

Naoki Hamaguchi, Director of FF7 Rebirth



A plea for more support?

 

[Dickie_Anderson]

Finished this game a couple of days ago.

For about 90% of it (for a ridiculous amount of time, like 150 hrs) I loved it. There's real challenge and depth to the combat in ways I didn't expect. It's a real-time action combat system that manages to have the feel/light strategy of the original's ATB system. I liked the fluidity of changing characters mid-fight and the fact that they all feel and play significantly different, and how you really have to learn each. I like how it incentivises you to use each character strategically so that you can use the "Synergy Ability" attacks later on in the battle that do significant damage. These abilities even affect the "affinity points" Cloud has with the characters he performs them with, and therefore the likelihood of them having a date scene later. It's a fairly modest but smart way of tying gameplay to story. The spectacular variety in the enemies you face and their attacks/status effects/aesthetics/animations, and the often equally spectacular new abilities you unlock for each character through new weapon skills/materia/modules you open through the levelling system means that combat remained interesting throughout.

I think an issue a game of this scale often runs into is that doing the core gameplay over and over becomes samey, and Rebirth does an admirable job of mixing things up so that this doesn't happen (only started really feeling burnt out on it by the aforementioned 150 hr mark). Part of the original's charm is that it has a lot of silly minigames, and this game does the same thing, except some of them have a surprising amount of depth. The standouts are the Queen's Blood card game, the real-time strategy game Fort Condor and the Mario Kart clone Chocobo Racing. These sufficiently broke up the core gameplay and were fun and well-designed. There are many others, some that I liked simply because they were silly and charming (particularly a dolphin racing segment and a ridiculous chicken-baiting one), a couple were confusing and quite bad (a robot RTS game that was basically an overly-complicated and poorer version of Fort Condor, a "3D Brawler" that was a bit like Punch-Out but with telegraphs that are ridiculously hard to read).

I was a little reluctant to play this game because I don't like what I've experienced of Square Enix's writing. In honesty, even though I like the original, I don't think it has an overall great story. There are aspects of it that I think are confusing and unnecessary and outright bad. Rebirth manages to almost (ALMOST) avoid these aspects my being quite light on its main plot. The "main plot" as it exists is held together with paper-clips and blue-tac: the gist is that you're on a globe-trotting adventure following a trail of robed men to main villain Sephiroth, and you bump into Shinra bad guys along the way. The qualities this game's writing has I think are mainly in its characters. It's (mostly) a character rather than plot-focused game. In order to build up the aforementioned "affinity points" with individual characters you go on side-quests with them, and through these you're meant to be learning a little more about them. Initially I was sceptical - I felt they were desperately trying to give depth to characters that didn't really have much in the original, and going about it by focusing on certain traits they had and just sort of hammering them over and over again, rather than adding anything.

While this is true to a certain extent, I found that they managed to make the characters charming enough that it didn't matter. The characters, and the character of the game in general, have a very silly sense of humour to them that make them endearing. Even if a sidequest is a bit mundane and the enemy interactions/minigames aren't that interesting, there's usually an absurd twist that makes it entertaining. The game for the most part doesn't take itself seriously, which was a welcome relief to me who has come to associate Square Enix games with self-seriousness, convoluted plots and portentousness. This reaches its apotheosis with the Gold Saucer date, where the characters take part in a bizarre comic-opera and then go on a ferris wheel together. The writing and direction for these scenes are ridiculously on-point, so great in fact I almost wish the game ended after them. Cheesy, but with a class you rarely see in big-budget narrative video games.

I could go on and on about what I like about this game - how I think they rendered the "natural landscapes tainted by industrial structures" world of the original beautifully, the unbelievable amount of quality music, the rich detail in each town you visit, etc. But all of this is let down by one thing.

The ending is possibly the single most dogshit thing I think I have ever experienced in a videogame.

All the absolute worst excesses of Square Enix writing just rears its ugly head suddenly and without warning. All the charming and silly character just drains out of the game, and it becomes this fanwank mess of references to other FF7 media hardly anyone has played/watched, "multiverse" bullshit that undercuts and ruins any kind of emotional impact a crucial scene should have, a 20-stage boss fight where 18 of them are totally without meaning or interest.

I refuse to believe anyone likes or is interested in this "multiple timeline" shite, yet I watched a podcast on YouTube yesterday where, to my despair, it seems that some fans do.

I literally cannot imagine how they can salvage the next game with an ending this dreadful.

 

[Talby]

I think the multiverse slop stuff comes from Marvel and how popular that was for a few years. Also alternate dimensions is an easy way to bring back dead characters if they want to. As soon as I realized they were doing some multiverse/alternate timeline thing in Remake I dropped it.

 

[Tehdagah]

 

[Tyrr]

The latest MMO expansion isn't that great, I wonder if the subscription numbers will go down.
So far I didn't even finish the main story and it's out for more than a month now. I don't think I will finish it before my subscription will run out.

 

[Elttharion]

Good, fuck Square Enix

 

[Grampy_Bone]

I can't remember the last time I played a game where I wanted it to end so badly. Despite the metric fuckton of filler crammed into every orifice, they still managed to rush the endgame and fuck up the forgotten city, and everything else. Great job.

For what it's worth I don't think there's a multiverse, I think everything that they dicked with the story was an elaborate fakeout. Not that it matters. I was reading comments from players who never played the original asking WTF happened and what it's all supposed to mean, so the game is a double fail. Pissed off old and new fans alike! Even Cid's comment at the end, "What did Aerith even do?" That has always been the question Cid, and the closest he came to even being 5% like his original self. Cid's personality is the most tragic death in this remake.

I keep thinking if someone remade Shawshank Redemption, but put in a bunch of scenes with Andy talking to his wife, who may or may not be dead, and maybe Tommy doesn't die or maybe he does, and there's flash forward that shows Andy escaped from prison or maybe he's dead and maybe it's all a dream. What a pile of trash.

Basically, this:

 

[Beastro]

Basically, this:

Mimsie.