Hiya!

Well, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has been out for a while now and, as expected, it’s received critical acclaim from virtually all review websites and the general population love the game. This was one of the year’s most anticipated games and everyone had very high expectations from Square Enix’s sequel to Final Fantasy VII Remake. This makes it all the more amazing how Rebirth satisfied a lot of them.

However, despite Square Enix’s best efforts, there’s really no pleasing everyone, which I get. No game is perfect and I never expected Final Fantasy VII Rebirth to be. I’ve been reading through the reviews and there were points brought up I have to agree with. The ending is a little messy and confusing, sure. However, there were a couple of websites, namely Laptop Mag and The Gamer, which I found a little bit ridiculous. There may be more who have this same complaint but I haven’t seen them yet. Anyway, their issue is Final Fantasy VII is it has “too many minigames” in it. Basically, they’re complaining Square Enix gave players too many fun things to do in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

Look, I’m sorry but if that’s something you have to complain about, then you’re just grasping at straws. In my opinion, you’re looking for things to complain about.

For one thing, everyone who has a passing familiarity with the original Final Fantasy VII would have known there were going to be a lot of side quests and minigames in Rebirth. Throughout Cloud’s journey, he could take out Shinra troops with barrels to help Aerith escape the church, try to do more squats than another guy in Wall Market and battle on a motorcycle while escaping Shinra headquarters. This is just during the Midgar section! We haven’t even talked about the Gold Saucer section, which is an amusement park, so obviously it had a lot of minigames to play!

In fact, let me tell you a secret: I thought Gold Saucer needed more minigames! At the very least, they deserved much better ones. The Shooting Coaster one was good and the Battle Arena is a good way to test your skills. I spent so many hours (yes, hours) playing Chocobo Racing, partially in order to level up my Chocobos so I could get the Knights of the Round materia. I still has a blast with it, though. However, the majority of them are pretty lame. The Arm Wrestling is just mash the button as fast as you can until you win. The Basketball Game timing game gets really tedious. 3D Battler is a glorified rock-paper-scissors minigame where luck trumps skill. Mog House is literally a “pay-to-win” game before developers knew there were suckers who were going to spend a ton of money for the best stuff without the grind.

So, yeah, I’m really glad Square Enix stuffed as many minigames into Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. From what I’ve seen, they look like a whole lot of fun. However, from what those reviews are saying, having more fun distractions in an already great game is supposed to be a bad thing! That’s just sounds weird.

Besides, you don’t really have to do the majority of them. I know you have to go through some of them. I’ve seen some playthroughs of Costa Del Sol where Cloud, Aerith and Tifa have to do things like find Cactuar pictures or shoot down targets in order to proceed through the story. However, you don’t have to do all of the mingames in front of you. You just need to do one each for Cloud, Aerith and Tifa to proceed. However, I guess because most gamers want to get all of the swimsuit options for them, they feel obligated to. Like I said, you don’t; you just want to because you want options on what you want Cloud, Tifa and Aerith to wear during your 2nd playthrough.

Speaking of that, you don’t need to do everything in your initial playthrough. I’m guessing you can but it’s not mandatory or anything like that. Rebirth is also supposedly an open world game where you can revisit areas and do the minigames you didn’t want to play earlier. I’m sure there are some gamers who just want to blast through the story as fast as they can but are afraid they’ll miss something juicy by not playing the minigames. So, go through the game at your own pace and, when you feel you’re near the point of no return, turn back and play those minigames you didn’t feel like player before.

Honestly, there are 2 practical reasons why “too many minigames” can be a legitimate criticism and that depends on your own values. The first reason would be you have some completionist mentality which compels you to 100% the game on your first try. That’s why I didn’t include the Digital Trends opinion piece regarding this very point. The writer actually says he wish he didn’t think this way when he started his playthrough of Rebirth. At least he realized, while there are a ton of minigames, he eventually figured out he didn’t have to do all of them. They still gave the game a glowing review as well.

The other reason to be bothered by all of the minigames is you don’t like developers overworking their programmers or putting too much time and budget into the minigames and then forgetting about the main game. I do hate how some developers will overwork their personnel just to get their game out on time and then let these same people go afterwards because they spent too much money. I hope this isn’t the case with Square Enix because they have had some flops like Forspoken just last year. Hopefully, they still keep the people because it wasn’t their fault.

From what I’ve seen, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is a game that can be completed in around 30 to 40 hours, if you just focus on the main story and complete a few side quests and minigames here and there. That’s already a substantial amount of gameplay there. So, why complain there are too many minigames? Play through it without focusing on them and you’ll still get 30 to 40 hours of game. Why complain about getting more game?

Byee!

What do you think of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth having too much stuff to do? Let me know in the comments section below!