Having beaten Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, I found, as I had with Remake, a desire to keep playing. There are some games where I finish the story and feel fully ready to move on, but usually when a game nails the "good feeling" of gameplay, it inspires me to find any opportunity to keep playing. For example, I'd have loved a New Game Plus (or even just the ability to have a second save file) for Control, so even after I'd finished the main game and both DLCs, I'd wander around the Oldest House and just look for Hiss to fight.
Remake and Rebirth are both games built to allow both a sense of closure with finishing the game and a sense that you can continue if you just want to play some more. Remake was, of course, a bit more linear, with brief interludes that included some side quests, but mostly just an ongoing narrative (and, like early Final Fantasy games, the plot dictated who was in your party at any given time).
Rebirth is a lot less linear, with tons of activities you can do in the world outside of the main story quest. Both games give you "chapter selection" when you finish the game - a kind of NG+ but one that allows you to jump around, perhaps to replay the parts of the game you enjoyed the most (or the parts where you want to get certain missed items - I remember in Remake missing Aerith's staff you need to steal off of the second boss in the Train Graveyard and making that my first pit stop after beating the game proper.)
But with all these side activities, especially those that are less about some new challenge and more about discovering parts of the world, they allow these things to carry over when you return to a chapter. Thus, your World Intel progress will remain completed, and you have an option to reset side quests (I'm not sure if this includes the protorelic intel) or simply leave them completed.
This does result, of course, in passing through the world a lot quicker. As soon as I exited the Mythril Mines, for example, I was basically ready to head into Junon and fight the big sea monster, and not long after that head up to the whole inauguration parade for Rufus.
Now, playing through this on the same difficulty is all well and good (there's also "Dynamic" difficulty, which is available from the start, and I assume scales monsters up to your level - which is probably wise if you're going to early-game areas with an endgame-leveled character unless the whole point is to utterly destroy everything in your path with ease).
But, as with the previous game, beating it once also unlocks Hard Mode. Hard Mode is truly hard. Not far into it, most of my characters hit the level cap of 70, which did grant more skill points, but the true incentive to do this is that each boss you take down grants a manuscript for one of your characters - my sense is that if you beat the whole thing, you'll have enough SP to unlock every skill in your Folios. Granted, at that point you might be wondering what there is left to challenge you.
Hard Mode, like in Remake, has two other major changes: the first is that you can't use items. Weirdly, you can still get items in Hard Mode, but they basically just go into your inventory and chill, I suppose until you decide to play in a different difficulty setting. The other is that resting at a bench or an inn will restore HP, but not MP. Finishing a chapter will restore MP, and there is a little bit of passive MP regeneration, along with skills and materia that can help with that, but you basically need to be clever about conserving MP (Aerith does have Soul Drain, which will likely get more use). There is one exception to the no-item rule, though, which is that you can use a Cushion on a Chocostop, and furthermore this will actually restore your MP as well. Still, any "dungeon"-like environment (including, for example, climbing Mt. Corel) will require you to really think about when to expend your precious MP. And without potions or ethers, you need to play very carefully.
However, in my experience at least, the non-boss monsters are mostly pretty trivial - they don't seem to scale up very much, and so between the free elemental damage skills and just the raw power of where your characters have gotten makes it pretty easy to get through these fights without having to spend MP, and often not even taking any damage (outside of combat, when you don't have to worry about building ATB charges, the base Cure seems like the most efficient healing-per-MP-expended). If you know for certain that a particular character won't be forced into your party, the HP/MP materia actually could work pretty well for a permanent back-line healer, though I haven't done this (and many of these more narrow "dungeon" environments split the party up anyway).
Anyway, if the non-boss enemies are pretty trivial in Hard Mode, boy howdy are the bosses not. These seem to be balanced not just around your being max level (maybe the first few aren't quite) but also requiring pretty excellent execution. Bosses that were thrilling but relatively easy to get through on the first attempt are quite difficult. I'm been able to one-shot a couple of them, but most have required at least a second attempt.
There are some systems I haven't entirely figured out - party level, for example, I think derives its separate XP from doing side quests, and that means that at some point I'll have to (if I want to cap this out and access the last of the skills in the Folios) actually finish the "Ultimate Party Animal" challenge at the Gold Saucer. Beyond that, there's also weapon XP, and that I genuinely don't understand and can't seem to find an in-game explanation.
Anyway, on Hard Mode I'm now on the modified Valkyrie at Mt. Corel, doing the Red/Cloud/Aerith half of the mountain before we go on to Yuffie/Barret/Tifa. I did one attempt, which was going ok until Red went down and I tried to use a synergy attack to stagger the boss, but happened to do so right when it was using a big attack, so the party got wiped. I don't think it'll take too many tries, but we'll see. (In Remake, Hell House took me many, many attempts on Hard Mode).
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