I guess at this stage this is more like a video game travelogue. The Corel region in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth appears to be three if not four regions in one. After the cruise ship from Junon (with a fun little interlude that involves a cosmic-horror monster) the party gets to Costa del Sol, where Rebirth's sense of stakes and urgency are at a classically JRPG-level of conflict and the party has a fun beach vacation while keeping an eye on the mysterious robed figures.
Oh, spoilers ahead.
So, don't get me wrong: I'm having a blast playing through Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. While I don't have the deeply ingrained nostalgia of others my age who played the original game when they were eleven, I genuinely really like the cast of characters, and on top of that feel really grateful for Remake coming out at sort of the perfect time to help lift my spirits at the onslaught of the Covid 19 pandemic.
I also think that Remake and Rebirth have hit a real sweet spot when it comes to blending the strategic gameplay of the old FF menu-based ATB system with a more action-focused approach (something that I think the other recent game in the franchise, FFXVI, failed to do - the action gameplay in the first couple hours was great, but it never felt like it grew beyond that point).
Unlike the relatively linear Remake, which paused occasionally to give you periods of downtime to do sidequests, Rebirth opens up into various world regions with a big checklist of things to accomplish before moving on. You don't strictly have to do these things, but I am doing them (the sole exception being that I didn't do all the Junon Queen's Blood stuff, which I now regret because it turned out the intermission period after finishing Junon and going to Costa Del Sol happened to have a giant Queen's Blood tournament.
Hitting Costa Del Sol then dumps you into a ton of minigames (I actually practiced playing Tifa's theme on the piano long enough to do decently in the full performance). Between playing essentially Rocket League as Red XIII, a shooting gallery, a series of Queen's Blood puzzles (boy did they go all in on that!) it did feel a bit like I was waiting a super long time to get back into the action.
And some have been downright frustrating. I still don't feel like I have a solid feel for Queen's Blood strategy - I mostly seem to have to restart a match over and over until I stumble into a winning play.
I get the sense that Square Enix's philosophy toward game design is "more is more," and to a degree I can appreciate that - I really like hanging out with these people, and given what I know of what happens to Aerith at least in the original game, I'm not really in a rush to move the plot forward (though I wonder what time shenanigans will ensue and if she'll be ok - at some great cosmic cost - there's definitely some cryptic stuff going on with her that I suspect is not from the original game).
Anyway, I seem to have hit the third "go around and do exploration and side quests" part of the game. Oh, and Yuffie has joined the party finally!
But I'll leave with this complaint: why the hell does Barret not get to get some cool beach clothing? I get that he likes the sailor suit, but I think this is discrimination against big guys with broad shoulders and barrel chests and I will not stand for this injustice!
FFVII Remake was the first in the trilogification of 1997's beloved seventh entry in the Final Fantasy series - itself the quintessential JRPG series. VII's original release did introduce some new ideas, mechanically, as all the games have, but was still true to the classic JRPG formula in which most monsters you fight occur in random encounters, on a separate "battle screen" that abstracts the movement and action into a turn-based system.
VII Remake did what Final Fantasy games have been doing since XII (or I guess XI, but as an MMO, I kind of don't count XI or XIV as part of the core series, regardless of their numeral legitimization) and tried to break out of that old system and put a little more action and continuity with the overall game world into it.
But unlike the solutions I've seen in XII and XVI, I actually thought that they did an incredible job balancing this drive toward fast-paced action while retaining the strategic decision-making from the old turns-and-menus system of the past (I suspect I'd have liked XVI a lot more if it had just copied this combat system... and also made Clive's friends and allies into full-fledged, controllable party members).
Rebirth thankfully retains the basic premise of Remake's combat system. Once again, regular attacks build up ATB, which can pool into a maximum of two charges, and most spells, abilities, and using items take one of these charges. The character you have direct control over will typically build up ATB quicker, so if you want to keep it simple you can just focus on their abilities, but as you get more comfortable with it, swapping characters constantly starts to feel deliberate and reasonable.
Each character has a unique ability outside of the ATB-fueled "abilities" in their main menu that gives their basic attacks a different rhythm. Cloud, for example, can swap between a speedy single-target Operator Mode and a heavier-hitting AoE mode that makes you slower called Punisher Mode. Barret's arm-gun can fire a quick burst of damage, but then needs to recharge before you can do this again, the special ability button allowing you to spend a second or so speeding up that recharge time.
I think these are the same as they were for the previous game, though Aerith's might have changed, and post-Remake, Red XIII has joined as a full-fledged playable character with his own unique ability. I'm given to understand that Yuffie, Cid, and Cait Sith will join up later in the game, though Vincent Valentine, while appearing in Rebirth, does not appear to be playable in this part either (perhaps similarly to how Red XIII joined the party without being playable in the last part of Remake).
Materia appears to work the same way - you determine what spells and other bonuses you get by socketing these balls of magical energy into your weapons and armor (armor being more of a bracer of some sort). Materia will grow more powerful as the person wearing it fights battles, which unlocks things like upgraded spells (Fire becoming Fira and then Firaga). Note that the party starts at level 15 in Rebirth, so even if you had fully-maxed-out stuff in Remake, it doesn't carry over.
Each character of course has their own category of weapon, such as big swords for Cloud or Staves for Aerith, and like in Remake, each individual weapon has its own unique skill, but if you use the weapon enough and perform the actions to gain its proficiency bonus, you'll unlock that skill regardless of what weapon you're wielding - meaning that you'll want to gain that ASAP and then swap to any new weapon you've gotten to collect them all, and then when you've done that, pick the weapon with the stats you prefer.
Now, let's move on to the new stuff:
In Remake, most of your character progression was linked to various spheres in your weapon upgrades. Rebirth has kind of separated these out - the weapon unlocks new passive bonuses and materia slots as it levels up (meaning you might be inclined to swap them even after getting their proficiency bonuses, unless I'm misinterpreting something here - the weapon leveling might actually be character-focused rather than tied to the item). The other things, which include new abilities and passive bonuses, are now handled via a character's "Folio." Essentially, it's a bit like a book that charts the character's development, and you have to go to bookstores or little vending kiosks to spend skill points in your Folios. Still, this feels fairly similar to the weapon spheres from Remake, and it's free to assign the points you have and you can always reset them for free.
Probably the biggest mechanical addition is Synergy Attacks, which... I'll be frank, I don't entirely understand yet.
And that's in part because it's really two things.
While you're holding R1 to block, you'll get a menu of attacks to choose from. These attacks are unlocked in your Folios, but they're all tied to one of the other characters - for example, if you have one of Cloud's abilities that works with Barret, you'll need Barret in the active party to use it.
These can be helpful - Barret has one that gives him and an ally momentary damage immunity, for example, and there are some that launch Tifa in the air to punch flying enemies - as an alternative to your regular attacks. But they'll also build up a kind of bond over the course of a fight that will eventually allow Limit Break-like Synergy Attacks between two of your characters.
I... I don't really know exactly how these work. But boy, when they do, they land like a freaking nuke.
So, there's a pretty deep level of complexity to these systems. I honestly think that the Remake combat was close to as good as one could get, so while the Synergy stuff is cool, I'm still not 100% sold that it will make combat feel particularly better.
This is just scratching the surface - there seems to be a kind of "relationship level" that Cloud has with the other party members and I don't know if that's tied to Synergy attacks, story stuff, or what. I've already put 14 hours into this game and feel like I'm a substantial chunk into the game's second major area, but I suspect I'll have to be halfway through at least to really get the full feel of it.
I didn't finish FFXVI in part because I got burned out on all the side quests. That game's world was clearly very carefully built (if, admittedly, they clearly wanted to make Final Fantasy Game of Thrones) but the side quests were like Vanilla World of Warcraft-level oldschool in design - go to this place and collect these things off the ground kinda stuff.
But even if I kind of liked Clive and definitely Cid in XVI, I think that that game suffers profoundly by being primarily a single-character game (also, the lack of real strategic decisions as to what abilities you use, instead really working more like a God of War-style action game... and forgetting that GoW is secretly an environmental puzzle game with brief combat interludes).
But FFVII's cast of characters has 26 years of enduring appeal, and personally, I find its quasi-modern fantasy world really exciting to play in, even if, after escaping Midgar, you find yourself in a more classical fantasy grassy area (the town of Kalm looks like a perfectly preserved European village that is nonetheless a hub of modern life - it's one of the prettiest RPG towns I've been in).
Anyway, Remake was a pretty linear experience, with, essentially, a handful of chapters full of side quests, but most of the story taking you through the plot at a pretty good clip. There were side quests, but they were kind of confined to these particular phases of the game.
Rebirth opens the world up a lot - not only do you now get to choose your party composition (in Remake the people in your party are always determined by the plot, and even though Red XIII joins you near the end, you never get to control him as a full party member,) but the world really opens up in this big area to explore.
And, perhaps unsurprisingly given the way that Square Enix does things, the map gets populated with a hundred different things to do and find.
There is a... a lot of tutorial stuff early in the game. And that includes the very secondary game of Queen's Blood, which the game wants you to get into and search out special cards to add to your deck. But there's also all of this world research that the weird little Chadley kid (who's really a cyborg) wants you to do.
Still, for whatever reason, I'm not feeling terribly impatient to get to the plot - perhaps having the lengthy prologue in Nibelheim satisfied that desire for the time being - so I'm honestly just enjoying hanging out with these characters and killing monsters.
There are some new systems I haven't totally gotten the hang of. Folios are a little easier to figure out - in addition to weapon upgrades (which seem simplified compared to Remake) you'll also get these "Folios" that allow you to grant the characters certain active and passive abilities (the passives taking the place, it seems, of the stuff you got with the weapon upgrades in Remake). More confusing is Synergy attacks, which I genuinely haven't figured out yet - usually I seem unable to actually use them and I don't really know why.
Still, plugging Materia into weapons and armor still gives you spells and other abilities, just like the last game (and I assume the original) so to a large extent I think I need to just get back into practice. Unlike XVI and, you know, Elden Ring, I think there's far less of an expectation that you'll perfectly dodge all the attacks.
Anyway, I'm likely ok to move on to the Swamp area past the Grasslands, but for now I'm just going to check all the boxes and try to unlock the Titan summon materia.
I must be unusual of my generation of video game nerds in that I never played Final Fantasy VII. When it came out I was just getting into console gaming, and I only had Nintendo systems, on top of being in a Mac family. So all the avenues to play this now-beloved game were closed, and I never got around to it.
But it was hard to escape the existence of the game and its plot being the kind of nerd who would eventually have a gaming blog, and so I've had this vague sense of the game for a long time (a friend had it on PC, and I remember seeing the Midgar freeway escape sequence).
2020's Final Fantasy Remake, which had been announced like a decade prior, brought these beloved characters into a hi-res, modern game, which I thought did an amazing job combining SquareEnix's drive toward more action-oriented gameplay while retaining the strategic menu-based gameplay of classic Final Fantasy (something that Final Fantasy XVI I think failed to do, leaning so far into the action side of things that I grew bored with it as it was basically just about using any and all of your abilities as soon as they came off cooldown).
But Remake only remade the first section of the game - the adventures taking place within the city of Midgar. What had, I'm given to understand, been only the first three or so hours of the original game was blown up into a full game in its own right.
Beyond this expansion, though, Remake also introduced some new plot elements - a notion that this was not going to be the same story, precisely, but a kind of alternate timeline.
Er, spoilers ahead.
I realized just now that this is the first new Zelda game I've beaten since the release of Twilight Princess, the first game I got for the Wii back in 2006. To go eighteen years without doing so is kind of nuts, but in my defense, there are only two games between then and now to have come out - Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild. (I did play and beat the Switch remake of Link's Awakening, but given that that is, as I understand it, a pretty faithful recreation of the 1993 Gameboy title, I'm not counting it as a "new" Zelda game.)
Tears of the Kingdom is, like Breath of the Wild, a big open world game, which means that the "main quest" of the game is a relatively small fraction of what exists there. I could, of course, spend many more hours hunting down every shrine, doing every side quest, but I suspect that the assumption Nintendo has is that you'll only do part of it. (Unlike my obsessive Elden Ring playthroughs in which I've done nearly everything on like seven different characters).
I don't know if there's some secret scaling, but while I did complete all the Divine Beasts in Breath of the Wild, I never felt quite ready to go face off against Calamity Ganon, and kind of ran out of enthusiasm as every cool weapon I had lasted about long enough to kill a single monster. I wonder if I were to go back and play it again (and maybe do so on the Switch rather than the Wii U) I might enjoy it more. But then again, the games are so similar in presentation, gameplay, and the world itself that I suspect I'd only miss the innovations from Tears of the Kingdom.
Still, let's talk about the finale.
It's kind of embarrassing. After playing tons of Tears of the Kingdom, I've only now just noticed something that was kind of staring me in the face:
The Depths are the inverse of Hyrule.
Let's back up.
The first Zelda game I was ever really aware of was Link to the Past, though the first I played was Ocarina of Time. I got my N64 in 1997, only a year after I had gotten my SNES, so the two systems for me more or less overlapped - I'd buy used games from Funcoland (by the way, if you're young and don't remember Funcoland, imagine a cool little indie game store where they have a ton of consoles with the latest games running in banks along the walls so you can try them out, only as a national chain. Sadly, they got eaten up by Gamestop) and so, for example, after finding Samus to be my favorite Super Smash Bros. character, going back and picking up Super Metroid.
In A Link to the Past, the concept of it is that you have both the Light World and the Dark World. The Light World is your classic Hyrule, with Hyrule Castle at it center, while the Dark World is a once-beautiful Golden Land that was corrupted when Ganon seized the Triforce of Power. The Light World has plenty of enemies, but the Dark World is everything turned up to greater levels of spookiness, and has Ganon's Pyramid of Power in its center. The game uses these two worlds cleverly for some puzzles, where you might need to swap between them to get past barriers. It also divides the game into two distinct segments - the first part in which you have three dungeons to complete in the Light World, and the second part, in which there are I think eight dungeons in the Dark World (three of which occupy the same spots as the Light World ones).
Ocarina of Time would repeat this idea in a different way. The two versions of the world are separated instead by time, with Child Link going through an era in which there are problems, but overall Hyrule is at peace, and Adult Link in a world in which Castle Town has been utterly devastated and Ganondorf has destroyed Hyrule Castle and replaced it with his ominous floating fortress. Various parts of the world are different, like Zora's Domain flooding over or Lake Hylia draining.
Subsequent games didn't so much do this "two versions of the world" thing, though they did typically divide the main quest into two main phases, usually collecting some group of items from the first few dungeons and then a separate set of items from later ones. One could argue Skyward Sword had two versions of the world in the Sky and the ground level, but in practice this mainly allowed them to turn the ramp-up to the dungeons on the surface something of dungeons themselves (ironically the last game before Breath of the Wild was maybe their most restrictive, least open-world entry).
Anyway, given that Tears of the Kingdom largely reuses the same map from Breath of the Wild, I guess I wasn't thinking too much about this idea of a parallel world.
In fact, Tears of the Kingdom has three layers to its world - the surface, which is, again, mostly the same as it Breath of the Wild, and then the Sky, which is a bit more like Skyward Sword's sky area, having only a relatively small surface area of isolated sky islands that are tricky to get to, and then the Depths.
The closest equivalent to the Depths I can think of in other games I've played is The Maw from World of Warcraft's Shadowlands expansion - specifically in its first patch, before the Maw was made a little less hostile.
The Depths are taxing - there's no civilization to be found here, and it's hard to see. One of the biggest goals in exploring the Depths are to find the various Lightroots. Not only do these act as fast-travel locations, but their light both allows you to see farther (Brightbloom Seeds are a consumable and collectable resource that you can toss around the place to get reasonable lighting in a small area, but hte Lightroots are both permanent and have a far larger radius) and their light will cure Gloom, which prevents you from healing hearts that are affected. The Lightroots are also the only way to fill out your map - until you can get those giant beacons of light, you can't really see the overall layout of the surrounding area.
While perhaps not as hard-limited as the Maw was in WoW's 9.0 period, it'll take a while in Tears of the Kingdom before you can really afford to take extended trips to the Depths.
The Lightroots have odd names, but I realized only recently that the names are familiar if you spell them backwards. In fact, they are all the names of Shrines on the surface of Hyrule.
This has actually come out as a huge strategic hint for me in figuring out where Lightroots might be - if I look at my surface map and find a shrine I've discovered, I can just look directly below it and place a beacon and I'll find a Lightroot. I don't believe there's a similar connection to the ones on the Sky Islands, but this is still pretty helpful. Likewise, if a Lightroot is found in the depths, you can infer that there's a shrine above it on the surface.
Naturally, my interpretation here is that the Shrines and Lightroots are likely connected. The shrines seem to be a kind of purification and recycling system for magical power - taking evil magic and transforming it into healing light magic. And I think that the output, essentially, is in the Depths, pumping light into this place of darkness.
This realization about the connection between the Shrines and the Lightroots, though, led me to realize something else that had been staring me in the face:
The Depths are an exact inverse of the Surface.
I think the first thing that I realized was that you could find Bargainer Statues beneath all great goddess statues - the ones in the wellsprings of Wisdom, Courage, and Power, as well as the one in Hebra Canyon. But then you look at the Shrine/Lightroot connection, and then you look at the topography of the Depths.
The thing is, while the Skyview Towers give you a pretty enormous swath of the surface map - there are only like twelve of them - your map of the Depths requires pretty diligent Lightroot-hunting to get a big view of it.
But now that I've done a fair amount of that, the truth is revealed: the Depths' topography is the exact inverse of the Surface. Wherever there is a tall mountain in Hyrule, there's a deep pit. Where there's a canyon above, there's a giant ridge below.
This has led me to wonder something:
The Depths can be reached simply by diving into big holes in the ground - the "chasms," as the game refers to them. These take you through a pretty solid chunk of earth surrounded by gloom before you fall down into the Depths.
But what if that seemingly physical relationship is masking something bigger? What if we're actually traveling across dimensions?
What if the Depths is The Dark World?
Naturally, there are big differences here. The Dark World, for example, is a shadowy reflection of the Light World, but is physically similar. Death Mountain, for example, is a mountain in both versions (I also think it's uniquely called the same thing in both worlds. Both have a spooky woods, but the Lost Woods in the Light World is the Skeleton Woods in the Dark World.)
Still, it's not like Hyrule looks the same in Tears of the Kingdom as it did in A Link to the Past (while Death Mountain is still roughly in the northeast, Kakariko Village is almost exactly on the opposite side of the map). Zelda games tend to reimagine the world significantly between entries (with the Tears of the Kingdom probably the biggest exception when compared to Breath of the Wild).
The Depths even has its own weird skybox - a kind of brown-gold haze.
What is interesting, though, is that unlike the Dark World, which seems to, at the point we get to it in Link to the Past, be fully saturated in the dark sensibilities of Ganon, the Depths has evidence of less evil elements, like the various Zonai mines and processing centers, and the decidedly true neutral Bargainer statues (which, again, are placed in a position equivalent to the goddess Hylia on the Surface, suggesting that the Bargainer might be essentially the primary god of that realm. (The fact that a Bargainer statue speaks to us through a Hylia statue on that plateau where we wake up in Breath of the Wild raises all manner of disturbing questions.)
Unfortunately, the Depths is a little thin on detail. Compared with the surface world, it's pretty homogeneous in terms of aesthetic. Other than Zonai constructs and Yiga clan bases (appropriate to see them there given that the Yiga sigil is an upside down version of the Shiekah one) it's kind of all just gloom, desiccated/petrified trees, and gloom-empowered monsters. I could have imagined a version of the game in which the Depths were more fleshed out as a kind of mirror world to the Surface, but I think that they might not have been able to do as much with the sky islands.
Still, conceptually I find the Depths to be kind of fascinating.
