YMMV / Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Pages for other entries in the Compilation:

• Final Fantasy VII
• Before Crisis
• Advent Children
• Dirge of Cerberus
• Crisis Core
• Final Fantasy VII Remake
• Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis

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• Alternative Character Interpretation: Here.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The memetic "yellow paint" on the rock wall that Cloud scales actually resembles a species of lichen that's known for growing on just about anything - including and especially rocks.
• Annoying Video Game Helper:
  • Chadley has garnered some hate as when you gather intel, he constantly talks and interrupts the flow of gameplay while he explains the world to you.
  • MAI is this in and out of universe; she annoys players by talking non-stop during the fiend intel missions, which can be distracting, especially if you have the setting that sees both her and Chadley speaking directly out of the controller speaker, and irritating due to her high-pitched voice. Additionally, Chadley himself finds her annoying, in spite of being the one who created her.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: While disguised in Junon looking for soldiers from "your unit" to perform in the parade, one of the stops you can make is a bar that only serves bald people. And it just so happens that Rude is a regular there (and there when you arrive). They even have their own special "bald person salute" which involves making a squeaking sound off their bald heads. And they get very tense at the idea of non-bald people being in the bar. However, the tension drops when the people you are looking for realize who you are and go to meet up with the other soldiers you've picked up. The entire experience never comes up again.
• Breather Level:
  • Chapter 6 has only two battles (not including if you choose to use the simulator), and is mostly taken up by character interactions and minigames.
  • The Nibel Region is this for World Intel completion. The region is much smaller than the others and most of the intel objectives for Chadley are out in the open and fairly easy to reach. You can also find and tame the Chocobo of the region soon after arriving, which makes navigation much faster and easier. The only hiccup is that the Protorelic sidequest doesn't unlock until you progress the main quest in Nibelheim, but everything else can be done before ever setting foot in the town and it'll only take an hour or so.
• Catharsis Factor
  • After being a Karma Houdini in Remake, in Rebirth Don Corneo rides Abzu into battle against the party and players can treat him to some direct payback, and the fight ends with him once again losing and being sent scurrying away, but this time its in public and much more humiliating for him.
  • With her being even more bloodthirsty and cruel in this continuity, Scarlet is begging for punishment. Players get to dish it out to her twice using two different parties, crippling her beloved Crimson Mare again for good measure.
  • While the execution of the game's Gainax Ending is debated, it can't be denied that fighting and beating down Sephiroth with a party of Cloud and Aerith can feel very satisfying, especially after just witnessing him kill her again (or at least one version of her) by using a timeline distortion to "cheat" and subvert Cloud's attempt to save her. Making it even more cathartic is that Sephiroth is visibly angered before the fight, admitting that he underestimated Aerith, and afterwards he's even more angered and retreats.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Continuity Lockout: In addition to references to the original Final Fantasy VII's story being thrown out like candy, Rebirth makes reference to the events of Crisis Core, Before Crisis, Ever Crisis, and Trace of Two Pasts.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The deaths of the many Black Robed Men are a bit heartwrenching, as they are often killed with little regard. However, before entering Corel, the party reaches a raised bridge. One of the Men simply stares at the bridge before leaping off into the river below in an attempt to make it to the Reunion, cue an exasperated Barret yelling at them to just wait a moment while the party lowers the bridge, in the same tone a parent would use to scold their child.
• Demonic Spiders
  • Ogres have a Ground Pound attack that knocks characters around them into the air, can chain-stun them as the attack continues, and especially on Hard Mode deals heavy damage.
  • Levikrons and their variants can dig up rocks that they throw at characters for high damage, can pin characters to the ground and peck at them, and are fast and evasive.
  • Landworms and their variants burrow under the ground and suddenly erupt to swallow characters, removing them from battle until you stagger or kill the worm. If you're fighting more than one worm, each of them will swallow a character, leaving you alone. When they can't swallow someone, they'll still burrow and leap up to deal heavy damage with an attack that's tricky to block or dodge.
  • Moss-Grown Adamantoises will, when attacked, let out a blast of non-elemental energy that seeks out and explodes to deal heavy damage to party members. As they get enraged they not only begin using charging physical blows, but they emit more energy attacks more often when damaged, to the point there'll eventually be a non-stop barrage of attacks to avoid or else you can quickly be bombarded to death. They stop these counterattacks when pressured, but even if you can find an opening to muster enough of an offense to do it, they have a ton of HP and will grant themselves defensive buffs, making it unlikely that only one stagger will be enough to take them out of the fight.
  • The Gold Saucer battle challenges and Chadley's VR simulator make liberal use of many Elite Mooks that can create chaos and headaches for you.
    • The White Terror will slowly charge up to "Earsplitting Howl", which deals massive damage in a radius around it and spawns projectiles that seek out characters. Anyone who survives the initial blast will probably die to the projectiles before they can recover, and those outside the blast radius need to move fast to avoid the incoming fire.
    • King Zu will use Swan Song to charge up a massively powerful attack that is pretty much guaranteed to be a Total Party Kill. The only way to stop it is to cripple its two wings, which is easier said than done since while it charges it will constantly be spawning tornados to damage and stun you. Add in other enemies appearing alongside it in challenges, and killing the wings can be extremely tight. Even if you manage it, King Zu will just do it again eventually.
    • The Battle Square has a challenge titled "The Zoomies", where the first round has you fight 4 Lavalisks and 4 Velociwings. While normally not an issue on their own, these enemies together can combo you to death. If one manages to get a hit on you, another will follow up, leaving you little to no room to escape, let alone heal. Even worse, this is supposed to be your introduction to the Battle Square and it's labeled as "Easy".
• Ending Fatigue: Remember the multi-phase finale of Remake? Well, the final boss fight against Jenova Lifeclinger and Sephiroth in this game manages to out-do it. After Aerith's possible death, the final fight lasts for no less than twelve distinct phases, utilizing every playable character including alternate timeline Zack for two of them in set parties, culminating in a brutal fight against Sephiroth with only Cloud and some version of Aerith. Hopefully, you have enough decently levelled Materia to give to everyone, because there's only one chance to enter the menu about midway through to swap it around, and you don't know the party compositions ahead of time. Altogether, this can take at least one continuous hour of gameplay, and if you die, some retry options can send you back multiple phases, further adding to the time. Good luck!
• Ensemble Dark Horse: For being relatively minor characters, fans have taken a great liking to the Seventh Infantry, both the troops and their commander. For the commander, it's her professional appearance combined with her giddy reaction upon receiving the award, as well as her knowing full well Cloud's party consists of two members of the AVALANCHE terrorist group, a ninja from Wutai, one of Hojo's experiments, and a flower girl, with Cloud himself being an ex-SOLDIER turned traitor, but hides their involvement from her superiors, despite them essentially being enemies of Shinra and instead opts to inform her higher-ups that Seventh Infantry took down the fiend. As for the troops, it's their loyalty to Cloud and how they act as temporary party members. Fans have expressed a strong desire to protect them when they were party members, trying hard to not let a single one die. Even when reuniting with Cloud afterwards in a sidequest, they remain loyal to him, still referring to him as "Captain". People have also expressed an interest in seeing them again in the third game.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • Sephiroth's speech in the Summer Game Fest trailer has led to some circles theorizing that Tifa might be the one to die this time, namely because of the focus on Sephiroth stabbing Tifa during the Nibelheim incident and existing theories about how Sephiroth is his post-Advent Children self seeking to undo his defeat, with the idea being that Sephiroth would seek break Cloud even further than in the original game by killing Tifa, knowing her role in restoring Cloud's memories in the original game.
  • The presence of a comatose Aerith in the Game Awards trailer in Zack's timeline (the Terrier timeline) has sparked numerous theories about what would happen to said version of Aerith in the game itself, with the most popular theory being that the comatose Aerith in that timeline would end up serving as a body for Aerith from the main/Beagle timeline to attempt to transfer her consciousness to assuming her iconic death scene still plays out at the end of the game (or alternatively because she survives, but Sephiroth finds a way to banish her mind to the other timeline).
  • On the basis that Aerith performing a transfer of consciousness on her comatose Terrier self if Sephiroth impales her again being "too obvious", other group of fans have theorized that Aerith from the Terrier timeline would be the one to die this time around, and the last scene in the Game Awards trailer is not Sephiroth coming down on Aerith from the Beagle timeline but Aerith in the Terrier timeline instead. This is tied to a theory that the Whispers, which are hinted at in the trailer, are completely destroyed in Cloud's timeline, but may still exist in Zack's and may seek to ensure that events continue as normal there.
  • It has been commonly speculated that the comatose Cloud in Zack's timeline will fall under the influence of Sephiroth at a certain point in the story. This is due to a shot of a hooded figure heavily implied to be Cloud in an area also implied to be the Northern Crater at the Summer Game Fest trailer.
  • On the anti-sequel^note Meaning fans that consider the remake trilogy a true remake and all the supposed Stealth Sequel and Alternate Timeline elements to be a huge Red Herring side of the fanbase, both Zack's voiceover in the Game Awards trailer about feeling the pain of multiple bullets and recent developer statements from a Gameinformer article that through Zack's arc we will understand how the remake world works have been used to argue that Zack is indeed dead and that the Terrier timeline is actually a limbo/purgatory between the real world and the Lifestream in spite of living characters being present in multiple trailers. Ultimately though, any prospect that the Terrier timeline is purgatory gets debunked by the game itself, with Red XIII being shown to have been alive for a brief moment in Zack's timeline before dying there and Sephiroth claiming that many worlds can be accessed through the planet and is seeking to merge the worlds as part of his plans.
  • A particularly dark fan theory tied to that same corner of the fandom is that rather than regain mental composure long enough to not kill Aerith, resulting in Sephiroth doing the deed instead, Cloud has a full mental breakdown at the Forgotten Capital and will actually end up killing Aerith. Alternatively, he accidentally kills Aerith while trying to protect her from Sephiroth. Proponents of this theory claim that this can supposedly provide an explanation as to why Cloud was still grieving her and Zack's death in Advent Children.
  • The final shot of the Final trailer, showing Cloud lunging at Sephiroth in an area heavily implied to be the Forgotten Capital, has spurred theories that said scene shows Cloud actually trying to prevent Aerith's death rather than lashing out at Sephiroth because of her death. This was ultimately confirmed to have happened, through timeline distortions seem to have rendered Cloud's efforts in vain. Even then, the game makes it ambiguous if Cloud actually did save Aerith and said timeline distortions only removed her from the story, or if the distortions briefly warped Cloud to another timeline and he saved the Aerith there but not the one in his timeline.
  • Following up on the survival of Zack and the inclusion of Deepground in Remake and Intermission, the confirmation of Cissnei appearing in Rebirth and the play at the Gold Saucer being Retconned to instead be a production of LOVELESS has led to many theories about the possible return of Genesis Rhapsodos from Crisis Core. Given how Remake is heavily implied to be a Stealth Sequel to the original continuity, that the Sequel Hook at the end of Dirge of Cerberus built up Genesis' return in a potential sequel to VII, and that the remaster of Crisis Core done with Remake's assets was described as being something for fans to play prior to Rebirth, there are many details and plot elements pointing towards Genesis returning in some way or form, either solely as a superboss in VR, or as a major storyline character for the third part of the Remake trilogy. To a lesser extent, there are also theories that Zack's mentor, Angeal, will also return in some manner. Furthermore, the demo has a section in the Nibel reactor where Cloud leaves the room to turn a valve for a minute and when he returns there is a crashing sound, and some theorizing that Genesis made his Crisis Core appearance during this time.
  • Some players theorize that the Weapons in the reactors are Cloud and Aerith from the original game: the blue one for Cloud, and the pink one for Aerith, taking on these forms to help the party. The memories in the Lifestream are shown from Cloud's perspective, not Tifa's, and they don't actually say that Tifa is the one reliving her memories. There is also a place for the Nibelheim gate despite Tifa not knowing the significance the gate has to the two of them, the button presses to pass through the Black Whispers are identical to those that Cloud oftentimes has to go through, and Sephiroth impales the one carrying Tifa and cuts it in the shoulder, both injuries the original game's Cloud took from Sephiroth. The last part is that the Weapon only relinquishes Tifa to the party when Cloud comes to help, as though knowing that he must accept his place at her side after failing her.
  • Hours within the ending of the game being revealed, Aerith's presence around Cloud after her seeming death has been interpreted as anything from Cloud fantasizing her being there and unwilling to accept her death, a Jenova-induced projection to break him further, him being able to perceive her spirit due to a strong bond with Aerith (with the implication that Aerith will play a bigger role Part in 3 despite her death with common theories being elements of Maiden Who Travels the Planet being incorporated into the final game and Aerith helping Tifa out during the Lifestream sequence), a combination of the above points (Cloud seeing Aerith's spirit but thinking her to be still alive), or even Cloud either being briefly teleported to another timeline due to time distortions where he was able to save Aerith, but not in his timeline, or even managing to save her in his timeline only for timeline distortions to remove her from the Beagle timeline and replace her with an Aerith from a timeline where he failed, with only him and potentially Red XIII knowing the truth. Her iconic water burial from the original being skipped lends credence to all of the above.
  • Relatedly, how much of the ending is from Cloud's perspective or Tifa's? As sections of the ending is apparently from her perspective, as she sees Aerith's blood disappear and reappear without seeing her face, whether or not Tifa seeing nothing next to Cloud when he sees Aerith is normal or a clue that she knows Aerith is not actually there, seemingly hinting that her time in the Lifestream in Gongaga gave her a connection to the distortions. Rather prominently, she is the only character to go from sad at the capital to worse at the Bronco.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The enemy skill materia is far stronger in this game. The first skill, Sonic Boom, is a powerful wind attack that confers an automatic Bravery and Faith buff for just one bar. The Soothing Breeze enemy skill, which can be gained as early as chapter 4, even on your first playthrough, and heals the party with a pulsing area of effect channelled ability. While it does have a Necessary Drawback of having the party member stand still while using the ability and enemies can disrupt it, you can even time it to use it at the end of a battle and heal your entire party back up to full. For the cost of a single ATB bar. On top of all that, mastering the materia gives you an automatic boost to all the good stats for a nice kick.
  • Any elemental attack skills (Wildfire, Snow Flurry, etc.) are incredibly useful because they allow the player to hit enemy weaknesses without consuming any MP, making longer stretches of the game without any benches much more manageable.
  • Yuffie's Ninjutsu excels at filling enemy stagger gauges and filling her ATB bar. Additionally, it can be switched between every element, so it can always hit an elemental weakness when available. And if that weren't enough for you, throw in the Doppleganger skill, which doubles her output.
  • Yuffie's Brumal Form, ATB assist, Skill master and Aerith's ATB ward combination is found to be disgustingly overpowered. ATB assist allows one member to give the other characters a boost to their bars when that character makes a move, Skill master allows a character a new bar when they repeat the same skill, combined with the low cost and high speed of Brumal Form under the ATB ward and a haste boost for good measure, one can have Yuffie in an unending loop of Brumal Form while filling the other two members at a rate of about six seconds, which is often times just long enough for them to be done using the last skill they used. Add in Aerith using Arcane Ward on herself and equipping her with Genji Gloves to break the damage limit, and the hardest group content will be annihilated, as Aerith repeatedly blasts enemies to pieces with endless -aga spells hitting for tens of thousands of damage each time.
  • Aerith's Level 3 Limit Rising Fury is a reimagining of Fury Band and works just as it did, filling the Limit gauges of the other two party members. Add in her passives to boost her Limit charge rate when expending MP, and Aerith can repeatedly top off the Limit bars of her allies and let them spam them freely. The only hiccup is getting her Limit Level to 3 so she can use Rising Fury, but not only is this easy with the right set-up, there's also an accessory that will max out her Limit Level every battle. It's also possible to use a materia ability to siphon the Limit Break gauge from other party members, allowing for infinite Limit Breaks since Aerith can fill the bars of the other two party members, have one use their Limit Break, then siphon the remaining one back off to recast Rising Fury to repeat the process.
  • While it requires very high levels of timing and skill, the HP<>MP materia allows the game to be completely broken. As this sounds, it swaps HP and MP values. While this might seem like a waste of time, when combined with other game mechanics this is where things get crazy. Firstly, parrying at the right time negates all damage. However, for Limit Break purposes it still charges the gauge as if you took damage, and because health is so low it charges the gauge a lot. A few parries and you have a Limit Break. Next: invincibility frame abuse. While using a Limit Break you are invincible, however similar to parrying it will charge the Limit gauge as if you took damage normally, meaning you can use a Limit Break to block incoming damage, and you instantly get another Limit Break. The end result is either dying horribly... or something like this.
  • For the Queen's Blood minigame, the Fat Chocobo card is disgustingly overpowered. While it needs to be placed in a rank 3 spot and packs the expected 5 power, its true power is the ability to buff adjacent lanes or any cards placed after it on its own lane if placed correctly. With one solid placement, the opposing players will constantly lock up in realizing they can't play anything to win, because it will often overpower your other cards to absurd degrees and seize the lanes. Even better, it's a Disc-One Nuke because you can buy it from the final opponent of the Grasslands for a mere 500 gil.
  • Also for Queen's Blood, there are several cards that start out weak but get a power boost as cards are destroyed, variably yours or your opponent's (and a couple get a boost for both, but a smaller one). Against high-level opponents these cards become ridiculously powerful because many opponents use replace cards (cards played over a card of theirs already in play, and the original is considered destroyed) and enfeeblement cards, letting you turn their advantage into yours.
    • Particular mention to the Tonberry King, who can be gotten into play very early and gets +2 power every time one of your cards is destroyed; players quickly figured out that when paired with a Mindflayer card (which continuously enfeebles cards in its squares by 1), you can just continuously feed low-level cards to the Mindflayer to let them be destroyed and power up the Tonberry King. Utilized properly, the Tonberry King will reach such absurd levels of power that you only need to claim the lane you placed it in to rake in enough points to win the match, and if you can get a second in play or have a method to power up the other lanes alongside it, your score can hit triple digits.
• Ho Yay: Continuing on from Remake, Tifa and Aerith are as intimate as ever. The very first conversation between the two has Tifa massage Aerith's back, and they spend a lot of time together throughout the game, including hitting the streets of Costa del Sol together in what the game explicitly labels a date; and the Gold Saucer date scenes where Cloud ends up with Yuffie has them ride the Skywheel together. When Tifa nearly dies after being eaten by a Weapon, it is Aerith whose face she sees most clearly encouraging her to keep on living. In the end, Tifa is the most inconsolable about Aerith's apparent death.
• I Knew It!:
  • Even before official confirmation, a vast chunk of fans predicted that Wutai would be saved for Part 3 due to the extremely optional nature of visiting it in Disk 1 in the original game.
  • A sizable chunk of fans that ship Cloud and Aerith together and/or feel Hollow was about Cloud’s guilt at not saving Aerith in the original game speculated for a long time that Rebirth’s theme song would be sung by Aerith. They were proven right with the Game Awards trailer.
  • A fair chunk of fans predicted that Cissnei would appear in Rebirth due to Zack joining the cast in the previous entry. This was confirmed with the release of the final trailer.
  • Even before a single detail was known about the story, many fans were predicting a Gainax Ending for the game for several reasons: (A) it's part two of a confirmed three-part series, so this game's narrative can't possibly resolve every conflict; (B) both Remake and Rebirth establish that multiple timelines and twists of fate are in play, and (C) endings that raise as many questions as they answer is something of a Creator Thumbprint for creative director Tetsuya Nomura. Sure enough, the ending of Rebirth contains Mind Screw elements to it while raising a lot of questions for the trilogy's final act.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: There are those who felt disappointed that despite the set up in Remake that fate could be changed, the game still largely hits the same beats as the original game, up to (possibly) Aerith still dying at Sephiroth's hands. There is enough ambiguity to what happened that it's possible the third part is where the story will really go Off the Rails, but there were many who were hoping that Rebirth would forge its own original story path.
• Magnificent Bastard: Tseng returns. See here for more details.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The September State of Play trailer briefly shows Cloud riding a Segway. There were soon memes of Sephiroth competing with Cloud by having a taller segway being the length of his Masamune. Even better is that this isn't the only 2024 RPG that will have a main character on a segway in a sunny beach town.
  • Relatedly, Red XIII riding a chocobo in a strangely humanoid seated position.
  • "Yellow Paint", referring to a segment in which Cloud climbs a rock wall that has what looks like yellow paint blotched around - this has extended to people realizing just how many games from every period of gaming have used bright yellow/gold colors to draw players in certain directions.
  • Speedrunning the Barret date.^ExplanationCloud can go through Tifa's wardrobe, which resulted in both Tifa and Aerith calling him an "asshole". Due to the nature of Relationship Values in Rebirth, the reaction to this moment from fans was that it was an easy way to do the Gold Saucer date with Barret.
  • Cloud still got love for the streets, reppin' Sector 7. ^Explanation When it was discovered that the pianos in-game could be played like a real one, numerous videos flooded the internet of Cloud playing everything from Céline Dion to Dr. Dre.
  • Sephiroth being Cloud's wingman. ^ExplanationThoughout the game, Sephiroth gaslights Cloud into thinking Tifa isn't real. Tifa's response both times she is asked is to show him her scar bellow her breasts, causing her to lift her shirt and sports bra. Fans joke that Sephiroth is doing Cloud a solid by getting him to make Tifa show her boobs.
  • Queen's Blood, owing to its nature as a collectable card battling game that people the world over play, has invited many jokes comparing it to Yu-Gi-Oh!.
  • Kid G the Gobhog ^ExplanationKid G is a friendly goblin NPC in the Corel region who many accuse of being an expy of Sonic the Hedgehog due to him being a carefree, spunky, and sarcastic character who moves at high speeds and packs a mean punch in a fight.
  • "Guide me, O Tifa." / "Come, my child." ^ExplanationDuring their date in Costa Del Sol, you can freely switch control between Aerith and Tifa, and they have a brief exchange whenever they do telling the other to take the lead. These two lines in particular though caught notice for being funny and fueling the Ho Yay they share.
  • Cloud's getting some under the Highwind next game ^ExplanationIn Tifa's intimate date during Chapter 12, Cloud expresses his feelings and kisses her. Many note that if they are going that far in this game, their night under the Highwind is probably going to go even further, depicting them having, likely censored, sex.
• Narm:
  • While the razing of Nibelheim in the prologue was generally well-received, one particular moment is awkward. After his house is blown up and Cloud begins crawling after Sephiroth, the camera shows Sephiroth walking on only to be stopped by the mayor of the town and three townsfolk, who are all pointing rifles at him. Despite the fact the town is in flames, people are bloody and dead in the streets, and they know Sephiroth is responsible, they don't immediately shoot him on-sight, instead they just point their guns at him and nervously spread out as he just stands there. They don't attempt to keep their distance from him so he can't attack them, and don't shoot even when he starts slicing them down one by one, making them look like incompetent fools literally lining up to get slaughtered. To act to the awkwardness, the scene is a quicktime event that requires players to cycle holding L2 and R2 to crawl closer, and if they delay the scene drags out even longer without Sephiroth or the townsfolk doing anything.
  • During the segment where Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith are disguised as Shinra troopers, Cloud's model still shows his equipped weapon. No one in Shinra has any reaction to the fact that a common trooper is carrying a massive sword on his back, even though that's the sort of thing that should stick out.
  • Yuffie's assassination attempt of Rufus requires the player to focus a target cursor on him three times. What makes an otherwise tense scene silly is two things. One - Yuffie can overhear Rufus talking to the party members, but they barely talk long enough for the first target to be aligned, after that the four standing in place staring at each other without a word, as though they're waiting for Yuffie to finish so the scene can progress. Two - players may recognize the targeting system used for this sequence is the same one used for darts in Remake, and the idea of a fun minigame and an assassination attempt using the same mechanics is worth a laugh.
  • The Final Boss of the game has several attacks that manifest Whispers. Sometimes this works, like sending out one to ensnare a party member, or having them burst out in the wake of another attack. However, the boss can also conjure tornadoes of them, summon pillars of them from the ground, and perhaps most silly of all, fire a continuous wave of them from their hands like a Kamehame Hadoken. It looks more than a little ridiculous in what is otherwise an epic confrontation.
  • The fact that the party were subdued by a bunch of random Mooks after first arriving in the Dustbowl AKA Corel Prison. Granted, it was an ambush, but when you consider that the party has fought their way through far worse throughout their adventures and are each individuals with great physical and magical prowess, it makes them look insanely careless. Even worse, they're all strong-armed into a jail cell and Cloud is forced to abide by the thugs' leader Solemn Gus' rules to win him some money by winning a chocobo race. You'd half expect them to have been caught deliberately as a ploy to gain more intel on Barret's whereabouts, then breakout, but no. The whole hostage situation is played straight and they're only freed once Cloud wins the race.
  • Over the course of the game, the party proceed to run into almost every noteworthy NPC that they met over the course of the previous game. Whilst some are justified, it happens in every region except Nibel and ultimately just makes the world feel smaller.
  • Side quests naturally have reduced development resources, and this clearly shows in several places. Because only specific party members relevant to the questline will react, this means multiple occasions where other teammates are standing around idly in the background of scenes, completely unresponsive to anything that occurs whether the situation is funny or serious, even when it would be in their characterisation to react and join in. This has the unfortunate result of making otherwise complicated, well-written, fleshed-out characters come across as unthinking NPCs only responding when programmed, and detracts from the genuinely good writing on display.
• Narm Charm
  • Queen's Blood is a card battling game that has drawn comparisons to Yu-Gi-Oh! for its premise and how seriously people take it, and the developers seem to have intended that to happen, to the point the climax of the subplot — the spirit of the Shadowblood Queen manifests from her card and possesses Regina to challenge Cloud to a final showdown, and is defeated and sealed back in her card for good — would not be at all out of place in that franchise. For fans of Yu-Gi-Oh! however, Queen's Blood going all-in on the similarities means it brings with it all the fun, silliness, and epicness of the other franchise, and heartily embrace the cheese.
  • The player can invoke this when playing New Game Plus, where you can play with characters dressed up in their out-of-place costumes in the course of the normal game. Barret's emotional confrontation with Dyne goes over very differently if you play it out while he's dressed in his sailor's uniform.
• Older Than They Think:
  • While certain segments of the fandom took umbrage at the overt focus on Aerith and Cloud's date in the Game Awards 2023 trailer, traditionally Aerith has mostly been marketed alongside Cloud with regards to the OG and in both Compilation and spin-off material, this being prevalent even after Crisis Core expanded further on her relationship with Zack.
  • Many also took issues with the design of the Moogles in Rebirth. However, Moogles were also showed in Remake with the same design. Though in that game, they're almost completely absent outside of the Chocobo & Mog summon and as a minion in the Fat Chocobo boss fight.
  • A number of players had a Double Take at hearing Red's/Nanaki's real voice and took umbrage with it, claiming that Rebirth had somehow taken creative liberties that disrespect his depiction in the original game. But Nanaki is a teenager by his species' standards even in the original Final Fantasy VII and used a different inflection and style of speech to be taken seriously (though due to the difference between Japanese and English, it would be hard to properly reflect in the original given lack of voice acting even if the original's translation didn't have dubious choices). Max Mittelman's performance reflects this now that Nanaki is in a fully voiced game.
• Padding: While the game is much better about its pacing than Remake (owing naturally to the party's adventures across the Planet in the original game covering a much longer timeframe than just Midgar, thus things don't need to be stretched as much), there are still spots where the story is artificially lengthened.
  • The Queen's Blood tournament aboard the Shinra-8 doesn't really serve much of a purpose story-wise. Thankfully, it isn't forced and can be skipped over.
  • Cloud and the gang aren't allowed on the beach in Costa del Sol without proper beachwear. This translates to having to play three minigames (one each for Cloud, Aerith, and Tifa) before you're allowed to progress through the story.
  • The trip across Mt. Corel was fairly short in the original game, a simple path over the old mine tracks with a couple minor puzzles along the way. Mt. Corel is a much larger area in Rebirth encompassing a fairly long hike, and at the abandoned mako reactor along the way the party has to take a break to find a way to lower the minecart bridge, which means a trip into an abandoned coal mine to reach the switch.
  • Rebirth changes the party's reason for visiting Nibelheim from just being the pursuit of Sephiroth to needing to access a Shinra database terminal in the abandoned manor. To get into the manor, Cloud and a couple of his allies head up Mt. Nibel to the reactor so they can get his keycard, and Cloud inserts it into a terminal so Cait Sith can scan it. While this is keeping in the original game also having you climb Mt. Nibel, once Cait Sith and those with him enter the manor, they encounter an AI of Hojo who drops them into his abandoned lab. What follows is a dungeon that is both unnecessary and annoying as the group fights their way past Hojo's leftover experiments to escape. The only purpose it serves is to let Cait Sith be the party leader for a chance, and to basically stall his group while Cloud and company make their way back down the mountain to meet up with them.
  • The battle in the Gold Saucer for the Keystone is padded out with a rematch with Rude and Elena, and then Cloud vs Rufus. Neither fight serves any point but to lengthen what would otherwise be a fairly short chapter, and the same result as the original game happens anyway.
  • While its length is understandable given that it serves as the Very Definitely Final Dungeon, the Temple of the Ancients is very long, taking up the entirety of Chapter 13's story progression. The first part where you explore the gravity-shifting temple is long enough on its own, but soon after the party is split up between Cloud and Aerith, and each of them explores the next chapter of the temple separately with each of their segments being just as long as the first, and Aerith's part requires you to explore the temple for objects to break and enemies to fight so she can absorb lifestream from them which is necessary to progress further. When the two parties eventually reunite there's another section to the temple to go, just as long as the first one, and finally a (thankfully brief) escape sequence. And naturally, each of these four segments has a full boss fight at the end.
• Paranoia Fuel: In the Summer Game Fest trailer, Sephiroth's speech on Jenova's nature and him implying that Tifa is dead and the one in the party is a Jenova duplicate. Is he telling the truth, or is he playing his twisted mind games on Cloud like he enjoys doing? She wasn't a duplicate in the original game (with the exception of one short scene where Sephiroth impersonated her to distract to distract the holder of the Black Materia, either Red or Barret), but given how the previous game has already shown how much this new trilogy is willing to change...
  Sephiroth: They say she's a monster... that she can peer inside you... into the very depths of your soul. That she can become those you hate... those you fear... those you love. [...] You know that I killed her. So, who is she?
• Salvaged Gameplay Mechanic:
  • One of the major criticisms of bosses in Remake is that their scripted phase changes or cutscenes can occur in the middle of attacks, halting the pace of the battle just as you began to get momentum going and letting the boss recover before your attacks get to do their full damage. In Rebirth, bosses now change phases when their health falls within a range of their HP bar, not a set point, and the range is pretty large for many of them. This means that you have more freedom to wail on the boss and do as much damage as you can before they phase change, or you may trigger their phase change earlier than normal before you begin to get serious, either way the change is less intrusive and not as unintentionally punishing for the player. The mechanic is not removed entirely and bosses will become invincible if pushed to very low HP before they phase change, to ensure you can't completely kill them before they do, but it's still much more lenient than in Remake.
  • Another criticism of Remake's combat was losing ATB and MP when commands and spells were interrupted. This can still happen, but the game is more lenient and characters will often carry out the selected command after an interruption, unless stunned completely. MP is now only lost when the spell is actually cast instead of when the command is queued, so you would have to be unlucky and cast a spell as a phase change occurs to lose out.
• Salvaged Story:
  • Tifa in the original game has been often criticized for not confronting Cloud about his inconsistent memories of Nibelheim and keeping the anomaly to herself. Here, she does considerably more to at least get to the bottom of the issue, not only confiding in Aerith but also attempting to question Cloud a number of times, though she eventually stops upon figuring out that it may only end up further harming his already fragile mental state, acknowledging they were both in the dark over Nibelheim. The game is also more upfront about exploring Tifa's personality flaw of wanting to be a people pleaser rather than facing the hard but necessary truth, resulting in her failure to help Cloud sort out his memory issues while keeping the others in the dark about what she knows, hence their being unable to help as well.
  • In the original, Cait Sith often got flak for not only forcing himself into the group but also blackmailing the other party members into letting him stay by threatening harm upon Marlene. Here, he never makes a move against Barret's daughter, and instead earns the party's trust through more sincere actions like finding Barret in the Gold Saucer. It helps that the person behind Cait, Reeve, also gets Adaptational Herosim by being shown working behind-the-scenes to assist the party as well, such as altering their wanted posters.
  • Cid's bad temperament and awful treatment of Shera have gotten more and more criticism over the years for aging very poorly. While his relationship with Shera isn’t seen here, he’s shown to be a lot nicer while keeping his rough demeanor.
  • Some find it hard to believe that Shinra, especially executives like Rufus, wouldn't notice the party infiltrating Junon in disguise and Cloud conversing with Rufus without issues. In this, Shinra are fully aware of Avalanche's break-in, with Rufus allowing it to happen so he can make Cloud an offer he can’t refuse.
  • In the original game, the Turks were often depicted as having a frenemies relationship with the party, despite being responsible for dropping the plate that destroyed Sector 7, killing their friends and destroying their livelihoods. In Rebirth, the party's displeasure whenever encountering the Turks is more pronounced, with them bringing up the Turks' cruel actions in Remake.
  • The origin of the Black Materia was unclear in the original, but it was implied to be a creation of the Cetra. This led many fans to wonder why the protectors of the planet would create something with the sole purpose of destroying it. Rebirth changes its backstory to being a creation of the Gi, who are extra-terrestrials and therefore unable to enter the Lifestream upon death. Rebuffed by the Cetra, they corrupted sacred materia out of spite and in order to end their practically undead existence. The Cetra merely stole the Black Materia and hid it in order to keep the Gi from using it.
• Scrappy Mechanic
  • The Retry screen for boss battles has gotten some flak for its unintuitive options; "Retry from Before Current Battle", "Retry from This Battle", and "Retry from Before Battle". What these options mean is that in a Boss Rush (or some bosses with multiple phases), you can retry from the start of the current boss, retry from the start of the Boss Rush, or retry from the point you had control of the party before the Boss Rush began. While all of these options may be desirable depending on circumstances, the awkward wording has been criticized, and many players advise "just pick the top option". Thankfully the developers took notice and a month after release a patch changed the descriptions to be more straightforward.
  • As in Remake, it's possible for characters to get hit as they're charging attacks and they lose their ATB gauge and/or MP spent on that attack. But in Rebirth, now this can also happen to Synergy Attacks if someone is KO'd as they start to use them, and depending on when in the animation they're KO'd, the attack may simply be canceled or it'll be considered "used", meaning the characters lose their Synergy charges and the next usage of that ability costs more synergy to use. And while Limit Breaks give the user invincibility while they execute, Synergy abilities do not, and though they usually interrupt enemies they hit, enemies not being hit can still attack and there is a few seconds during the start-up where the Synergy ability has not yet interrupted the target, and once again the ability will be considered "used" if someone is KO'd. Finally, there's the issue of bosses with cinematic attacks - even if you order your Synergy command before the boss calls out the cinematic attack, if the Synergy ability doesn't interrupt them and the cinematic attack goes off, the Synergy ability won't get to finish and your characters won't get the benefits from it.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: While the game starts out easier than Remake due to you having a full party, Synergy abilities, and the opportunity to buy proper supplies for them before you leave Kalm, the game stops pulling its punches once you reach Midgardsormr. Normal difficulty is considerably more challenging than Normal on Remake was, with many more enemy types that demand you pay attention to their attack patterns and elemental/status vulnerabilities, bosses that can wipe out the party in one attack, and sidequests that can be just as challenging as the main quest even if they're unlocked at the same point in progression. You'll also need to learn how to make use of those Synergy abilities properly, because a lot of bosses can only be pressured by their usage, and the Refocus ability and the party's higher-level Limit Breaks require Synergy skills to access each fight. Things are even worse in Hard Mode's optional combat challenges, which are far harder than their equivalent fights in Remake. You'll be pitted against wave after wave of Elite Mooks, bosses, pairs of Elite Mooks and Bosses, and even a virtual recreation of Sephiroth, effectively pitting you against an even stronger version of the game's Final Boss.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat: Shipping wars over if Cloud should be with Tifa or Aerith, and if either girl truly loves him and he them, go back all the way to the original game, and Rebirth has only stoked the fires hotter than ever. For those supporting Cloud with Tifa, they actually kiss in the "intimate" version of their Gold Saucer date, the first time Cloud has ever kissed either of them. For those supporting Cloud with Aerith, they don't kiss, but instead hold hands with Intertwined Fingers, which is definitely a strong romantic gesture of its own, particularly in Japanese works. Regardless of the player's affection choices or Gold Saucer date, in the ending Cloud and Aerith go on a "date" in a parallel version of Midgar while an instrumental version of "No Promises to Keep" (titled "One Last Date - My Dream") plays throughout the sequence, and hold hands and intertwine fingers again before she fades away after the boss battle with Sephiroth. Finally, the other Gold Saucer dates still feature one of the two girls as the topic of conversation (though Barret's is only implicitly referring to Aerith, and could be taken more generally), with Yuffie teasing Cloud about Tifa having a crush on him and Red XIII making a Declaration of Protection towards Aerith with Cloud. Far from definitively "killing" either of the two ships, Rebirth has given them both more fuel than ever. The relationship between Zack and Aerith also goes unresolved, as while both are alive in the alternate timeline Aerith remains in a coma throughout all of Zack's story segments, though he is informed about Aerith's feelings for Cloud by Marlene and reacts supportively.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • The device Chadley gives Cloud to remotely contact him and scan the environments or mess with certain towers has a video screen mode to speak with Chadley and a new AI called MAI. The problem is the video conversations are blatantly just animated images rather than any real video feed, and considering the game actually has surprisingly good lip sync even for random people in the streets, it becomes blatant that nothing these two say even remotely synchronizes with their actual dialogue.
  • One of the big complaints of the game's visuals is that by virtue of using a heavily customized build of Unreal Engine 4 derived from Remake's development, the game lacks a proper sense of global illumination or lighting shaders in anything that isn't directly sunlit regions. The results can be jarring, going from Scenery Porn to seeing an entire portion of an area where everything is flat and looks like there's no lighting whatsoever, and it's a frequent issue throughout the whole of the game besides major cutscenes.
  • The water, while impressive from a distance, is rather noticeably stiff and doesn't interact with anything in it at all. This is especially obvious in the Under Junon cutscenes with Mr. Dolphin, the Terror of the Deep and Yuffie, where much splashing about happens, but the water remains perfectly flat. This is referenced by Cid in the boat'd Tiny Bronco, who complains that the entire Meridian Ocean doesn't have even one little wave to challenge him.
  • In New Game Plus you have the option to switch the outfits of party members. Understandably the developers didn't motion capture these alternate outfits and did it using the base outfits, which can result in oddities like Tifa doing animations for adjusting her gloves when she isn't wearing any, Yuffie resting her hand an inch above objects because her gauntlet is normally covering her hand, and so forth.
  • In scenes where party members interact with beds, primarily the night in Kalm in Chapter 2 and the comatose Aerith in the Zack interlude scenes, the characters do not interact with the comforters shown on the beds at all; they lay on top of the comforter and have a seperate, much more plain blanket that shifts around as the character using it turns and moves, which then disappears when no longer needed. This is a consequence of cutscenes in the game being made with the game engine, where beds and the blankets on them are immovable props.
  • Continuing a problem from Remake, Barret's gunfire is streams of fire overlayed where the top barrel of the Gatling Gun is. While most of his weapons are still modeled to use the same approximate area, it creates oddities when he uses his last weapon that has the barrel in the middle of the gun not the top, creating an effect where fire comes out a place the gun doesn't have a barrel and not utilizing his actual opening.
• Spiritual Successor: Much like VII Remake being this trope towards Final Fantasy XIII beforehand,^note A linear trek through a city that culminates in the main party defying fate by defeating two Final Bosses in quick succession, Rebirth is one for Final Fantasy XIII-2; both are Wide Open Sandboxes involving the main characters hunting the Big Bad, and both end with a female party member dying (though more of an ambiguous case here) despite attempts to avert You Can't Fight Fate, and two Marathon Bosses in quick succession. They even share Gilgamesh as a Super Boss!
• Squick:
  • Some critics—particularly in the West—took to social media to complain about Yuffie, who is sixteen years old—opining that her midriff-bearing clothing and shorts were too sexualized, that a child shouldn't be the butt of somewhat risqué Accidental Pervert and Covert Pervert jokes, and that Cloud being able to go on a date with her crossed a line. While players could have Cloud date Yuffie in the original game, he was almost silent during their date which gave the implication that he wasn't interested in her that way, but in Rebirth they get an Almost Kiss during the performance of LOVELESS and their gondola ride has him converse with her more, both of which make it easier to interpret that he is interested in her.
  • While watching the carnage aboard the Shinra-8, Hojo is astounded by the mutations of the men in black and wants to study their genetic structure. During Costa del Sol, Hojo remarks to his attendants that he has need of female assistants to help birth a new hero. Considering how Sephiroth was made, he all but says he wants to use them to literally give birth to a Jenova-infused child by having them breed with the mutated men. At least he is pragmatic enough not to force the issue, but when the Grasptropod captures Tifa, he makes the same offer and drops her in the tank with the mutants, the subtext being this is the way he wants to do it.
• Tainted by the Preview:
  • The announcement that Vincent Valentine wouldn't be a full party member in the game and that players would have to wait until the third and final part to play as him was met with some disappointment, given his popularity among fans of VII and the series in general.
  • Multiple recent statements that the story will "not be overly altered" have not gone well with proponents of the theory that the Remake trilogy is a Stealth Sequel over a true remake. While the developers have made multiple similar comments in the past, they were generally seen as disingenuous. This time however, these comments were combined with claims by the devs that "fan reactions" were taken into consideration when developing both Rebirth and Part 3, discussion about "linking up" with Advent Children, comments being interpreted as "most of the big mysteries will occur on Zack's end, whereas Cloud follows the same path as the OG", and the excessive showcasing of Aerith's fate in pre-release marketing to the point where her character could be seen as having multiple death flags^note Narrative warning signs that a character would die. This all led to fears that the developers walked back on the idea of a Stealth Sequel due to backlash at the ending of Remake and confusion as to how they can even reconcile Remake's plot developments with the OG. That said, the announcement of theatrical re-releases of Advent Children (actually the Complete version)^note Which would end up spoiling many of the plot developments for the Original Game, including Aerith's death. in Japan and the West has re-ignited hopes in these circles that the developers are planning big narrative divergences. The game ultimately does not resolve the question of whether the game is a true remake/reimagining or not. This is because, on one hand, it expands further on the idea of alternate timelines and debunks many of the more popular theories among the segment of the fanbase that believes the game to be a true remake^note such as the idea that Zack's world was a limbo for dead characters, and on the other hand, Cloud's party do go through mostly the same flow of events and Aerith's fate is seemingly unchanged. That said, her fate is framed in a much more ambiguous way that allows for interpretations that she will continue to interact with the party in some manner.
  • The same crowd do not like the idea of the Whispers being a persistent threat for the party, believing that they should have all been destroyed in remake and the only reason that they continue to exist is due Square not fully committing to diverging from the original game and seeking to keep them around as a means to push the story back on the tracks of the original game if they were to walk back on making big divergences to the story.
  • In general, the statements from developers that they "take fan responses seriously" to the point of said viewpoints influencing the story and not just the gameplay has led to concerns that both Rebirth and the final game of the trilogy will have their entire plots be dependent on a whim on purely pandering to which fan circle shouts the loudest over considering what is the best way forward from a narrative/writing perspective.
  • The 2023 Game Award trailer extensively showcasing Aerith's Gold Saucer date with Cloud has not gone well with a sizable chunk of Cloud/Tifa shippers, with claims being thrown around that Tifa was being sidelined completely in favor of Aerith in spite of multiple developer statements that the outcome of the Gold Saucer date was still dependent on player choice as with the original game. Some have even gone on to claim that the trailer made both Aerith and Cloud look like awful individuals by "cheating on" Zack and Tifa respectively with each other. That said, these sentiments aren't universal among Cloud/Tifa shippers in part due to that segment of the fanbase mostly viewing the Remake trilogy to be a true remake over a Stealth Sequel, with other such shippers believing that the showcasing of Aerith in that trailer is more likely tied to her imminent death over a developer statement being made on the love triangle in her favor, and that all of Part 3's marketing would be tilted towards Cloud and Tifa with Aerith out of the picture. The 2024 State of Play seemed to have alleviated some of these concerns in these circles due to the gameplay features segment featuring player choices affecting Cloud's relationship with Tifa as well as showcasing her date at the Gold Saucer, and the final trailer showcasing a tender moment between Zack and a comatose Aerith in the Terrier timeline, and Cloud/Tifa shippers were overall pleased to see a Big Damn Kiss in Cloud and Tifa's date in the Gold Saucer in the game itself.
  • When the demo revealed the scene of Cloud possibly stealing a pair of Tifa's panties—transliterated as "Orthopedic Underwear" in the English localization—was changed to him simply going through her wardrobe, some fans of the original game took to social media to complain that this was a sign that Square-Enix was ruining the game by catering to "woke" Western sensibilities. Others thought that the scene—particularly Aerith joining Tifa in berating Cloud—was even funnier than the original.
• That One Achievement:
  • The "Piano Virtuoso" trophy requires getting at least an A rank on all six songs found in the game, which can be quite tricky to earn on the more difficult songs.
  • The "Stealing the Show" trophy can be an absolute nightmare. The requirement is to get at least 100,000 points across three segments. While that doesn't sound bad, you have to pick the formations with the hardest difficulties. You can mess up once or twice and still get the trophy, but only a few times. Made even harder as there's a lot of movement and the angle of the prompts can be difficult to read, making the timing difficult. If you mess up a few times too many, you can restart, but it sends you to just before the parade, when Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith give their speech to the troops.
  • The "7-Star Hotel" trophy requires donating every item to Johnny's treasure trove, which not only requires the prior completion of both the "Piano Virtuoso" and "Stealing The Show" trophies detailed above, but also requires the player complete every combat trial, every chocobo race, every Queen's Blood game and challenge, every Moogle challenge, every side quest, every photography challenge, every mini-game on both normal and (if there is one) hard mode, get an S rank in the "Loveless" play with each of the female party members in the role of Rosa, find every Play Arts model hidden on the world map, get an A rank in every Glide de Chocobo challenge, defeat Jules in the sit-up mini game, keep all of the Seventh alive during Chapter 4, take a perfect photo when prompted during Chapter 4, and destroy 10 boxes on a conveyor belt whilst controlling Cait Sith during Chapter 11 - some of which provide no incentive towards their completion other than contributing to this trophy.
• That One Boss:
  • The Jenova Emergent has already gotten this level of infamy from the fanbase. It's a giant horrific monster whose first phase is almost entirely dependent on ranged attacks. With Barret being a permanent member of the party for this fight, you'd think that'd make it easy, right? Only if your dodging is sharp to avoid its tail laser, which has an almost unfair ability to near perfectly track you and hit you, costing 700 HP. Even doing the Cheese strategy of playing as either Cloud or Tifa and running to its side to melee it to smithereens does nothing to help the tail laser part. Phases two and three should theoretically be easier as it now moves around, right? Good luck with that! It now has a version of the tail laser that can reach across the entire arena, and even sneaking around to its back, it can grab you from under and spit you out not unlike the Terror of the Deep, except this time costing you 600 HP. Phase three also has goddamn tentacles to make it even more difficult. The fact you cannot pick your party to deal with the boss your own way is the final cherry sundae on top of it all.
  • The boss fight against Rufus Shinra at the Golden Saucer can be a real pain to deal with and a nightmare on hard mode. For starters, he has a huge number of moves, and there is a lot of RNG in his AI script, which makes him very difficult to predict. The only way to damage him is when countering his attacks or when he's reloading, which makes it very difficult to build ATB, and while Counterstance worked well in Remake it is almost useless here. Trying to attack him at any other point causes him to parry your attack and damage you and he can sometimes do this at the end of his reload when he's supposed to be vulnerable. His regular shots also have interrupt and knockback capabilities, meaning Cloud has to spend 90% of the fight cartwheeling around. Most ranged attacks don't work. His attacks are quick with rather peculiar timing. There's a lot of randomness in when he will reload. Rufus is also slow to build up stagger, though it's easier if you use an ability rather than normal attacks. Like in Remake, you can stagger him instantly with a Braver, but the timing is so tight on this that it's practically frame perfect, and most of the time you will end up being countered. Things get even more difficult in the second phase, where his pet, Darkstar, joins the fight, since they can combo attacks and shred Cloud in seconds. Obviously, you're meant to focus on Darkstar, but you still have to deal with Rufus attacking you. He can even attack you while off-screen, while you're trying to attack Darkstar. The cherry is Rufus is also fought straight after the Turks (and after yet another boss and series of battles in which Cloud is a mandatory party member, meaning a lot of fights you need to converve Cloud's MP for in hard mode), so there's no ability to save before the battle. You can customize your equipment between fights, but if you restart the battle it will reset to what equipment you used against the Turks, so you have to do this every single time.
  • The fight against Odin in Chadley's battle simulator, which is required to get the Odin materia. If Odin lands too many attacks on you in a row, he "gets dispirited" and launches Zantetsuken against the whole party, even on the easiest version of his fight. Even if you manage to dodge a good number of attacks, there's still a chance he'll use Zantetsuken, with practically nothing you can do unless you can somehow stagger him. You can get around this, with abilities like Arise or the Revival Earrings, but without specific preparation and time spent learning how to dodge his attack animations, you'll be pushing up daisies time and again. The fight overall is a very lengthy one, since you have to be patient to dodge his attacks and slowly whittle his health down. But if you die, then all your hard work will be for naught.
  • The fight against Phoenix in the battle simulator. What makes the fight annoying is its gimmick that it creates enemies throughout the fight that have to be defeated before Phoenix can take damage. These enemies also have conflicting weaknesses and strategies which makes focusing on each of them annoying as another enemy or Phoenix can easily potshot you, including an Ogre who has a very annoying attack that shakes the whole ground stunning the party for a bit. Also after Phoenix recovers from its second stagger it will always use its Flames of Rebirth attack which if your party isn't topped off on health, which is very hard to do at that point of the game where you first unlock the fight, it will most likely be a Total Party Kill.
  • Dyne can be extremely difficult on hard mode, due to a combination of Barret's poor evasion, numerous attacks that have very strong tracking and/or require precise dodging, and many ways to get stunned or knocked back. Dyne is also quite difficult to pressure and has a small window to exploit this, and similar to the Scrappy Mechanic in Remake, the game is quite fond of phase changes when you do finally manage to pressure him, which allows him to get out of this situation.
  • Gi Nattak can grab a party member to immobilize them and drain their HP, can use Drain to absorb HP from party members in front of him, can summon Soul Fires to swarm the party and potentially deal a One-Hit KO, later in the fight he's able to curse the party to deplete their ATB gauges, halve their max HP, halve their max MP, or reduce the size of the arena. Finally, when at critical health he casts Doom, which will deal a Total Party Kill if you can't defeat him before the timer runs out. To fight him, you only have two characters, Red XIII and Barret (and Barret's awful dodge means he'll have trouble avoiding Gi Nattak's unblockable attacks), they don't necessarily have the best Synergy Abilities or Limit Breaks, and Gi Nattak has no elemental weaknesses to exploit. Even if you can balance keeping the two alive with whittling down Gi Nattak's health, you'll need to strategize carefully to have the resources to rush down his last phase before Doom wipes you out.
  • Yin & Yang, the two-headed boss(es) you fight as Cait Sith by himself. You're already at a disadvantage, as Cait is very weak and squishy without his Moogle summon, meaning you'll have to attack to build up ATB to summon it. And throughout the fight, the dominant head will switch between the physical-focused Yin and the magical-focused Yang, with each being more vulernable to the opposing damage type (magical attacks are more effective against Yin while physical attacks are more effective against Yang). They're also incredibly aggressive and fast, meaning you'll be spending a lot of time dodging and waiting for an opening. If you manage to summon a Moogle, there'll usually focus on it, but they can also just turn around the target Cait. And when you take one head down, the other will enter a berserk state, making it even more aggressive and faster than before. When the remaining head is at low health, it'll "take aim" and quickly jump to your location and explode, dealing a hefty chunk of damage which will KO Cait if he's below half health.
  • The hard mode fight with the Red Dragon has garnered a lot of hate for one simple reason: damaging its chest does nothing to weaken the mass fire breath attack in the second phase. In fact, despite the assess description, destroying its chest results in it flooding the battlefield with lava that can easily wipe the party. That means the entire arena becomes one large flame broiler to cook your party alive, and it considers the damage non-elemental so cheesing it with fire protection does not help. That means you must find a way to keep your party healthy and fortified enough to survive the attack, which is a big task while fighting a near endgame boss to begin with. Some have even suggested that the fight is bugged, since the player is punished for crippling the body part that not only they are informed to focus on to reduce damage, but most players would logically think would weaken the boss. Thankfully, the Dragon's HP threshold for changing into its second phase is vast, so having it down to a level that winning before it even uses its Crimson Breath attack is entirely possible if requiring very specific builds and team composition.
  • On Hard Mode, the Final Boss has begun to get this reputation. Aside from the expected increase in difficulty that comes with Hard Mode, the fact that the fight is a Boss Rush with phases that force you into specific party compositions means you have to make sure every party member is able to pull their weight properly, and the game simply does not give you enough resources to optimize your team (several important Materia, accessories, and the highest-level armor pieces, may only be found once or twice on a playthrough). While HP is healed between some of the fights, MP isn't, and in tandem with no ability to use items this places a very tight restriction on how freely you can use your magic since the only way to revive fallen allies is the Raise spell. The boss gauntlet also features at various points status ailments, a boss that can shift its elemental weakness, attacks that can wipe out the party if they aren't buffed with protective spells, and an HP to One move; you'll need to be prepared for all of these things. Finally, despite the boss' many phase changes and your party line-up changing during them, it's all considered one fight, so if you ever want to go into the menu to adjust the party's equipment, you have to start over from the first phase.
• That One Level:
  • Gongaga in general definitely has not been looked at fondly by the fandom from a gameplay perspective. The whole region is absolutely gorgeously designed and the music is serene, but trying to lock down all of the intel for Chadley (which is required for multiple sidequest completion checks) is an exercise in frustration, particularly because the whole level involves bouncing from mushrooms on chocobos to reach otherwise hidden ledges and sliding on vines - and there's no indication on where those mushrooms and vines will take you. One wrong turn and you're starting the process over again from the beginning.
  • Cait Sith's segment in Nibelheim is one that many dislike going through, because Cait is an unorthodox character who relies on RNG that many players don't play as much even when they get him due to familiarity with the other more reliable party members. He also has slow meter buildup with not a lot of damage until you get the robot Moogle he's known for, which requires meter. Not only is that where a lot of his damage lies, but he's also incredibly squishy without it. Now take all of that and make him the only playable character in this one segment with difficult enemies that can one shot you, including Ying & Yang as mentioned above, the boss only he fights, and include a very needlessly complicated aiming mechanic to get through certain areas and progress. It's considered one of the biggest pace killers in the whole game and it reminds people of the weaker aspects of "Remake"'s level design but with a more unreliable, luck based playable character.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The Musclehead Colosseum at the Gold Saucer. No item usage, and while you get a little HP and MP restored between rounds, these fights are designed to be nasty little challenges expecting you to use the absolute best you can manage at that point in the game. It has no problem swarming you with foes, either, and one bad round of attacks can lead to being stun-locked by all of them attacking at once. Depending on which party members you are using (and with some of the six person battles, the order of the two teams), they can range from straightforward to infuriating. The six person battles also have problem in that you can go through a difficult first battle, only to walk into another encounter that your B team are not suited for, and you can only find this out either by reading a guide, or having to go all the way through the first battle before finding out yourself for the hard way.
  • Biological Intel: Head Case should be a relatively simple challenge, with players tasked with killing a Mind Flayer and two Varghidpolis. The issue is that The mind flayer has to be killed first in order to complete the challenge, there's no way to set the AI to target the same enemy as you, and it has a far larger HP bar than the Varghidpolis and some devastating attacks. If that wasn't bad enough, the Varghidpolis have one attack, Deafening Screech, which stuns anyone who doesn't block it long enough for them to self-destruct, which counts as losing the challenge. While logic would say you should solo the battle, the issue is that the only way to pressure the mind flayer and stagger it quickly is to use synergy attacks, and so any solo attempt quickly devolves into a battle of attrition which can easily lead to a defeat if the player happens to be a little too close to a Varghidpolis. Luckily, the Varghidpolis are vulnerable to sleep, which can open up some much-needed breathing room.
  • The Musclehead Colosseum is back again in Chapter 12, with another side quest, which requires mastering multiple different minigames around the Saucer. While most of these are pretty manageable with some experience, the Colosseum throws a very difficult 5-round battle at you. The second battle involves fighting ten Tonberries, which is a recipe for being stun-locked and instant death, unless you play perfectly (or use Warding materia to make yourself immune to instant death, but this will likely need a large amount of grinding, or waiting until New Game Plus). And you have to start at the very beginning if you die, you can't simply retry the round you've failed at.
  • The sit-ups minigame unlocked in Chapter 7, essentially a reskinned version of Tifa's pull-up minigame from Remake. The first three rounds against Amina, Jay, and Ronnie are easy enough, but then there's Jules. Like the pull-up minigame before it, you have to press buttons so fast that muscle memory and pure dumb luck can determine whether or not you beat Jules, and if you make even one mistake once he picks up steam, you may as well retry since he'll gain a lead you'll never catch up to. But unlike the pull-up minigame, your button prompts are now mapped to the shoulder buttons with no way to change it without going to your system settings and remapping your controller, meaning it's very easy to make a mistake. Thankfully, there's no achievement for beating all four opponents, but you do still have to beat them to 100% the game.
  • The 3D Brawler minigame at the Gold Saucer. Opponents can have up to six attacks they can use, depending on their difficulty, and each attack requires a precise directional push on an analog stick to dodge or block it, or Cloud gets hit and takes damage. There are visual cues for which kind of attack they're going to use so you know which direction to press, but the tells look very similar and the window to react to them is very short. As you face higher-level opponents, they'll begin to use strings of multiple attacks that all must be dodged within an even smaller input window than normal, and your one respite is that dodging them all gives you an opening to hit back. Even so, they can perform these combos back-to-back as often as they like, putting a lot of pressure on you to not mess up. Finally, higher-difficulty opponents give you very few openings to get in hits without you dodging their combo attacks. Mastering the game boils down to pure memorization of each opponent's attack animations and which directions to press to dodge their combo strings, and being very patient and very lucky to pull it off. You can abuse the pause button to allow yourself to work out what attack is coming up, and even then this can still be difficult against the most challenging opponents. And this is all without noting the massive spike 3d Sephiroth is. while the others you could learn to beat with some leeway, Sephiroth takes at least 3 times the dodges to drop his guard, can drop a flurry before even getting to his first drop, and his final hit requires dodging a completely new combo designed to knock those who had his previous combos down and most irritatingly of all hits twice as hard as everyone else, meaning rather than 5 hits you now have 3.
  • The hard mode versions of Cactuar Crush as Aerith can be infuriating. Yuffie's levels are generally considered reasonably manageable with some experience, but Aerith's are on a whole other level. Even in normal combat, playing as Aerith against a speedy opponent that is difficult to hit would be bad enough, since Aerith's slow attacks would struggle to build ATB. Now let's add: Aerith needs to use Sorcerous Storm which the enemies are very fond of moving out of (the very short) range. Enemies that alternate between light and dark so Aerith is forced to spend even more time alternating wards. Enemies that use knockdowns which you must avoid to avoid point deductions. Enemies that can dodge the main attacks even when you do build enough ATB to use them. Still not enough? You can also be completely at the mercy of the AI RNG as well, which can mean enemies rapidly alternate between light and dark sometimes seconds after switching, or the larger cactuars running away instead of doing a body slam (which produces a Stagger effect for more damage). This can cost you tens of very valuable seconds, due to RNG which is completely outside of the player's hands. While you don't have to do this to complete the game, if you want to achieve max party level and unlock some powerful abilities, you need to complete every single protorelic quest on hard mode. Thankfully, Aerith's Transcendence is tailor made to take out the gigantaurs but that still means you have to get lucky.
  • The Saga Of The Seaside Inn can get pretty tedious. For starters, the player has to look for wood next to all of the ziplines, and unless the player had already used them prior, they won't show up on your map. After you collect all of that, the player then has to retrieve the Tonberry King's crown, which if you started this quest at Chapter 7, you won't be able to do it until Chapter 9 because the land is blocked off by water that you need to Buggy to pass. Then, in order to actually fight the Tonberry King, the player needs to find all of the Lifesprings in the Corel area. Finally, once the player actually finds the Tonberry King, he's actually That One Boss due to his One-Hit Kill attacks, the crown needs to be stolen from the Tonberry King instead of won from beating him, and the player is only able to when he's staggered and he drops the crown.
  • Gus's Party basically functions like the Gold Saucer's Battle Square, but you instead use one character to fight monsters. While that doesn't sound bad, the issue comes with The Flower Seller vs the Fireballs, where you control Aerith against two Bombs. As the resident Squishy Wizard, Aerith can dish out damage, but struggles with taking it. Not helping matters is that her normal attacks, which are required to build ATB so she can cast spells, are very slow, with the Bombs' attacks easily making her flinch. And after enough time has passed (and they've grown big enough), their Fireballs can cause explosions that can deal hefty damage to Aerith, even with sidestepping. Your best bet to deal with this battle is to use the Elemental Materia combined with the Fire Materia to lessen the damage received from fire attacks.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The English dub chose to pronounce Cait Sith's name "Kate Sith", in line with years of Viewer Pronunciation Confusion in English, rather than use the correct "cat shee". Even more confusing because the Japanese original has always been pronounced correctly.
  • As with Remake, from the moment the game was commercially available, various influencers began uploading footage to sites like YouTube. Almost immediately, a contingency of the fanbase expressed outrage at the new narrative elements, taking to social media to criticize how they had "ruined" the story—especially in regards to iconic moments such as Aerith's death, the incorporation of The Multiverse,^note A concept which many feel both undermines the dramatic weight of established franchises and has become overused in media since its addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. and the fact that the game seemingly debunks many of the fan theories surrounding Chapter 18 of Remake—namely, the theory that the trilogy will be a "definitive" remake linking up with the Compilation—in favor of leaning further into the idea that alternate timelines/universes are, indeed, at play.
  • Some players hoping for Rebirth to diverge further from the original game expressed some disappointment that Cloud mostly goes through the same journey regardless of confirmation that multiple worlds and universes were at play, and felt that even if it is at this stage meant to be much more ambiguous than it was in the original game and to raise questions about future events going forward, the interpretative status of Aerith's fate as presented in this game undermines the themes of defying destiny set in the ending of the first game.
  • Some feel that separating the upgrade system from weapon upgrades makes the weapons themselves less interesting. In Remake, every weapon had a clear purpose and role (whether focusing on physical damage, magic damage, balanced damage, or a special niche). But with Rebirth, aside from damage stats, it is much less clear at a glance what any given weapon is specifically for, especially since most of the equipable augments can be found on multiple weapons. The weapons overall feel more "same-y", leaving you to mostly decide based on stat numbers and materia slots.
• They Copied It, Now It Sucks: Some players were not happy that the reveal that Sephiroth's desire for "Reunion" involves destroying alternate timelines and then forcibly fusing them together into a single unified world is almost a 1:1 copy of the Ascians' plan in Final Fantasy XIV to destroy the 14 shards of Ethrys and fuse them into the original single world that used to exist in their place.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The proto-relic quest for the Gongaga region has the party investigating supposedly abandoned Shinra training facilities used by the Turks, and each one has the party undertake a VR training simulation with a briefing from one of the Turks. This could have been an easy way to feature Before Crisis characters, if the facilities are from that time period; the Turks giving the briefings could be some of the player Turks and the missions could feature the party fighting Avalanche, perhaps in parts of Midgar or other areas not normally accessible in Rebirth. However, the briefings are from the Turks the player has already met and are Excuse Plots for normal battles in the VR simulator against enemies the player has already faced.
  • Despite Cloud eventually remembering Zack and his name, if you return to Gongaga to talk to the townsfolk, there aren't any new dialogues and no option to bring it up to anyone.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The moogles got a redesign in this game, and it hasn't exactly been favorable to some people. Their limbs can come off as too skinny for their frame and their nose and eyes too big, especially paired with the more realistically rendered fur, and with their triangular teeth often visible.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Hardly anyone expected Gilgamesh to show up, considering his non-existence from all previous Final Fantasy VII related works.
  • The appearance of Glenn Lodbrok counts, being a character exclusive to two recently-released mobile games. While it does turn out to be Sephiroth using Lodbrok's appearance as a disguise, it was still unexpected nonetheless.
  • While no one was shocked about there being another Final Boss battle against Sephiroth, many players were caught off guard when, at the start of the second phase of the battle, he suddenly transforms into his Bizarro Sephiroth form, renamed Sephiroth Reborn here. Understandable, since, in the original game, Bizzaro Sephiroth is the second-to-last battle.
• Unfortunate Character Design: Some have taken notice that Dyne's gun-arm looks particularly phallic, with a long barrel and two ammo drums at the base.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: In the Nibelheim flashback, just like in the original game, Sephiroth enters Jenova's cryo chamber in the reactor and dislodges some sort of mechanical mannequin that looks like an angel. Said mannequin is hiding behind itself Jenova's corpse, which is inside a large containment tube.
• Woolseyism: While retaining the original name in Japanese, the rather mundane sounding Huge Materia are called Magnus Materia in the English version of the game, better conveying their magnitude and importance.
• Writer Cop Out: This is a major criticism regarding how the game handled Aerith's fate. Those who wanted to see Aerith's death faithfully recreated weren't happy that the game blatantly left open a door for Aerith's possible resurrection and/or return through the various alternate timelines while those who were eager to see events changed weren't happy that a version of Aerith is still killed by Sephiroth, even if there's a chance that death won't stick. In general, neither side was particularly happy with the game trying to play both sides and leaving the ultimate conclusion ambiguous.