Last year I wrote a post here complaining about the mechanical flatness of FFXVI. Playing FFVII Rebirth I could not help but compare it’s delightful mechanical richness to 16’s flatness, so I decided to write a post celebrating it.

First of all, there is the materia system. It’s such a powerful game mechanic, I can’t help but wonder why so few games have copied the core concept. The magic comes from three parts.

1. Reifying powers into concrete items.
2. Giving these items their own development paths.
3. Making some of the powers meta-powers, changing the way others behave.

These three things together open a combinatorial explosion of character builds that is fun and intuitive to navigate, while feeling much more organic than a sphere grid like system. Decoupling the powers from characters lets you try out a maxed materia with entirely different characters. The meta-powers increase the size of the possibility space multiplicatively.

The materia system also interacts with other mechanics, making all of them richer. In my post about 16 I complained about how boring the weapons were. There were two stats, but they only changed in unison, making all weapons simple upgrades of the previous one. Rebirth takes full advantage of the separate Physical and Magical attack stats, but the materia makes things even more interesting. Do you want many slots, but a weaker weapon? Fewer slots, but more connections? All interesting choices, making most weapons occasionally relevant throughout the game.

And all mechanisms in the combat system benefit from the tweaks materia enables. You get the traditional fun with elements, but materia enriches blocking and character switching systems just as well.

And the combat system in itself has so much to offer. It’s still a bit slow for my taste (in the OG you get to enter ATB commands all the time, in Re* you have to wait for ages; I’m not that entertained by being able to pit pat tinsy bits of damage & dodge while I wait), but it’s definitely not mechanically flat. The way synergy abilities give you more to do while waiting for ATB and synergy skills incentivize switching between characters makes the combat even better than in Remake.

I do have a couple complaints, though. It is annoying how long limit breaks take. Way too many times I started my limit break not even half way to the stagger time of a boss and the stagger ended before the final blow. I even died to Sepiroth once, with a millimeter of his life remaining, because of this.

Also, Sepiroth is way too weak in the Nibelheim flashback. I suppose they wanted to keep the gameplay interesting for the action game nerds, but it fails to deliver the impact of the original. It was brilliant how they showed Sepiroth’s power with game mechanics by making him one-shot everything. In Rebirth, he is hardly stronger than Cloud. (Yes, his numbers are bigger, but with action combat you don’t really have time to see them. He does not feel different.) Sepiroth’s Limit Break, (Limit Break!) did not even finish off the flashback boss.

I also wish the Relationship Level affected the combat. It could eg. make synergy skills with the corresponding character cheaper. But it’s cool that the connection does go the other way.

These are minor nitpicks. As a whole FFVII Rebirth has embarrassingly rich mechanics, well tied to the story. I do hope they give us properly overpowered nonsense in part three, to keep in line with the original. Perhaps gated to be useless until you earn the second star, that was a fun OG idea they didn’t use yet.

I finished FFXVI yesterday and I have an urge to share some thoughts. I guess this is a review of sorts.

Visuals

Yes, the graphics are very high quality, but this game is a prime example of the fact that strong art direction has been more relevant since PS2. Most of the game is medieval towns and meadows. Don't get me wrong, they are beautiful, well implemented medieval towns and meadows, but just so utterly uninteresting.

But credit where credit is due, the fallen ruins are magnificent. Ancient ruins is such a well-trod trope that it's impressive they managed to make them feel fresh, while still fully evoking a feeling of ancientness. If only they could have an equally distinct approach to the idea of a medieval town.

The eikon fights were spectacular, but I eventually got bored with them, as all the spectacle was very samey after a while.

Story

I liked it. The worldbuilding and the character writing were excellent, and the political scheming worked much better than in eg. FFXII. It lost a bit of steam after all the human antagonists were gone, as Ultima just wasn't very interesting, but the well-establish characters carried it to the end.

Also the writing side of side quests was good. They fleshed out the world and the characters, almost nothing felt like a meaningless errand. I ended up doing all the side quests, not because of an explicit decision, but because they felt narratively worth doing.

Mechanics

This is where the core of my gripes comes in. The game felt so disappointingly flat on a mechanical level.

First of all, almost nothing in this game makes a meaningful difference Examples:

• You go to pick up an item on the map. It's 15 gil. 15. At a time when weapons cost thousands. Almost every item pick-up was a disappointment, there is hardly any reward for exploration.
• Combos. As far as I can tell, the reward for performing a 4-strike combo was that the last strike did 50% more damage. That comes to 1+1+1+1.5/4 = 1.125. A 12.5% advantage. This is supposed to be a core feature of combat and it barely gives a double digit increase.
• Items that boost skills for 8%. An entire accessory slot dedicated to a skill I get to use once a minute, and they have the gall to give it a bonus below double digit.
• Limit breaks, LIMIT BREAKS, give a damage bonus of 10%.
• A new weapon is always 5 points better than the last one, always with equal stagger and attack. Only Ragnarok and Gotterdammerung were meaningful bumps.
• Every weapon has equal stagger and attack values. Why even have separate values, if you aren't going to give the player a choice on which to prioritize.
• Top-tier armor giving 50 extra hp when the current total is over 2000.
• Even staggering, arguably the most central mechanism, gives a maximum of 50% advantage. 50% for 10 seconds once every minute. Bleh.

I can only presume that they did this to balance the action combat. Slower paced combat is about making interesting decisions before and during the combat, action combat is just about being good at pressing buttons at the right times. People who enjoy action combat seem to feel very positively about it in this game so they apparently succeeded. I just wish they didn't do it at the cost of removing every single mechanically interesting decision in the whole game.

Summary

In the end I just switched to Story Focused and breezed through. It was an enjoyable enough experience, but left me dissatisfied. I'm glad the action people are happy, but I need to go and play some game with actual decisions for a change.

PS. Yes, choosing your skill layout is the one mechanically meaningful decision you can make, and is fine. The skills are, a bit too well-balanced relative to each other to make this more than a stylistic choice. The only thing that really matters in combat is dodging and parrying, which are admittedly satisfying.