Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth and Kingdom Hearts 2: Cousins in Ambition

Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth released at the end of February 2024 and has monopolized all of my free time in the month since. Seriously, this behemoth of a game came on two discs and took my nearly 80 hours to finish. Not complete, just finish. I'm no stranger to a long game; I've played Person 5 Royal, a nearly 125 hours long experience, three times through. No, my issue, if I even really have one with FF7: Rebirth, isn't its length, but its pace and scale. And to aid me in convincing the mob of FF7 diehards of this flaw, I've invited Kingdom Hearts 2 to the conversation. Just to preface, my comparison is mostly confined to general design philosophy, as otherwise, two games differ greatly.

Both FF7 and Kingdom Hearts 2 are some of the most decorated Square Enix games of all time in regards to fan reception. Each are all-time greats of the JRPG genre in terms of action, spectacle and character, but they're more similar than that. FF7: Rebirth and KH2 strive to iterate upon their predecessors, and in so doing, they sacrifice something that made their originators so special.

Kingdom Hearts 1 is one of my favorite games ever. I played it first as a child, only a few years after it came out, and I was struck with wonder and frustration alike at the Disney worlds I explored alongside Donald and Goofy, but I lacked the patience required to keep up with the series. During the Covid lockdown, I returned to Kingdom Hearts and learned to love it, but it wasn't always easy. My appreciation for the original game wasn't instant, rather, it took a long time to understand its strengths. Playing it as a teenager, I appreciated its exploration and the freedom the game afforded me, but I brushed against the game's obscure and arcane directions. Its hands-off approach largely left KH1 to be a lonely experience for me, even though the game's thesis read "my friends are my power".

Only after playing KH2 did I appreciate what KH1 was doing. Littered with overlooked nooks and crannies and innumerable physics objects to interact with, secrets about KH1's level design are still being discovered to this day, more than 20 years after release. In many ways, KH2 overcorrected many of its predecessors flaws. Fans complained about the confusing level design and lack of directions, so KH2 never lets you get lost in its barren, flat levels, and its always telling what to do and where to go.

I was mortified. I thought I wasted my time and money on these games and that I was broken in some way for no being able to enjoy KH2 "superior" gameplay. People said it was the "perfect sequel" after all. I hated the combat; how Sora could fling himself across the battlefield, weightless and floaty while in KH1, I felt the blunt strike of every swing of his Keyblade. I managed to trudge through the game, languishing in its slow pace and boring Disney worlds until the very end, where I didn't know what to make of this numbing experience. KH2 traded the intimacy of level design that was so strong in KH1 for expanding the borders of the gameplay and story.

Not a bad trade, right? Hard to say. KH1 is a game I return to, KH2 is not. FF7: Rebirth suffers, although far less severely, from the same problems. Its predecessor, FF7: Remake, which is part 1 in the remake trilogy, is nothing short of a magical experience. Taking the prologue of the original FF7 and making it its own experience, while controversial at the time, can be said in retrospect to be a brilliant move. Midgar, the electric city that our heroes find themselves in, is chock full of intimate, intentional level design that gels well with the tight, linear experience of the original's opening hours.

Going back to Remake, I was able to appreciate its hidden depths. Yes, its mostly on-rails with little room to express one's self via gameplay, but the story moments and combat encounters are strengthened for this. A lack of agency actually makes problem solving during combat a rewarding experience. Of course, its stunning presentation and story go a long way, but even in it slower moments, simply having the time to soak up the world and characters helped me better immerse myself.

Like going from KH1 to 2, the transition from Remake to Rebirth was...odd. The sheer breadth of Rebirth is astounding on every level. Each area is dense with side activities to perform and side quests to pursue, but despite spending nearly double, even triple the time with FF7's cast of characters, I felt no closer to them in Rebirth than I did in Remake. Sure, I learned more about them and understood them better, but we had left Midgar behind, as well as the intimacy of its metal undercity and packed streets. The jungles of Gongaga are beautiful, and rocky shores of Nibelheim are breathtaking, but I miss the energy of Midgar, how the close proximity afforded by the setting created urgency and made the character act decisively.

Like KH2, everything was bigger than before---the world, the story, the suite of combat abilities---but like eating junk food, I was consuming and consuming but never feeling full. This is not insult tothe quality of Rebirth's side content, as I enjoyed much of it, but it becomes a pace-breaker very early on. KH2 doesn't have much side content going on, but its pace suffers for huge swathes of the game, nearly everything between the beginning, middle point and end, being inconsequential fluff. Rebirth's pace can slow to a crawl by getting lost in its world, making the important story moments feel so far away like distant blips on the player's radar in an ocean of map markers and level-ups.

In the end, Rebirth, I can confidently say, is a better game than Kingdom Hearts 2. By making plot points more numerous and consequential, it dodges a fatal bullet that its cousin couldn't quite duck under. But isn't it odd that this game has more in common with a sequel from another franchise than it does its own predecessor? And vice versa? I can liken KH1 to FF7: Remake with far more ease than KH1 to KH2. Sequels always strive to be bigger and better, and I'm not the first to see the similarities between these two games, but I find that one ultimately suffers less from this pursuit than the other. FF7: Rebirth retains its heart while KH2's is out there, in some restrictive corridor in Beast's Castle or a flat landing Aladdin's Agrabah, drowning under the weight of misguided ambition.