FFVII: Rebirth - Trailer Analysis & How It Will Reshape the Original
The new FFVII: Rebirth trailer presented at Summer Game Fest is filled with hints to question and guess how this sequel will build on FFVII: Remake, and continue to overturn the gameplay and plotlines we may remember from the original Final Fantasy VII. Here’s a complete breakdown & trailer analysis, and tentative answers.
What we knew of Rebirth so far
Until now, not much had leaked on Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth. Story-wise, we could expect the game will continue where “Remake” and “Intermission” left us: when Cloud, Tifa, Barret, Red XIII, and Aerith leave Midgar and try to track down Sephiroth. But how “Rebirth” may build up on – or depart from – the re-imagining of the original game already implemented by Final Fantasy VII: Remake? We didn’t have much.
The first teaser, initially published in June 2023 showed no gameplay but hinted at a few narrative choices. Some voice-over lines referred to how “the future can be changed”, and focused on, respectively, the fate of Zach Fair and Sephiroth’s motives. Visually, we could only glimpse at the Nibelheim flashback, the Meteor falling on Midgar, and Zach saving Cloud from Shinra. Beyond that, developers had been very discreet.
A social media campaign developed over the 7 days leading to Summer Game Fest 2023, where the trailer was revealed, consisted in releasing a short comment/tease a day, and had already hinted at a few possible features in Rebirth. Noteworthy ones were “an open world” exploration in line with the original game’s narrative, a form of “collaborative” combat mechanisms, and a comment on how new players didn’t need to have played “Remake” to enjoy “Rebirth”
The new trailer confirms at least the two first aspects and goes even further in divulging important mechanisms & plot points we can expect to see in Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth.
! Spoilers ahead !
Some points need to be understood in relation to events, including major twists and plot points, of the original Final Fantasy VII and the 2020 Remake. If you want to catch up or refresh your memory, check out my previous original vs remake comparison on Final Fantasy VII: Remake.
What the new trailer shows
This trailer definitely delivered, with almost 3:30 minutes reveals of the main narrative, settings, exploration, combat, and characters. And even a potential major twist to the original story.
The trailer starts off by showing the aftermaths of an explosion or forcefield having devasted Midgar, and our protagonists, unconscious, gathered by Shinra soldiers. We then cut to our heroes, this time well and awake, leaving what looks like Midgar and exploring the wider world. We see the scene in Grand Canyon when our characters learn more about the Lifestream, our protagonists pondering on the backstory leading up to the game’s events, combat scenes against beasts and the Turks, a confrontation between Cloud and Sephiroth, and finally part of the Nibelheim flashback where Tifa tries to take revenge on Sephiroth.
Voice-overs from these sequences and off-screen ones featuring in particular Aerith, Tifa, and Sephiroth, tease at intriguing dialogues in the upcoming game touching on – and potentially disrupting what we know of – Cloud’s past, Sephiroth’s motives, and Rebirth’s storyline(s).
An "Unknown Journey"
An insert at the beginning of the trailer is titled “The Unknown Journey Continues”, clearly teasing at how Rebirth will likely overturn quite a few narrative themes and segments of the original game. Two points stand out in this regard.
The trailer’s beginning, showing our main protagonists injured in a devasted Midgar, doesn’t quite correspond to the ending of “Remake” as we know it. But it is more interestingly the very abrupt shift to the next scene, where the same characters seem to come out of Midgar unscathed, that seems off.
One possible reason is that the trailer puts back to back two very different “moments” of the game’s normal narration. But given the place and pace of those sequences, it doesn’t add up. It is more likely, as was already hinted at in the first installments’ final cutscene, that Rebirth may shift between different timelines, dimensions, or “stories” in a non-linear way. That will be a big departure from the original game – at least in how it was explicitly narrated – and opens a lot of interesting avenues.
Another noteworthy element of the trailer is how some of the meta elements of “Remake” seem to carry over in “Rebirth”. Early on, we hear Tifa asking Aerith “What’s Cloud been doing these past 5 years? Where has he been?” While the passage is coherent with the original story, and likely refers to Cloud’s convoluted recollection of the Nibelheim events, the fact that Tifa asks this question to Aerith, who answers candidly “and you’re asking me this?” might also hint at how the first installment of the remake departed from the original game precisely in imbuing some of the characters with a possible awareness of the events of the original game.
This passage also further adds some mystery to what we thought we knew about Cloud‘s role as a Shinra soldier and experiment before the events of Final Fantasy VII: Remake. Later in the trailer, Tifa expresses exactly the same concerns about Sephiroth as she did previously about Cloud: “But, why come back now? After 5 years, doing who knows what”. This mirroring of Cloud and Sephiroth’s “Unknown Journey” is not directly contradicting anything established by the original game, but it seems to be a central touchpoint of the trailer, and likely the entire narrative of this installment.
After all, the face and voice of the hooded figure clearly suggest more of a “Cloud clone” than the Sephiroth ones established in the original game. Maybe it is just one more of Cloud’s hallucinations. Or perhaps we’re in for some surprises story-wise.
A coherent lore
Despite the narrative surprises explained above, the lore and overall universe seem extremely loyal and coherent to the original game. One minute into the trailer, we dive into Grand Canyon, home to Red XIII and Bugenhagen, the village’s elder, looking at a hologram of the planet. The setting and artistic direction, for one, are true to the feel of the original game, and the scene is immediately recognizable.
But the scene covered here is carefully picked as well: the exposition on the role of the Lifestream and Mako in the course of things does not depart much (if not at all) from the original dialogues. But if we are aware of the plot of Final Fantasy VII: Remake, they take on a new dimension and perfectly inscribe that lore into whatever narrative twists and turns Rebirth will come up with. And that is a promising sign, in that Rebirth is likely to aim for the same balance between nostalgia and novelty that Final Fantasy VII: Remake managed to handle so well.
In an Open World
A great addition from the first remake’s installment, however, is the clear take on open-world exploration. Of course, we shouldn’t expect the liveliness and depths found in a Witcher game, or the magnitude and flexibility offered by Zelda: Breath of the Wild. But one of the first scenes, in which our protagonists explore a vast landscape, with wild deers running around them, definitely suggests something less funneled than the first installment. Chocobo mounting and the distant landscapes of huge cities suggest quite a free exploration. And even Barret’s position on a steep hill during combat also suggests the absence of artificial invisible walls that we typically see in many J-RPGs.
Unlike the original or any segment of the remake’s first installment, proper open exploration of the World Map is suggested here. A lost tower we stumble upon will be tempting for anyone to explore, hoping to find a well-hidden Materia or piece of gear. If Rebirth is indeed open enough so that exploration becomes a rewarding experience for players willing to take the time to check every corner, then it will fill one of the main gaps I felt while playing the first installment.
"Synergized" combats
As could be expected from one of the teases made by developers a few days before the trailer was released, the combat system in Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth will integrate some additions from the “Intermission” DLC.
A sort of “team/tag attack” system, through a function called “Synergized” allows to shift the focus of supporting characters onto the main player’s target and, with the use of specific materia, launch collaborative attacks. This system is quite efficient in making combats more dynamic, and potentially more strategic even in the middle of the action.
Let’s hope this is not the only thing carried over from Intermission, as other features such as the Fort Condor minigame and the idea of matching pieces of equipment were very good. But this, so far, is already quite promising!
A (too?) familiar cast
There were no big surprises when it came to the characters shown in the trailer. On top of our main protagonists Cloud, Tifa, Barret, Red XIII, Aerith, Yuffie, and of course Sephiroth, the brief appearance of Yuffie was also not surprising, and a logical follow-up to the plots of the original game and Final Fantasy VII: Remake Episode Intermission.
More noteworthy is how the Turks were showcased. They had already witnessed good care in the first installment. Not only in terms of character design, but also as more fleshed-out, a little less quirky, and stereotypical (although they had their moments) than in the original game. Their presence in this installment is logical and in line with the original game’s main narrative. But the trailer’s choice to cast the spotlight on the Turks and Elena, in particular, might suggest an even stronger role to play – or impression upon the player – in Rebirth.
There are however quite a few characters missing that we could have expected to see. The obvious playable characters likely to appear in that segment of the story would have been, on top of Yuffie, Cait Sith, Cid, and Vincent. The first had already been teased at the end of Final Fantasy VII: Remake, so that may explain this omission. But the two others have never been mentioned or shown by developers. Given Vincent’s reputation and fanbase, this suspense is likely a well-paced marketing strategy, to build up the hype closer to the game’s release.
The same reason might explain why Zack is not in this trailer either, having been already used extensively in the first trailer. Finally, the recurring, almost “meta” dimension of the Cid character leads me to believe that he may not even be shown once before the release of the game.
It is also interesting to note the absence of supporting characters such as Biggs, known to have survived the end of “Remake”, and therefore having some potential in contributing to this re-imagining of the original story.
A major Twist?
This has been a theory for a while, but the trailer seems to play heavily with a major plot point of the original game, and how the remake might overturn it.
Spoilers ahead: In the original game, Aerith is killed by Sephiroth. We don’t see any of that in this trailer. What we do see in the grand finale is a scene already present in the original game, when Tifa attacks Sephiroth to avenge her father after the Nibelheim massacre. Sephiroth pushes her back with a sword swing, visibly injuring her.
The difference with the trailer is that as we witness this familiar scene, we hear Sephiroth saying: “Do you know that I killed her? So, who is she?”
Many have been wondering how the narrative retelling the remake would handle the canonical death of Aerith, and quite a few have posited that such a death will still occur, but for a different character.
The trailer could suggest this, to some extent, or it could simply be one of the many mind-tricks Sephiroth launches at Cloud to destabilize him, as already seen in the original game. In any case, Final Fantasy VII has always been as much about fate, as it was about identity and, in particular through the character of Cloud, the impossibility to truly know oneself. Maybe Rebirth will further expand on another layer to this line questioning: it is really possible to know yourself, and what you think you know about others?
We’ll have to wait and see…
Sources
All visuals from the Rebirth trailer belong to ©SquareEnix, and were only transformed into screenshots for the purpose of this analysis. The in-game screenshot from the original Final Fantasy (1997) is also ©SquareEnix
Sources:
- Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth – Trailer shown at Summer Game Fest 2023: https://youtu.be/HkD8BCCYsS0
