After spending 130 hours on it I finally got the platinum trophy for FFVII Rebirth. I'll keep this spoiler free and focus more on my impressions.
There is a lot to love about this game. I was really happy with the story. The characters are a delight and it's always fun seeing them interact in various little ways. The artstyle looks great and there are so many little details to appreciate everywhere. As I've mentioned before, the soundtrack is phenomenal and massive. The combat is an evolution of Remake's and it works well (mostly). Some of the minigames, particularly the new card game Queen's Blood, are super fun.
That said, the lows of the game are abyssmal. Rarely has my opinion on a game soured so much the longer I played it. Some of my issues are obviously related to my playstyle due to being a completionist, others were apparent from the get go. The overworld is split up into multiple open world zones. Those started out quite fun but quickly became rather boring. Not only that, some of them were a chore to explore. Ubisoft-style towers weren't a good fit for this game. Another issue was the obnoxiously massive amount of minigames. Almost every single part of the game that would drive the story forward had some kind of mandatory minigame attached to it. Some were fun, but many were either super generic, a waste of time, or horribly unbalanced. In order to get the platinum trophy you have to nail every single minigame (except the piano one, there you "only" need to get A ranks instead of S ranks). Some of them were laughably easy, others though infuriatingly hard.
In general, getting the platinum trophy for this one was very challenging and it's easily one of the harder platinum trophies out there. None of the Souls games I played came even close to the challenge found here. Unfortunately it's not even that rewarding at points because it felt so freaking unfair. Like I said, many minigames expect perfection, so look forward to restarting a bunch and wasting a ton of time (more on that later). Unfortunately the other big factor of frustration as far as difficulty goes is the end-game combat. Hard mode was mostly a breeze, with a few hick-ups here and there, but the combat simulator challenges (just like in Remake) were horrible. There is an excessive amount of them and you'll keep fighting the same enemies over and over again, with barely anything changing, so it often feels like padding for no reason. The real problem becomes apparent in the most difficult fights, which were pretty overtuned. People have found a few cheese strats that make these easier, but you still need to play very well, otherwise you'll wipe in the last round and will need to spend another 30 to 45 minutes just to get to where you lost.
With that we get to the next major point of frustration, the game's utter disregard for the player's time. As previously mentioned you'll find yourself restarting the minigames over and over again due to a single mistake here and there, or having to replay them entirely because you didn't meet the required point threshold to either continue with the story/side quest or for the trophies. There are certain animations while exploring the overworld which you'll see quite often and which considerably slow down the game for a few seconds killing the pacing entirely. This game features a climbing system, which is also excruciatingly slow; instead of being able to continuously climb you hop from point to point and that drags. There are multiple instances (prominently featured in the demo of the first chapter for example) where you have to press and hold either L2 or R2 for a slow animation (like crawling around the floor) to play. There's a ton of forced slow walking moments. Every single story boss has multiple phases (no issue there) but also phase transitions in the form of unskippable cutscenes (oof). Especially some of the harder bosses towards the end are obnoxious on hard mode since they waste so much of your time.
To summarize, I find it quite amusing how my experience echoes the apparent consensus with some key differences though. There are folks out there who dislike or were disappointed by the story (it's a Final Fantasy game after all), but loved the minigames and open world segments. For me it was the exact opposite. I had good times with the game but also a lot of frustrating moments and I'm glad that I can finally move on to play something different. Unfortunately it doesn't come close to Remake, let alone XVI or XIV. I bought a few indie games on the Switch that were on sale the other day. Looking forward to something different and new.
