Final Fantasy 7 Remake took the first eight or so hours of Final Fantasy 7 and expanded them into a 30-hour prestige RPG that, while it contained some quite skippable sidequests, added to the story in ways that made it even more impactful. The additions deepened character relationships and made you feel more attached to the setting. By contrast, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth took the original's second act and bloated it into 50+ hours of open world RPG filler.
It wasn't just the optional tower-climbing and chocobo-stealthing stuff that made Rebirth feel stretched. Even if you stuck to the critical-path story you'd have to slog through Cait Sith throwing boxes around, an overlong final dungeon, and a plot you had to move through at a crawl—sometimes literally.
Screenrant recently spoke to Naoki Hamaguchi, director of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy, and brought up some of these complaints. "Regarding time management in certain sections," he replied, "especially in FF7 Rebirth, I honestly don't believe that they were longer than necessary. I feel like nowadays, players just have too much to do and too much to play; so they often feel the urge that something has to be concluded quickly."
It's true that I had more patience for having my time wasted when I was a kid and couldn't afford more than a couple of games a year. But just because I put up with, say, the convoluted puzzles and backtracking of the Discworld point-and-click when I didn't have anything else to do doesn't mean it was good game design.
Still, Hamaguchi is aware of the criticism and taking it into account. "As we work on the conclusion to the trilogy, we are striking a balance on how story arcs are told and spread out so as to ensure that the game feels a bit more concise," he said. We can only hope that Final Fantasy 7 Revengeance or whatever it ends up being called doesn't expect us to defeat Sephiroth by throwing boxes at him for 45 minutes.
