Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Becomes the Second Highest-Rated Final Fantasy Game of All Time

I wonder if the score would have been higher if the game was better?

I wonder if remake would have been above IX if it was a one on one remake without all the side content and timelines. And just one game.

Does it actually have poor graphics though? Compared to other open world RPG's?
I don't think so at all, sure it might have some issues here and there, but the overall experience outclasses most if not all it's peers.

@NightshadeNL I didn't really notice in the demo. If you don't completely focus on it you probably don't see it.

Strange that the OG7 doesn't place in top 10?

Delighted to see IX got the hotspot, this is actually my personal favorite. VIII is also a great game, although I appreciate somewhat contentious due to having the impossible act of following VII!

IX is still my all time favorite. VII comes close in 2nd as my favorite but IX just hits differently with its story, music and characters

@NightshadeNL Having played the game through to completion, it does have poor visuals.

@LiamCroft I think ‘Final Fantasy Chronicles’ should be ‘Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles’.

I’m really glad it’s scoring well.

It’s also interesting to see this list. Seeing that the original FF7 isn’t even on the list when it’s almost flawless in my mind because of the rose tinted glasses I wear while playing it.

It helps realise there is a lot of scope with review scores. Many people judge games based off a single review score, but these scores are from hundreds of reviews so it gives us general consensus.

It just goes to show if you limit yourself only to games that obtain a certain score, you may be limiting yourself and missing out on some great experiences. Maybe even your favourite.

So the best one stays in first place

FFX surprised me when I played it last year for the first time. I cried at the end. The dialogue delivery is definitely on the cringe side but man did the cast commit. Also, I miss those old school FMV sequences. They were so beautifully shot. The battle theme is among my FF Favorites (13 has my favorite in Blinded by Light).

@CJD87 Oh it has a 92 from 20 reviews on the PS1. The author must've not seen it

"Poor graphics" what 😂
Some muddy textures and basic lighting quirks from what I've seen so far. I'd say they are more blemishes on the rest of the graphics rather than use "poor" as an overall descriptor. Unless the visual quality falls off a cliff after the first couple hours, which would be odd.

I've just been playing Quantum Error. Now that is an example of poor graphics.

Edit: Does Liam mean image quality rather than graphical detail? 🤷 funnily enough, Quantum Error actually features fantastic image quality 😂

@somnambulance Are you forgetting that Suicide Squad came out this year?

@breakneck Thanks for pointing it out, for some reason the original game didn't appear when searching for the rankings on Metacritic. It's in the list now.

Nice to know some reviewers still get JRPGs
Can't tell if I will rate it similarly yet, but I suspect I will absolutely love it. I'm always happy enough to do a few mindless side quests and fetch scenarios - for me that's a staple of the jrpg game that I embrace

@Loamy I mean honestly it does look pretty rough. It doesn't really help that performance mode(Even after the update) makes things look fuzzy and especially in the distance.

@Triumph741 what are you talking. These reviews are not from Demo.

FF during PS1 era was peak for sure.

@LiamCroft Yeah it was hidden behind the Switch version. The new Metacritic search feature is terrible.

pushsquare actually gave it one of the most critical reviews on the internet. I'm shocked AND appalled, bringing that score down!! haha.

@CJD87 the OG FF7 is third on the list.

I love how this game is sitting at a 93 on metacritic — one of the highest scores for a Final Fantasy game — yet people are thinking the game is going to be mediocre because it received a few 8s here and there. Man, this game should be absolutely amazing. No, I don’t expect it to be perfect, but that’s fine by me. Just give me more Cloud and company.

This game is sounding more incredible with each review ive read so far and that Metacritic rating is the cherry on top. Very rarely I pre order a game but I had to with this, the 29th can't come soon enough.

Seems some people just can't stand PlayStation having a great game.

@breakneck Thanks, weird - it definitely wasn't there earlier!

@breakneck Looks like author has updated now... I was in shock ha!

On a separate note, I'm really glad to see that Rebirth has landed well with critics.... with the only real criticism pertaining to excess bloat/padding (the issue I had with Remake).

N.i.c.e. thats cool.the second highest final fantasy games ever.wow.congratulations to final fantasy 7 rebirth.word up son

I'm glad this is being well received and would like the series (beyond remakes/reboots) move in this direction rather than the last mainline entry. Square Enix just had such a good output the last three years, they're amazing and should remain non-exclusive.

The fact that remake hasn't knocked 9 off the top of that list, just invalidates it entirely. But with remake not even being on there shows the level of vitriol remake had to cut through just to make rebirth possible. Making that entire stack of review scores meaningless.

I think the OG7 is my favourite, but only because of what it meant to me as a kid and thats where it all started for me. However, I deeply love 9 and even 8. Played them all again recently and they still hold up very well. Graphics doesn't overly bother me with rebirth tbh, aslong as everything else hits.

Extremely happy this seems to be reasonably more well-received than XVI. Between the more Japanese flavor of the presentation, having full control of a party of loveable characters, etc., THIS is what I think of when I imagine a modern Final Fantasy game.

The graphics not being super next-gen doesn't bother me at all, since it still looks good, and hopefully this means S-E actually made this on a manageable budget.

It's gonna be hard waiting for this, but you just know it'll be on PC within the year. Ugh. Very happy for PS5 owners.

@Martijn87 probably not. Remake had a lot of garbage and expectations to cut through. We will know if it succeeded if people buy rebirth in greater number. Remake did incredibly well and I'd say it was a better game than ff9 had any right being back then. I like ff9, but it gets put on a pedestal over the amount of nostalgia it engages. Even it's progression and battle system is lifted whole sale from past titles. Just like it's major story beats and atmosphere. Not criticisms of the game, as it does these things quite well, but the game as a whole just doesn't hit the right notes to earn the metacritic score it sits at. Especially when many publications at the time failed to ding it for criticisms they had of ff7 and ff8 that were still present in 9. Reviewers at the time came from the "we need to return to the high fantasy of previous titles" camp in that era. They weren't raised on ff7 and barely knew anything of ff5. Remake had to cut through what everyone wanted from an actual Remake of ff7, which the game is not. It's title is a play on words and has more in common with a sequel to advent children than an actual Remake. The whispers and other elements are quite brilliant. It really adds to and improves ok ff7. I dare say Remake is better than the whole of the original game and gives you a mass effect 2 level of quality in while ending on a mass effect 1 note. That's high praise from me. You don't get that anymore in games. Rebirth has a harder job to please me at the very least. After leaving midgar the game isn't particularly interesting in the original title. The pressure to add open world to everything, likely played its part in rebirth in hurting the game. At least with this site's reviewers. I personally have no love for open world titles and ff has never truly been open world. So the addition of open areas to rebirth (not open world) is going to lead to a lot of fluff no one asked for. As I said after midgar the experience kind of takes a dip. Midgar zormer, chocobo ranch, kalm all memorable moments that need to be there, but after that the quirky nature of ff kicks in and we end up with for condor and the opening moments of junon. I hope that parade sequence is a step up, I hated it in 97 and I hate it now. The boat from junon to Costa del sol steps things up a bit. Then there is Costa del sol with hojo on the beach which brings things down again. Light hearted moments were intricate to ff back then, but I don't know that they work now. But the content progression leads to a lot of highs and lows until the latter half of the content we are honing in on. I'd say the game doesn't really pick up again until after you leave desert prison. So I'm hoping they fixed thar it with this open area segment that always felt empty in the original, like a like of unused space. Granted there is a quest item you need the buggy for, but beyond that, pretty pointless unless you run into yuffie.

Guess what I'm getting at is ff7 remake was unfairly judged and the original is unjustifiably elevated. Remake did a fanboy job refreshing ff7s content for old players that many either didn't understand or appreciate. Though many of that many did start to come around with time. I still see these cools only criticism Remake for things it doesn't even do.

@DonkeyFantasy we did have the internet back then, we even had gamefaqs. Message boards, chat rooms, and dedicated fan websites existed back then. In fact prior to ff7 we were watching the ff6 Siggraph demo. PSXPower which was later absorbed by ign had guides for all 3 games on ps1 and eventually the ports of the other 5 titles (ff3 was never released on ps1, neither was mystic quest).

I will be playing in fidelity mode which does look nice on Junon demo. Performance mode quite blurry.

If PS5 Pro does become a thing I hope Square patches support for it.

Poor graphics? That's why it's sometimes great to focus on a distinct art direction so your graphics aren't called poor. Leave those realistic graphics to PS Studios and Rockstar. Funny how FF back in the days was in the league of impressive visuals, what happened...

Interestingly, the criticisms raised in the Push Square review seem to be pretty universal across the board. The final score boils down to how much these issues grate on a personal level. By all accounts, it sounds like a great game.

@NotSoCryptic I think this remake trilogy will easily surpass the original game. Remake improved the Midgar section a ton over original.

Go FF9! My all-time favorite game. 🙂

The original FF7 has been and always will be my number 1 game and I'm so glad to see that rebirth has been recieved so well and even rates slightly higher than the original. More Cloud and Co is all I need to love it.

In regards to complaints about side quests for this and FF16, I feel JRPG's in general are far behind games like Witcher and Elder Scrolls etc. Doesn't mean that can't and shouldn't change but I honestly can't think of a JRPG with actual good side quests.

@Zenos I whole heartidly agree still merrit in playing the original for the story components, since it serves more as a prequel now than a template. I think the generations of gamers who grew up on it, combined with the curiosity of youger generations. It'll certainly result in some long term profits for square. I just hope they go back and give the original a proper remake and maybe even re-imagine advent children a bit. The days of Dilly Dally Shilly Shally need to end.

@DonkeyFantasy At that point gamers of that age group should have (in the US at least) access to the internet through schools, libraries, and 12 dollars a month to a 56k ISP. Even if you didn't have the internet, there was a good chance you knew someone that did.

@Kienda
no, Crystal Chronicles has quite a bit lower score. Chronicles is the ps1 compilation of FFIV and Chrono Trigger

@DonkeyFantasy I'm not arguing with you. Relax.

If anything, I laid ground work for context and a sharing of information. Seems the EU was far more behind in the 90's than I thought when it came to the internet. Which is why I brought up "(in the US at least)", this is an EU site after all. In the end I learned a little bit about internet propegation in europe by 1999 and maybe you learned about how fast it had progressed in the US by then.

@NotSoCryptic i didn't enjoy FF9 back when it first released. I just recently got to complete and enjoyed it al lot more this time. I did however love 7 and 8 and completed those 100% multiple times.

The strength of 7 has always been it characters and how they interact with each other. It strengthens the big moments in the story, I still feel the haven't matched that in any of the other FF games. The world of VII is also amazing and full of lore, especially if you count the compilation with it, the story of the original was always a mixed bag for me personally, it had it highest but near the end it lost it. So remake was great for me, especially a second playthrough after it sinked in that it will be different going forwards, but that's fine by me cause as I said before the characters and world is what made 7 the best for me with VIII being close.

The poor visuals statements are hitting my faith in humanity hard. Those are some of the best character models I have ever seen in any videogame.

I forgot Remake was in the upper 80s, I thought it was in the 90s.

Oh man... 8 so doesn't deserve to be in that list. 😂

@Nem I always loved FF8. Probably the most underrated FF game imo.

@Martijn87 ya I feel about the same. There are certain key things that absolutely must keep the same. Including with a specific alter in a forgotten location later in the game. The ending could use a rewriting, the hard retcon done by Advent Children kind of points to what was actually intended there.

Remake is probably the first game in ages I've gone back and played 7 or 8 times. Aside from Ghost of Tsushima I haven't really done that since God of War 2.

@RicebinBernacky oh, the reason I suggested it is the link goes to Crystal Chronicles Remastered. 😅

@Zenos Oh boy... i'm not sure you want to get me started on that.
The awful story twist and the terrible draw/junction system are forever burned in my memory due to how bad they were and the disappointment i felt after FF7.
I know that for some it was their first jrpg and has a sentimental value, but it was such a bad game. Those review scores were mostly graphics for the time.
Music was great though.

@Nem Funny enough it was my first FF game 😆

@Nem first time I played it I got through the entire game without figuring out how to get the summons, i finally found out near the end. The world without internet was a dark time.
Though I did like 8 a lot generally. The graphics especially, they did look realistic at the time.

I never really got into FF7 tried it a couple times but...

Didn't enjoy the first part of the remake to much but I'd till finished once I just focused on the story missions and put the game on easy 😅. Definitely want to pick this up at sometime probably later In the year once I've got through like 4 other massive games on the go 🙄

Definitely a 2024 GOTY contender

The 8 out of 10 review score is why I like push square, honest, personal experience reviews and not just bumping it up to a 9 or 10 because its playstation exclusive

Poor visuals?
So should I wait & play it on PS5 Pro?

Brings a tear of joy to my eye, to see FF IX get the love it deserves 🥲

P.S. please don't do an action rpg style remake.

X and XII are not as good as the others high up. Really goes to show the bad taste gaming journalists had in the early 2000s

Final Fantasy VI in 5th place, hilarious.

ff7 remake didn't deserve its meta score so i doubt ff7 rebirth does either. they got the characters and battle system right... but the environments were terribly uninspired and boring. many of the textures were unfinished. the excessive use of load masking between areas was poorly implemented and really hurt exploration (what little there was). most of the side quests were uneventful or flat out terrible. much of the new story content was poorly written and should have been removed. a lot of backtracking and padding. seems like people are allowing their nostalgia to cloud (no pun intended) their judgement ff7 remake was ultimately an enjoyable but flawed game deserving of no more than a 7.5 at best all things considered.

now, with ff7 rebirth, s-e didn't even implement a function to carry over our old save file. i think that is a major oversight that kills the cohesiveness and immersion of the sequel. starting at level 1 materia spells again? if ff7 rebirth shares any of the flaws with ff7 remake (it sounds like it does), then i find it hard to believe that it is deserving of the 92 score. if it can muster an 8 i'll be satisfied

When you consider Rebirth has a lot more reviews than IX, it's definitely the more acclaimed game even if the score is a point lower. One or two extra reviews for IX would've been enough to have placed it below.