Eliot’sThe Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock.
The poem meant enough to me that I didn’t want to dissect it with a class.
I wanted to keep for myself.
I went in the end, and though I hesitated, I talked because I had things to say.
I now have to etheriseFinal Fantasy 7 Rebirth.
Cait Sith is splayed upon a table.
It’s all scalpels, forceps, and oversized novelty dice.
It’s a strange way to treat art you love.
AnRPGwhere your character sometimes knocks on doors before opening them?
What a time to be alive.
The how-will-theys and how-can-theys answered with shimmering, stagy confidence and surprise wit.
Cloud’s perfume and dress!
But I digress: Rebirth shines beyond the callbacks.
Final Fantasy’s best card gameandbest combat?
Builds are planned and team-plays executed in flurries of giddy spectacle.
Moments are brought in line with memory, decades of building adoration and mythmaking accounted for.
The gang’s all here, and they are all fiercely lovable and massive dorks.
Pulled akimbo by priorities not so much split as omnislashed: the expectations of the market.
Unbelievably brave about it.
Star-struck by fictional characters and leitmotifs.
In short, afraid.
Eyes up, SOLDIER.
All exploration is fed back through him.
you’re able to take the boy out of the Shinra building I suppose.
What fuels the towers I have to climb to reveal more icons, Chadley?
(I’m grasping him by the collar.
You little mole rat shrew gopher android fuck.
(Avoid all of Rebirth’s green marked sidequests until you absolutely feel like it.
Do the open world activities that look interesting to you but don’t feel compelled to clean up.
Definitely do the protorelic quest.
Absolutely play Queen’s Blood.
Otherwise, just follow the story.
you might come back and do everything else later.
Do not let this little bastard spin up the show and kill the pacing.)
But theme parks suggest safety.
A simulation of danger.
In between, everything.
A hundred visions and revisions.
Sidequests that all feel like slightly different flavours of that one goat hunt from The Witcher 3.
The yellow paint that rubs its nose upon the cliff edges.
More Moogle wranglin'.
Nibelheim’s fossilised tiger-teeth mountains.
Nibelheim’s potato tuber mako springs.
Nibelheim’s unbelievably boring background NPCs.
Moments that are pitch perfectFinal Fantasy 7.
An orb of materia falling from the blades of a repaired windmill.
Escher-esque tangles of switches and ladders.
Screw it, some Final Fantasy 8 and 9, too.
Monster hunts that offer up secret region bosses.
Moments that are better than the original; foregrounded and fairgrounded fan favourites.
The Gold Saucer play.
Moments that are Rebirth’s alone, but just feel right.
A showdown at Gongaga.
A far more intriguing role for the Weapon creatures.
Everything Barret or Yuffie says or does.
Feeling cosy next to an ecologically disastrous pipeline under an infinite sky.
Feeling forlorn and hopeless beside a motorcycle minigame near a stand selling tonberry ice cream.
Rare unmarked paths that lead to an overwhelming question: Not “will it end?
And would it have been worth it, after all?
Like Remake, Rebirth can’t do horror.
This is the best Final Fantasy combat.
It’s the best.
Many games are equally breathless but lack Rebirth’s sheer lung capacity in the getting there.
Rebirth is big lung breathless.
A linked materia slot housing glinting strategy and shining spectacle, each single minute brimming with decisions and revisions.
Christmas morning captured in a ward that turns Aerith’s plinky staff sprites into a quad-barreled laser cannon.
He wants to start a new life and his mum wants to help him out.
Tonally jarringfora project based on a game where you pop balloons on a snowboard moments after a tragic bereavement.
So, sure: some of Rebirth is dull.
Much of it is tedious.
Some of it is disappointing.
A lot of it is Chadley.
All of it did not run in ultrawide for me.
I wanted to see Barret’s sailor suit in ultrawide, Rebirth.
Final Fantasy Rebirth is imperfect, incautious, uneven, and gloriously, fearlessly unfocused.
Final Fantasy Rebirth is unmissable.
