I'm Okay with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's Weird Minigames

Before I started Final Fantasy VII Rebirth a year after its release, my first impression of it was my brother saying, “I liked it okay at first, but I bogged down about 25 hours in…I couldn’t handle all the minigames and side quests, but I also couldn’t stop doing them, so I had to walk away.”

Rebirth’s mostly optional minigame content is divisive – many share my brother’s feeling that it spoiled the game, making it less enjoyable than part 1 of the remake trilogy, Final Fantasy VII Remake. But I disagree! While I did experience minigame fatigue during my Rebirth playthrough, I came out the other side of it with an appreciation for what the game was doing – doubling down on the weird, delightfully uneven minigames of the original.

The Table of Contents

How Many Minigames Are We Actually Talking About?

Let’s compare! Here is my (probably not totally complete) list of minigames in Rebirth:

1. Queen’s Blood
2. Chocobo capture (stealth)
3. Junon March Drill Routine
4. Yuffie Assassination Aiming
5. Piano playing
6. Jump Toad
7. Moogle Mischief
8. Fort Condor
9. Dolphin Racing
10. Cactuar Crush
11. G Bike
12. Pirate’s Rampage
13. Desert Rush
14. Gears and Gambits
15. 3D Brawler
16. Run Wild
17. Chocobo Racing
18. Galactic Saviors
19. Crunch Challenge
20. Photos with Snaps
21. Loveless
22. Battle Arena
23. Chadley’s Combat Simulator

And here is my (also probably incomplete) tally of minigames in the original 1997 FFVII:

1. Chocobo Breeding
2. Sector 6 Plate Timed Jump
3. Temple of the Ancients Boulder Dash
4. Whirlwind Maze
5. Great Glacier Platform Jumping
6. Bone Village Excavation
7. Wonder Catcher (crane game)
8. Chocobo Race Betting
9. Shinra Building Team Stealth Infiltration
10. Protect Aerith in the Church
11. Performing CPR
12. Mog House
13. Gaea’s Cliff Climb (cold survival)
14. 3D Brawler
15. Dolphin Jumping
16. Corel Train Driving
17. Falling off the Corel train tracks for prizes.
18. Timed Safecracking
19. Gold Saucer Arm Wrestling
20. Piano Playing
21. Squat Battle
22. Fort Condor
23. Junon Drill Routine
24. Gold Saucer Rails Shooter Coaster
25. Basketball
26. Battle Square Arena
27. Tifa Gas Chamber Escape
28. G Bike Motorcycle Chase
29. Submarine Battle
30. Snowboarding
31. Chocobo Racing
32. Tifa-Scarlet Slap Battle
33. Loveless

You might note that I gave up on putting the original’s minigames in chronological order because there were just so many; life is too short. You’ll also note that the original list is much longer!

The Original FFVII's Minigames Were Kind of Insane

Playing these two games side by side helped me remember that the minigames in the original are insane. Many of them pop up out of nowhere with little to no tutorial or practice, run you through the game in about a minute, then send you packing after one rushed performance. My experience of at least half of these was, “What just happened?” (Junon Drill, Shinra infiltration, Corel train tracks falling—I’m looking at you).

Others you can (and sometimes must) do over and over, or at least until you succeed. This includes relatively normal, enjoyable minigames (Brawler, Battle Square, G Bike, Submarine, Chocobo Racing, Squat Battle, Fort Condor, Gold Saucer rails shooter, Temple Boulder Dash). It also includes minigames that are weird (Mog House dating sim, Gaea’s cliff climb survival, Great Glacier platform jumping, contorted piano simulation), repetitive, underexplained, or frustrating (timed safecracking, arm wrestling, basketball, whirlwind maze, excavation after the first few), or all of the above (dolphin jumping).

And then there are minigames making such bizarre choices that I really, really wish I could have been a fly on the wall of the Squaresoft decision room. Why are we gamifying CPR and gas chambers?? A few choices were painfully easy to understand – clearly, there weren’t many women’s voices involved when they wrote the Loveless choice about learning either the enemy’s weakness or the princess’s “measurements,” or when they forced powerhouse Tifa into an expletive-filled slap fight with Scarlet, where the only minigame control is ‘slap.

And of course, the eternal (spoiler-skirting) question…why are we snowboarding now of all times? The snowboarding was fun—jarringly 90s, but fun—but…is this the best moment in the game’s emotional arc to shatter immersion for some unapologetic 90s fun? It works great at the Gold Saucer—but when it first appears, it’s the wrong kind of emotional left turn.

That Chaos Was Always Part of Final Fantasy VII's Identity

But ultimately, that’s a big part of FFVII’s identity – it was an ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ game that experimented with every idea it could. It was great and beautiful in part because it tried so many things. A lot of them worked! And many of the ones that didn’t were at least memorable or good for a laugh and not too intrusive.

Where Rebirth's Minigames Succeed and Where They Don't

So when people rip on Rebirth’s minigames, I get it –some aren’t very good, some could be better explained or streamlined, some could be trimmed to limit bloat, and very occasionally, one can force a playthrough to a halt. I was frustrated by the Yuffie assassination minigame because, like the original’s Junon drill, it was over before I understood the controls.

I want to like Rebirth’s Fort Condor, Gears and Gambits, Cactuar Crush, and Desert Rush, but I don’t want to sink the time into really getting the strategy (or learn to recognize the split-second 3D Brawler animations without pause-scumming)—and that’s fine! They’re there for those who want to dive in, and I can (usually) walk away. I got most frustrated when I was an hour or two in before realizing I needed to let one go.

The Minigames Worth Your Time in Rebirth

Still, these minigames are mostly optional, and their quality is more consistently high than the original’s. And more interestingly, this weird overload of minigames is just so Final Fantasy VII. Weirdly, it’s a nice throwback to play the Yuffie assassination and say, “What just happened?” and remember that feeling from the original. To beat the crunch challenge with a goofy grin on my face or clunkily control Red XII playing beast soccer. Or to shift to easy mode to get through the last round of Cactuar Crush with Aerith (I will never be good at soloing Aerith, it turns out).

A lot of Rebirth’s minigames were fun for me: chocobo racing, the silly quicktime events in Junon and Loveless (now with a less insulting choice than “measurements” and wildly improved Gold Saucer theater production values), Galactic Savior, the piano rhythm game, Moogle Mischief, G Bike, and especially Queen’s Blood. After Triple Triad and Tetra Master took off in FFVII and FFIX, it’s legitimately great to see one integrated into VII at last. It’s optional if you don’t like it, and it’s well-balanced and extensive if you do.

By the end, I couldn’t resist completing the Ultimate Party Animal challenge, because a lot of the minigames had me hooked. But if they hadn’t? You don’t miss anything important by skipping the UPA side quest altogether.

Why the Backlash Says More About Gaming Culture Than the Game

I sympathize with the frustrations of the Rebirth minigames, but ultimately, I don’t wish the game had gone a different way. I think the minigame backlash shows a bigger difference in gaming cultures than in the two games. In 1997, when you played FFVII and hit a weird minigame, you’d talk to a couple of friends about it and scratch your heads, but the rough edges paled in comparison to the game’s many compelling advances.

But today, it’s easy for frustration to vent into an online rage storm because we expect more frictionless gaming, online forums intensify the reaction to popular complaints, and Rebirth isn’t the breakthrough moment in gaming that FFVII was, so less satisfying elements don’t get swept under the rug as easily.

If you’re playing Rebirth without having played the original, I think it’s a good game. But if you’re playing it as a fan of the original—so long as you are willing to walk away from minigames that aren’t doing it for you—I think it’s a really good one, because the ‘warts and all’ minigame experience is much closer to the experience of playing FFVII in 1997 than nearly anything I’ve played in the decades in between. Whether the original still holds up today is a conversation of its own.