rebirth

After years and years of rumors, it was finally announced that Final Fantasy VII was getting a full remake, starting from the ground up. Originally announced as "episodic" and later clarified to be a trilogy, the first part, titled Final Fantasy VII Remake, released in 2020.

Now, purely speaking about it as a video game: Remake is fantastic. It manages to blend action and turn-based RPG combat in a truly innovative system. The graphics are obviously much improved from the original. The music is phenomenal.

Where I take issue is the story. I'm not going to belabor the point, but Remake diverges from the original game significantly. Part of this is to make it work on its own — the Midgar arc of the original game is not meaty enough to occupy an entire RPG — and part of it is simply because the developers wanted to go a very different direction with the story.

The second game, Rebirth, was released in 2024 and follows along the same path. Where there are lots of ways it's exactly like the original in plot and setting, there are countless differences that add up to a very different whole. And this is no more evident than with Cid.

Cid is not playable in Rebirth, and functions instead as a guest character. His entire storyline is absent from the game — the story skips over Rocket Town completely, as if it doesn't exist. Rebirth being a massive open-world game, I can understand this to a degree — it would have simply added to development cost and time to have an explorable Rocket area.

But because Rocket Town isn't there, we simply get almost no personality for Cid, and the only reason he ends up coming along is because... he knew Aerith's mom, Ifalna? What? Sorry, what?

Yeah. In lieu of any of Cid's backstory or (entirely plot-relevant) reason to go after Shinra, he just helps out because he feels bad that Aerith's mom used to be a Shinra captive. Seriously, what? I can't even begin to make sense of this choice.

What's more, Cid is... not the Cid from the original game. I don't think he even swears once. He's a little rough around the edges, but he's not outright abrasive the way he used to be. While on the one hand I can understand this choice — the original Cid is openly abusive and downright rude — it's such a stark change that I have a hard time seeing Rebirth's Cid as, well, Cid. He's just a pilot who happens to have the same name and plane.

It's disappointing! Obviously I enjoyed the original Cid, or this website wouldn't exist. I had a lot of issues with Rebirth in general, and I feel like Cid sums them all up. It's just not the same as it used to be. I can appreciate the desire to do something new and different, but as a longtime fan it's not what I wanted.

Oh, well. We'll always have the original.

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