I’ve never played the OG FF7 but I loved Remake. Beautiful environments, great music, story, and characters. I rarely pick games back up after finishing them, but I finished remake twice.
I was really excited to play Rebirth, especially after seeing the all the great reviews, and wow what a let down. The graphics are downgraded, the story is filled with Ubisoft style open world bloat, loaded with pointless minigames. It felt like SE tried to pad out the game with as much time wasting garbage as possible. I put the game down shortly after reaching the second area and haven’t felt compelled to come back.
Does the game improve at all later? Is it worth pushing through?
I agree, if you took out the side quests and mini games you’d get another FF16 which was an absolute slog by the end of it because of how monotonous it was with lack of variety
FF16 only ever became a slog due to its side content and the difficulty of such once you were levelled last a certain point. Story content was always great, even for the side stuff. But the gameplay for the side stuff got very tedious after the third half. I also ended up doing everything too. So I know how boring it can be. Still loved the game as a whole though. Mostly due to the story and characters.