Final Fantasy VII Rebirth excels at character, story and combat. The PC version offers improvements over the console release but has a host of technical issues.
VGChartz's Mark Nielsen: "Halfway into the decade and the 2020s has been an interesting one for gaming in both good ways and bad, with the restructuring of the industry, a mix of innovation and the same old, and of course many, many long waits. But there have also been many quality titles, to be sure; the last three years in particular have seen a number of critical darlings. Something the most acclaimed ones have had in common (with the obvious exception of Astro Bot) has been an absolutely massive scope, easily boasting 100+ hours of content.
In my own experience that massive amount of content hasn’t always been a positive; in fact I would go so far as to call their slightly overeager strive for quantity a shared flaw of these games. I’ll be looking at four titles in particular here and going over the different ways in which these otherwise solid experiences became victims of having just a bit too much fluff."
To much unimportant content and bloat is mote likely to cause me to stop playing or never revisit it. Especially when it feels like you're forcing the player to do side quests to pad out your game length just to make it long enough so you won't have the player trade the game in to fast
One recent example for me is Hogwarts I enjoyed the story but despised the level gating there was no real reason to lock missions behind a leveling system it was just forcing the player to fly around doing side quests and puzzles so they could advance to the next chapter
omg hogwarts
i love every second of it but damn, does it feel like a chore to play haha.
Hogwarts Legacy should have stuck to what other games couldn’t do: Let us be a Hogwarts student. The open world aspect was just like any Ubisoft game.
Honestly wish it had more of a Bully feel. It was clear that 90% of the attention went to the school and town and the rest felt like the northern chunk of Just Cause 3's map. Almost like they had to justify the flying mechanic by spreading things out.
Yeah agree the Hogwarts castle and grounds is ripe for exploration. Look at the PS1 Argonaut game i felt like that old game did a better job with relaying what it's like to be a student at Hogwarts than what legacy did.
Legacy was like ok you've done a few classes learnt to ride a broom go spend the next multitude of hours exploring nearby towns and killing hundreds of goblins and spiders I don't think they did enough with the school grounds.
I appreciate them including Hogsmeade but I felt like it didn't need to expand past that point
Why don't we have more 12-15h single player stories for $45 is beyond me.
My guess is I recall around the late 2000s game trades were a big issue which resulted in publishers shifting away from standard single player campaigns that could be beaten in a month and we started to see more expansive open worlds that would take longer to see everything to keep the player invested long enough that they wouldn't trade in the game when it was going to be the most profitable retail window e.g the first month
With the rise of all digital games I can see those games making a comeback as there is no second hand market
Expecting a 12-15h game to be $45 is part of the problem. These games don't sell well at full price anymore and relatively speaking it takes a lot fewer resources to stretch it into a 30-40 hour game that can be sold for full price.
We can complain about padding all we want, but most people simply pay more for padded games.
Eternal Strands $48. 18 hours
Citizen Sleeper 2 $23 10 hours.
AstroBot (got as a gift) 16 hours and they keep adding levels.
Totally agree. I'm tired of the same bloated fluff that games present as 'content.'
Act 3 is massive. I think I finished the game 4 times for the platinum and I know I must have missed at least half the stuff in that city
i feel like Rebirth only really had Costa del sol as a bloat. but its a long game, so i dont blame the author
On March 15, 2025, a special program for the Famitsu Dengeki Game Awards 2024, sponsored by KADOKAWA Game Linkage, was broadcast. The Famitsu Dengeki Game Awards 2024 is Japan's largest user-voted game awards, where game fans vote to select the best game of 2024. The program selected the best works in 17 categories, including the grand prize "Game of the Year". The winner of the grand prize "Game of the Year" was Square Enix's "Final Fantasy VII Rebirth".
I have very mixed feelings about this game. It is not the GOTY i expected it to be for sure. It has too many mini games that break the rhythm..
No more than the original does really. A lot are completely optional too like the card game
costa del sol has a max of literally 3 mini games that u need to play. every other mini game is optional and doesnt need to be won for the rest of the game (except the choco racing one)
im sorry that your attention span is so fragile that u need action 24/7
Just ended chapter 13 & boy it has some emotional content. The game is very good & award deserving.
It was my GotY. Heck it’s one of the best games I’ve played in a while, period.
The PlayStation 5 was once again the best-selling console in the US in January 2025 in terms of units sold and dollar sales, according to figures from Circana (formerly The NPD Group). Circana includes the dates for the four-week period of January 5 to February 1. The Nintendo Switch came in second place in terms of units sold and in third in terms of dollar sales. The Xbox Series X|S came in third place in terms of units sold and second in dollar sales.
Astro Bot has legs.
No.5 best selling game on PS5 for Jan.
No.12 best selling game overall.
And was in the top 10 in December. All these people gloating that it's not selling are morons.
It was just a select few that was gloating. Don’t mind them. They usually get banned in minutes for having hundreds of alt account lol.
They? Lol it's just one sad little lonely embarrassment of a man that makes all those alt accounts. Just a single quivering sack of tears who is trying not to burst whenever pro-Playstation news or unflattering xbox news comes out.
Especially those who tried to brag Indiana Jones sold well, despite charting lower than astro bot, 3 months after it's that released lol, and indy now being absent from the charts.
As usual MS games tend to be a lot of smoke and mirrors. Starfield was supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread too.
Ms games don't sell not when they are in a subscription might actually see some numbers when we get it on ps5 there's a reason Microsoft is backing away from the Xbox it's cause PlayStation and Nintendo players buy games not just rent them
It is a shame though, Indiana Jones is a very good game. But it might get legs when it arrives on ps5. Fortunately, they did greenlight a sequel, so it doesn't really matter that much.
That’s because Xbox games are always going to struggle at retail for the most part, because contrary to what fans want you to think, GamePass cuts into the physical sales of all their games, on top of the platform currently on track to be the worst selling Xbox consoles since the original, and probably ending with 30% less sales than the XBO which was already considered to be a steep decline.
Keep in mind it's a 4 week period compared to January 2024 where it was a 5 week period.
Interesting:
Indiana Jones was beaten in dollar sales in its second month by games like The Crew Motorfest and It Takes Two.
You can't even use Gamepass as an argument here, as it's not even in the top 10 on the Xbox platform, and even there, was beaten by other Gamepass games like Flight Sim 24 and Forza Horizon 5 as well.
Another example that proves what an immense challenge it must be to generate SO much cash through new subscribers to compensate for the 30% or 70% share that no longer exists due to "Day 1 in the Gamepass".
Oh and:
Congrats to Astro Bot & Asobi. Very nice to see it's still in the Top 20 in the US!
Replies(1)If indy sold well - 'see, gamepass magically increases game sales'
Indy doesn't sell well - 'duh how can it sell well if it's on gamepass'
- xbox fanboys
The duality and spinning with these arguments is indeed annoying.
But since Microsoft still don't release all the really important and meaningful data, those discussions won't ever be fruitful.
All we get in terms of data is revenue and percentages. Or the shallowest meta data like "5 million players", "500m MAU", "biggest launch in franchise history", or no console shipment or sell through data at all.
I really have to say that it is nuts to me how investors & stock holders let them get away with such unspecific data in every single financial report.
@dveio, MS gaming is such a small part of MS, I don't think investors give it much thought compared to the rest of their business. Gaming is lumped under "More Personal Computing" (1/5 revenue) and gaming is somewhere like 1/4 of that. So gaming is about 1/20 of MS. Easy for it to get looked over
Replies(1)
I’m impressed by Spider-Man’s sales… how tf? Its like it periodically releases lol.
Yeah, certain fanboys cling to Spidermans budget, when at the time it had sold like 10 million, and continues to chart and sell well, as if games just magically stop selling as soon as they get released lol.
New users buy a PS5 with a Spider Man copy, or to be more precise it's one of the first games they get.
This holiday Sony said that around 40% of sales were new users.
Pretty much Spider and Astro are the new faces of PS for new users.
Very good point. They sold about 10 million in the holiday period and they said 42% were completely new users so that's around 4 million with a brand new PS5, so I believe you've hit the nail on the head. They totally would have bought spidey lol and seeing as though Astrobot got GOTY, I bet that sold a million or so as well.
That's the good thing about using known IP. There's a constant new influx of gamers every year and a lot of these people are spiderman fans, so they will play it.
Games like Spider-Man will always be evergreen for Sony. You can add the likes of God of War and GT7 to that list as well.
"Square Enix promised 120fps at 4K. " How is that even a thing. How can they promise you 120 FPS without knowing your system. Just because a game supports high framerate doesn't mean that your PC will support that. Not all PCs are created equal. Thats the point.
@Cogconnected
Can you link the source where PC players are "promised 120/4k" because I highly doubt they ever did.
Have they really given a criticism in a review of they promised a certain performance? Isn't that your PCs fault 😂😂
we he said he has a 4080, if only a 4090 can get 4k 120 its catering to 1% of the PC demos lol
The reviewer complains for the lack of Dlss and the game has Dlss ..Complains about 4K@120 and them says it runs at that framerate with v-synch off...did this guy really played the PC version...I dont think so.