Video Game / Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Though this is a remake of a game from 1997, there are enough differences in the plot that spoilers from that game may not necessarily apply here. Whether you know the events of the original Final Fantasy VII or not, tropes below will spoil some of Rebirth's new twists and turns. Read on at your own risk!

The Unknown Journey Continues

"What we've done — that's set in stone. The past is forever. But the future — even if it has been written — can be changed. So focus on the future — not the past."

— Aerith Gainsborough

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is the second entry of a three-part Video Game Remake series of the timeline-breakingly popular 1997 PlayStation RPG, Final Fantasy VII, sequel to Final Fantasy VII Remake, and the eighth entry in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, developed by Square Enix for the PlayStation 5. Multiple members of Remake's team are involved in Rebirth, including creative director Tetsuya Nomura, director Naoki Hamaguchi, and producer Yoshinori Kitase.

Following the finale of Final Fantasy VII Remake, BFS-wielding mercenary Cloud Strife, his Bare-Fisted Monk childhood friend Tifa Lockhart, Eco-Terrorist revolutionary with a machine-gun Arm Cannon Barret Wallace, White Magician flower girl Aerith Gainsborough, and fiery talking wolf/lion-like beast Red XIII, have escaped the Mega City of Midgar. Now the group pursue the enigmatic white-haired Super-Soldier, Sephiroth, a man who both Cloud and Aerith claim is out to bring about The End of the World as We Know It. As the chase spans across the continents, the group is joined by teenaged ninja Yuffie Kisaragi, Funny Animal cat robot Cait Sith, surly aerospace test-pilot Cid Highwind, and gothic gun-toting monster man Vincent Valentine. And along the way, each character must face their pasts, including Cloud and Tifa wrestling with their history with Sephiroth during "the Nibelheim incident", Barret confronting the vengeful ghosts of his hometown of Corel, Red XIII coming to terms with his family's legacy in Cosmo Canyon, and Aerith accepting her inheritance as the last of the Cetra.

But even as the cast contends with their pasts, the future continues to shift. Free from the hands of destiny that haunted Remake, what is Sephiroth now after, what is it that Aerith is still hiding, and what does the appearance of the mysterious black-haired SOLDIER Zack Fair mean?

The game was released on February 29, 2024 on PlayStation 5. A demo of the game was made available on February 6, 2024, which covers the Nibelheim Incident in the game's past. A further demo of the Junon area was added to the same demo before the game's launch on February 21, 2024.

Previews: First Look, Summer Game Fest 2023 Trailer, Release Date Trailer, Theme Song Announcement Trailer, Official Trailer, Final Trailer, Launch Trailer.

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The game contains examples of:

A-F

• Absurdly High Level Cap: The level cap for this game has been raised to 70. Passing level 50 on a normal playthrough would take quite the effort.
• Actionized Sequel:
  • Characters move faster, have stronger moves and can even use special moves without using a gauge, greatly increasing the speed and ferocity of battle.
  • Cloud can now strike enemies from range with Sword Beams and fight in midair, and the tutorials emphasize the importance of different kinds of techniques letting you string combos together more efficiently, like moves that do more damage if used in midair.
• Actually Pretty Funny: During a certain sidequest, a character will ask what Cloud's brand is, suggesting "Tall, blond, and 'not interested'", causing Red XIII to let out an audible chuckle.
  Red XIII: Ahem... Allergies.
• Adaptational Badass:
  • The Nibelheim opening scenes see Sephiroth and Cloud perform a combination attack on the Materia Keeper's counterpart, the Materia Guardian. Considering that the entirety of the compilation has made it clear nothing short of Cloud at his peak is anything resembling a challenge to Sephiroth, that is quite a jump for a mid-game boss. Slightly downplayed in that this is A Taste of Power and that Sephiroth does not consider the boss any sort of actual trouble.
  • The Nibelheim flashback shows that 16-year-old Cloud, while not as powerful as Sephiroth, is still quite capable on his own. This is in stark contrast to the original, who was at level 1 and had to rely on the level 50 Sephiroth to do everything (and is likely a hint that the actual SOLDIER you're playing as is not Cloud at all).
  • Priscilla's dolphin stays around after the Terror of the Deep attacks, helping Yuffie get to dry land and giving Cloud a boost to deal the finishing blow.
  • Tseng was never fought in the original, but proves to be a tough opponent. He also walks away under his own power, albeit heavily wounded, after being impaled by Sephiroth, and even kills the Sephiroth clone with his gun after being stabbed.
  • Yuffie is an optional party member in the original, and her plot relevance comes when the party goes to Wutai. In Rebirth, Yuffie somewhat joins forces with the party as early as Junon Lower Area, and stages a political assassination against Rufus Shinra during the Junon military parade, though she fails.
• Adaptational Context Change: In the original game, the Mog House was a Game Within a Game that Cloud could play at the Gold Saucer. In Rebirth, it exists in the real world and Cloud can visit it himself.
• Adaptational Deviation: Many events happen in different circumstances compared to the original Final Fantasy VII:
  • There are many new unique enemies in the world that weren't present in the original or had their locations changed, such as the Quetzalcoatl, an electric bird/wolf enemy. Some enemy types, such as the Heavy Tank and Ghirofelgo, remain Adapted Out however.
  • The summon materia had their locations moved and are all found via questlines involving Chadley.
  • The colored Chocobos with unique exploration abilities play a bigger part in the game and can be unlocked earlier.
  • When Cloud witnesses Sephiroth's Sanity Slippage in the flashback, he tries to stop him from leaving the Shinra manor only for Sephiroth to toss him aside and knock him out. In the original game's flashback, Cloud actually let Sephiroth walk out and didn't understand just how badly he'd snapped until he saw Nibelheim ablaze. Furthermore, a lot more focus is given to Cloud searching in vain for his mother compared to the original where he quickly came to terms with what had happened and chased after Sephiroth.
  • The Midgar Zolom (now named Midgardsormr) is a mandatory boss instead of an optional enemy that should be avoided.
  • In the portion of the original game covered here, the party only fought the Turks (comprised of Rude and Reno) in an optional encounter in Gongaga. In Rebirth, Reno is absent from the narrative until Shinra are preparing to head to the Temple of the Ancients, leaving Rude to be partnered with Elena for most of the game. Additionally, Rude and Elena are fought in both the Mythril Mines and the Gold Saucer's Musclehead Colosseum, whilst Reno and Rude are fought in the Temple of the Ancients. Additionally, Tseng - who was never involved in combat in all previous appearances - teams up with Elena for a second boss fight in the Temple.
  • The Mythril Mines in Rebirth now consists of three visually destinct sections: an old disused civilian tunnel from the Republican days at the top, an proper gold-rush esque mine in the middle, and a large chamber system of caves at the bottom. In the original game, the Mines were only a small cave system with almost no actual mining equipment.
  • Fort Condor is now inaccessible, being an island that cannot be reached at the present time.
  • Bottomswell (now named Terror of the Deep) no longer confronts the party on the beach: Cloud has Barret assist in drawing it away from the beach over to a pier, which in gameplay gives it much more freedom of movement.
  • In the original game, Cloud's party first met Yuffie in a random forest, and she fought them to try and rob them of their Materia. In this game, she gets attacked by the Terror of the Deep in Under Junon, is rescued by Mr. Dolphin, and meets the party after they dispatch it before heading off on her own.
  • Cloud leads the section of the Junon parade he is in instead of being just a member and can arrange the troop formation himself, along with Aerith and Tifa accompanying him in uniform and performing alongside him. The section of Junon that the parade went through was a revisitable area that one just had to bribe a guard to get by. Here, Upper Junon becomes inaccessible after Chapter 4.
  • The Shinra-8, the ship used by the party to travel between Junon and Costa del Sol, recieved a flurry of changes in Rebirth:
    • The Shinra-8 is now much more akin to a cruise ship rather than the cargo freighter it's depicted as in the original game. That being said, the ship does have a large storage hold that forms most of the dungeon leading to the engine room boss fight with Jenova∙BIRTH (which has been retranslated to Jenova Emergent).
    • The civilian-friendly redesign also allows for the party to get rid of their Junon disguises (with the exception of Barret, who grew to like his sailor getup) earlier than in the original game, where they had to blend in with the crew. For those worried if Red XIII being dressed up like a Shinra trooper was cut, then fret not. It makes a bedazzled appearence during the climax of the onboard Queen's Blood tournement, where he uses it to bypass the bipedals only requirement.
    • The enemies fought in the night during the lead up to the Jenova fight have been changed from Shinra troopers and Scrutineyes in the original game to monsters created by Hojo's RND department. These monsters are also revealed to fuse with the Sephiroth Clones into Transhuman Abominations.
    • Rufus and Heidegger are not on the boat as the party moves to Costa del Sol. Their near encounter on the ship is changed to an actual encounter during the parade in Junon.
    • Yuffie is present aboard the Shinra-8, having snuck in by disguising herself as a Sephiroth Clone, which gets her in trouble when she's confused for one of them.
  • Hojo no longer resigns from Shinra to search for Sephiroth on his own; instead, he uses his position at Shinra to further his own agenda. As such, his trip to Costa del Sol, which was a genuine vacation in the original, is recontextualized as an attempt to gather specimens (whilst still enjoying the sunny weather).
  • While Yuffie's desire for Materia is as strong as ever, her non-optional nature this time means she has more story contribution, and she bonds more closely with the party. Since Wutai was moved to the third game in the remake project, she doesn't steal the party's Materia in this game.
  • The existence of Weapons becomes known to the party much earlier in Rebirth at the Corel Reactor. In the original game, the first mention of their existence was at the Icicle Inn.
  • In the original, you had to pay the entrance fee every time you entered the Gold Saucer or purchase the lifetime pass for a staggering 30,000 gil. Rebirth changes it to where Dio gives the party a lifetime pass as a prize.
  • Barret is alongside Cloud when first meeting Cait Sith, when originally Barret is the only party member that couldn't accompany Cloud to see Gold Saucer.
  • There is no longer endless desert outside of Corel Prison, thus no chocobo carriage to ferry you to safety as well. Rebirth also allows it to be revisitable, compared to it only being accessed one time in the original game.
  • The Dune Buggy is only available inside the Corel region, when it was possible to take it past Gongaga until Nibelheim and take it back to Junon.
  • Gongaga is now part of the main storyline, while Rocket Town isn't and can't be traveled to. Due to this, various things taking place in Rocket Town in the original game get spread throughout Rebirth:
    • Cid is instead introduced at Gongaga Airport, where Cloud's party has to flare up smoke and request his services to fly them to Cosmo Canyon. He flies the Tiny Bronco, which is now an actual functioning airplane instead of a mere vehicle that allows you to travel over shallow waters, and you can also request Cid to fly you to other places with it (albeit with limited controls and options). ^note The Tiny Bronco's wings still end up blowing up and malfunctioning like what happened in the original, although it happens much later in the story. However, Cid and the party restore its airworthy status in the ending cutscene, and use it to fly northwards from the Forgotten Capital.
    • The plotline revolving around Rufus' plan to steal the Tiny Bronco to assist in his hunt for Sephiroth was entirely cut, as Cid's job has been changed to being a freelance pilot using the plane to fly across the world.
    • The Materia Keeper (now named The Materia Guardian) is now a boss during the flashback section Sephiroth accompanies Cloud through the Nibelheim Mountains. In the original game, Cloud and the party fought the monster while travelling between Nibelheim and Rocket Town.
    • The boss fight with Palmer also gets moved earlier, this time to the Corel Desert immediately after the showdown between Barret and Dyne. He additionally fights using the Anuran Suppressor, a frog-like mech that frequently gets flipped over thanks to the space program director's extreme incompentence.
  • Gongaga's one plot critical appearance has been moved to after the Corel arc. Cloud's breakdown fueled attack on Aerith at the Temple of the Ancients has been changed to a delirium and gaslight induced attack on Tifa at the Gongaga reactor. Barret has less to say to Cloud afterwards, rather than tell him that just because he doesn't know himself all that well doesn't mean he can stop, he forces him to get up to help Tifa. And Tifa is the only one who hears him break his walls and admit his faults about his condition.
  • Barret is the only person who accompanies Red through the Cave of the Gi. Cloud put forth his services, but Bugenhagen could tell Nanaki looked up too much to Cloud for him to learn from the trial.
  • In the original game, the rebuilt Nibelheim was heavily implied to be a Shinra cover-up of Sephiroth's actions, with the citizens all acting defensive and telling off Cloud and Tifa when they try asking about what happened, to the point of accusing them of lying about the fire. Here, it's openly stated that Shinra rebuilt the village and filled it with their employees, repurposing the town as a treatment center for mako poisoning.
  • Cloud's confrontation with Sephiroth in the basement of the Shinra manor has been removed, changed to him doubling over when close to some containers implied to have Sephiroth's genetic material.
  • Aerith is now aware that Cloud used to be close friends with Zack, further solidifying her theory of him subconsciously imitating the latter.
  • Further, a subplot has Tifa telling Aerith that Cloud's story in Kalm is not what she remembered (a scene cut from the original game). It's heavily implied that Tifa told Aerith that it was Zack instead, leading to them keeping a closer eye on Cloud's mental health throughout the game and testing him on things about Zack. In the original, Tifa kept this information to herself, meaning Aerith never learned that it was really Zack in Nibelheim.
  • Wutai is constantly mentioned throughout the story, but is no longer an optional area players can visit. It instead will be visited in the next game.
  • The party is forced to fight Don Corneo on Dio's behalf in order to obtain the keystone needed to open the Temple of the Ancients.
  • The subplot about Marlene's kidnapping being used to force Avalanche into cooperating with Cait Sith after he steals the Key to the Temple of the Ancients is completely absent. As a result, Cait Sith doesn't join the party's exploration of the Temple until it's about to collapse. On that note, because they are on the outs with him, Cait doesn't do one last reading on Cloud and Aerith's compatibility before they leave the Temple. Cait Sith's monologue has also changed, where it was implied that this particular model found some self awareness and sentience just before his sacrifice, here he just pleads to empty air for them to be safe.
  • The Temple of the Ancients has been moved from an island south of Junon to the northern continent, near the Forgotten Capital.
  • In both games, Turks leader Tseng gets stabbed by Sephiroth in the Temple of the Ancients. While the original game has him lose consciousness with the implication he succumbed to his wounds,^note Before the Remake project, this was retconned so that Cait Sith rescued him before the Temple collapsed. Rebirth has him walk under his own power out of the Temple in order to better explain future events featuring him.
  • The Demon Gate is now the final guardian of the black materia instead of impeding the party's escape from the temple like in the original game.
  • In the original, the Black Materia was built into the temple itself and the only way to obtain it would be to activate a device inside the temple that would shrink the temple down until the Materia was obtainable, but the person who activated the device would be crushed (with Cait Sith volunteering as penance for betraying the team.) In Rebirth, the Black Materia is inside the Temple, but taking it causes the Temple to collapse, with Cait Sith this time sacrificing his life to delay the collapse of the Temple by holding up the pedestal the Black Materia was on.
  • The Temple of the Ancients segment ends with Sephiroth knocking out Cloud, rather than the ally that accompanied him. This also means other than Tifa and Aerith, most of the party does not know the full sway Sephiroth holds over Cloud's mind. Subsequently, they don't go to Gongaga to recuperate.
  • Instead of Aerith leaving the party while the rest of the team are in Gongaga, the entire team immediately head for the Sleeping Forest, skipping over the Bone Village segment in the original. Aerith then uses some implied Cetra power to create a fog that makes it impossible for the party to follow her, while she heads for the Forgotten Capital. Cloud meanwhile comes to, and can see Whispers which allow everyone to navigate the forest.
  • The Forgotten Capital was an explorable area in the original, and the party originally had to rest overnight in order to find where Aerith was praying, with Cloud waking and sensing her presence. Here it's a linear dungeon sequence that leads straight to Aerith and the end game.
  • In the section leading up to the water altar, the immediate party all followed Cloud down in the original, with the two other characters hanging back while Cloud went over to where Aerith was praying. Here, the entire party are blocked by Whispers, but manage to combine to create a gap in the barrier to allow Cloud to proceed through by himself.
  • When Cloud is forced to swing his sword on Aerith at the water altar, rather than controlling Cloud's mind to do so, Sephiroth instead uses the Black Whispers (with White Whispers pushing the blade away, implied to be from Aerith or the Lifestream). Rather than being snapped out of it by his friends, Cloud is on his own and breaks free through sheer will upon seeing Sephiroth dive down to unleash the infamous killing blow, which Cloud notices this time around instead of seeing it too late.
  • Cloud blocks Sephiroth's infamous attack, seemingly saving Aerith's life. Sephiroth then appears to rewrite reality so that his attack was successful anyway, resulting in Aerith falling down in an almost identical manner to the original. More timeline distortions occur, and Cloud sees Aerith awaken in his arms. Meanwhile, all this dissipates the Whispers blocking the party as above allowing them to join Cloud, and their visions distort to seeing Aerith mortally wounded or lifeless as per the original game.
  • After the battle with Jenova Life (renamed Jenova Lifeclinger), there is a new multi-stage boss fight against Sephiroth, firstly in his Bizarro Sephiroth form (renamed Sephiroth Reborn), which Zack also helps with. The final stage is against Sephiroth's human form, with Cloud and an unspecified version of Aerith assisting him.
  • Originally after laying Aerith to rest, which is skipped over in Rebirth making it unclear if it happened or not, the party proceeds through the other side of the Forgotten Capital towards Icicle Inn. Instead, they now board a repaired Tiny Bronco and take off in the direction of the Northern Crater.
  • In the original game, the White Materia was lost after Aerith's death when it fell into the lake and was never found again. Here, its purpose gets expanded to involve two White Materias from different timelines: an empowered one that originally belonged to the Chihuahua timeline Aerith which finds its way to her Beagle counterpart, and a depowered one that ends up in Cloud's hands after the Aerith of his timeline bequeaths hers to him in exchange for delivering the empowered materia. The empowered materia leads to Aerith herself growing powerful enough to gain command of her own Whispers and becoming a direct threat to Sephiroth. What role the second materia in Cloud's possession will play in the future remains to be seen.
• Adaptational Diversity: The Shinra forces in Upper Junon have a noticeable number of female members among them, most significantly the Commander of the Seventh Infantry. All previous works in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII franchise had shown the rank-and-file Shinra troopers and field officers as being exclusively male, even as recently as Final Fantasy VII Remake and its Intermission DLC story.
• Adaptational Early Appearance: Sephiroth transforms into Sephiroth Reborn for the middle portion of the final boss fight. Those who played through the original game know that this is Bizarro Sephiroth—which doesn't appear until at the very end of the original game—under a more accurately translated name.
• Adaptation Expansion:
  • Instead of being optional recruits like in the original game, Yuffie and Vincent have their roles expanded to connect to the main story.
  • In Cosmo Canyon, it's revealed that the Gi were aliens who came to the Planet after the destruction of their home world, but clashed with the Cetra and were denied access to the Lifestream after death. Their vengeful spirits corrupted a sacred materia with their desire for oblivion, creating the Black Materia, but the Cetra stole it back and hid it away so it could never be used.
  • In the original, the only piano that could be played was the one in Tifa's room. Rebirth adds multiple pianos throughout the world, turning piano playing into a fully-fledged minigame. There's also sheet music that can be discovered, and playing them well enough will earn rewards.
• Adaptational Modesty:
  • Tifa is wearing a black sports bra under her top once again, even in flashback scenes to the Nibelheim Incident. The first chapter also shows that Tifa had her Modesty Shorts on back then too.
  • A minor example, but unlike in the original game and Intergrade, the fly of Yuffie's shorts is buttoned up and she has a belt on.
  • Concept art of Priscilla corresponding with her original character model had her in a rather revealing bikini and sarong combo in the original Storyline. She now wears a floral top and has shorts under the sarong for Rebirth.
• Adaptational Nice Guy:
  • Cid sincerely asks Aerith if he could help her after hearing her mother was Ifalna because he developed feelings for the woman back when he used to work for Shinra, which, considering his characterization in the original game, is unusually polite for him.
  • The original version of Sephiroth, while still initially a decent man, was mainly concentrated on the mission in Nibelheim before he went insane, and was largely cold and professional in his demeanor, to the point of leaving one of his own men to die after a bridge collapse because he knew lingering around to search for them would be too dangerous. In the first chapter, Sephiroth willingly jumps off the broken bridge so he can plant himself in the river to save anyone he can while trying to find the missing Shinra trooper, even looking by himself after everyone gets to solid ground. While Sephiroth is still pretty aloof and mission-focused before he undergoes his Sanity Slippage, he does show a sense of humor, and is not without a few moments where he's shown to be every bit the hero that Shinra painted him as. Barret even comments that Sephiroth sounds like a stand-up guy before he went mad, and Cloud affirms that he was. This is in line with his pre-slippage characterization in Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII and his rather odd but warm friendship with Zack. Furthermore, this game's portrayal of his Sanity Slippage lacks the venomous hatred of humanity he developed in the original game, and his descent into madness is driven purely by his delusion that he's Jenova's successor and needs to reclaim the planet in her name.
• Adaptational Superpower Change: In the original game, yellow chocobos had no special skills, blue chocobos can swim through shallow water, green chocobos can climb mountains, black chocobos can do both, and gold chocobos, the rarest breed, and cross any terrain and swim in the ocean. Here, all chocobo breeds can swim, yellow and orange chocobos have no special skills, black chocobos can climb mountains, green chocobos can bounce on mushrooms, light blue chocobos can glide, and dark blue chocobos can glide and use a stream of water when swimming to jet into the air. The issue of which breeds, if any, can cross ocean waters never comes up, as invisible walls prevent players from taking any chocobo too far away from shore.
• Adaptational Wimp:
  • Sephiroth is less powerful in this game's Nibelheim flashback sequence, but only by virtue of the original game making him invincible and killing everything in a single hit. Further downplayed in that he's still immensely powerful and clearly not going full out; when he's trying, he's every bit as strong as would be expected.
  • Regular Dragons were a Boss in Mook Clothing the size of buses in the original game. Here, they're just Giant Mook car-sized monsters, likely so that the full sized Red Dragon would come across as more impressive.
  • The Materia Guardian (originally known as the Materia Keeper) was a notoriously difficult mid-game boss in the original, but here it serves as the boss of the tutorial, and with Sephiroth in the party during the fight it becomes a cakewalk.
• Aggressive Play Incentive: Even more than Remake, Rebirth encourages fast paced action and strategic attacks. The new Synergy attacks require multiple actions to be used, often after using the base attacks to build up ATB bars. These Synergy moves all have buffs that in themselves reward aggressive play, be it by buffing Limit levels, granting free mp, extending stagger time, or enabling more actions. The perfect block system allows even more aggressive actions by charging Limit Breaks by how much they would have charged if they did damage to boot.
• Alien Blood: Sweat in this case, but it is implied this would hold true for blood and other fluids. That produced by Sephiroth clones will glow purple under a blacklight, in an identical color to Jenova's blood seen in Remake. Dr. Sheiran notes that they have some odd component in their blood which he can't identify, and requests a blood sample from Cloud to check his hypothesis that it has some link to the SOLDIER creation process, which Cloud refuses.
• All for Nothing:
  • Chapter 11 is spent trying to acquire the location of the Temple of the Ancients from the transponder within the Shinra Manor. When he gets it, Cait Sith is accosted by Vincent before he tells the party and keeps it to himself afterwards. In the next chapter, Cait betrays the party to give the Key to the Turks and even with him being the best chance of getting to the Temple refuse to let him back on board. Making the effort to get the Temple's location moot. Vincent is able to track the Turks so it wasn't a total loss.
  • Shinra mistake the Temple of the Ancients for their fabled "promised land", Tseng even lampshades this when Aerith tells him the truth. All it does is result in a huge number of Shinra troops getting killed, and some of Shinra's best operatives in the Turks being seriously injured.
• Almost Kiss:
  • After Tifa recovers from the events at the Gongaga reactor, she approaches Cloud for an intimate conversation and then leans over like she's about to kiss him before realizing that Yuffie and Cait Sith are peeping nearby.
  • Happens to Cloud during his time performing a rendition of Loveless alongside the female party member the player happens to be closest to.
  • Happens again to Cloud during the second Gold Saucer date with Aerith.
• Alternate Universe: Alternate timelines are at play:
  • The game's main timeline picks up shortly after the last game left off, with the team resting in Kalm.
  • In the timeline created by Avalanche's defiance of the Whispers, Zack Fair cuts down the Shinra troopers sent to kill him and carries a borderline comatose Cloud into Midgar. The game's opening cutscene takes place in this timeline, showing the possibly dead bodies of Avalanche's members still in Midgar and being collected by Shinra troops in the wake of the massive tornado created by the Whispers at the end of the last game. Biggs is revealed to have somehow crossed over into this timeline (or otherwise survived this timeline's version of Remake's events), apparently having met Cloud despite Zack being with him all along, and Marlene possesses knowledge of the future picked up from her meeting with Aerith in Seventh Heaven.
  • Late into the game, Zack is faced with the choice of whether to save Biggs, Aerith, or Cloud—each choice producing a new timeline symbolized by the Stamp dog mascot having a different appearance. A grand total of six timelines are known as of Rebirth's conclusion.
  • While making one final pitch for Cloud to join him, Sephiroth shows Cloud what would come to pass if that happened—Cloud in a state and robes like the Sephiroth clones at the Northern Crater chanting Reunion.
• Alternate Self: Confirmed with the existence of alternate timelines. The game occasionally switches to the point of view of characters who live in a reality that's separated from the "main" Beagle timeline, most notably Zack Fair, who survived his fated death in one timeline as a side effect of the previous game's climatic battle. Interestingly, some characters like Marlene are somehow able to possess knowledge that they either shouldn't have or should only be known by a different alternate self of theirs, heavily implied to be because of their connection to Aerith.
• Ambiguous Ending: The ending leaves many questions about Aerith's fate and Cloud's sanity up in the air. Even though Cloud apparently stopped Sephiroth's killing blow on Aerith, it appears that due to convergence of timelines, reality warps and she dies anyway, only for another reality warp to seemingly undo her death in some manner where Cloud sees her open her eyes and smile while Tifa seems to see her blood disappear and reappear in flashes. Pointedly, the blood never returns after the battle with Sephiroth and leaves out every other party member's point of view besides Cloud's as he speaks to Aerith. The game notably skips her iconic burial scene, instead only showing the party looking forlorn while sitting next to where she was buried in the original. And then Aerith appears, seemingly only to Cloud and possibly Nanaki and Barret during the ending cinematic but a shot from Tifa's side only shows emptiness where he looks. Due to Cloud's fragile mental state and questionable actions, like when he finds the Black Materia but chooses to hide it from the group, it raises the question as to which version of Aerith Cloud is actually talking to. Is she a ghost or alternate reality version of Aerith that no one else can see? Is she actually alive and there's more to the party's ambiguousness than meets the eye? Or is she just an illusion because Cloud is in denial about her death? The other party members' reactions are also left deliberately ambiguous to keep the player guessing. Are they mourning Aerith's death? Are they saddened because she lives but in a different state of being? Or are they saddened because Aerith still has to part ways with them even if she did survive due to the immense burden of praying for Holy?
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • There are several hints that other versions of Aerith besides the one from the Chihuahua timeline are actively looking out for the party and the "main" Beagle timeline's Aerith. During Costa del Sol, Aerith tells Cloud that he is going to meet "her future self" one day, to which he says he will keep an eye out. When Tifa nearly dies in the Lifestream, she sees visions of her friends telling her to fight on, and most do calmly but the vision of Aerith yells her name and arrives like she ran, and in the montage of all of them only her face is visible, implying that she is more real than the others. At the Forgotten Capital, when Cloud approaches the praying Aerith at the altar, she can be heard "talking to herself" that she doesn't know the correct way to pray and is looking for guidance, the implication being she's not just monologuing, but actually having a conversation with a more knowledgeable Aerith from another plane of existence. The Aerith who shows up to help Cloud in the final battle doesn't actually say anything one way or another if she is indeed the same Aerith who has fought alongside him up to this point, though her dialogue subtly implies she isn't. ^note "I saw what you did back there, Cloud. Thank you." is a very odd choice of words for something you were right there to witness, but makes a lot more sense as a different version of Aerith observing events from afar. That said, with Aerith's seemingly expanded powers, at this stage there may not even be a meaningful distinction, which adds even more ambiguity.
  • The ending of Chapter 13 and a significant portion of Chapter 14 also fall into this. In Chapter 13, Cloud appears to give the Black Materia to Sephiroth, and then he and Aerith fall together off the bridge they are on, but the next chapter does not address how they survived the fall, and the ending shows Cloud still has the Black Materia, strongly calling into question what happened in Chapter 13. And then, of course, there's Aerith's ambiguous fate, and the question of whether she's real or if Cloud could be hallucinating her.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: Rebirth gives players more opportunities to have characters other than Cloud take the lead, and each of them has an exploration ability unique to them.
• And Then What?: During the final boss fight between Cloud/Aerith vs. Sephiroth, Aerith rightly questions why Sephiroth would even wish to win considering what it would ultimately lead to. While Sephiroth dismisses what Aerith is saying, she brings up a good point.
  Aerith: How can you want this, Sephiroth? How can you want an eternity of loneliness?
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: One of the rewards for beating the game is the option to change costumes freely in New Game Plus mode. Given that this allows you to play through the entire game with the girls and Cloud in their beachwear (or with the exception of Yuffie, in Shinra military uniforms), and Barret in his sailor uniform, one might in fact argue this is not a bad reward at all. Red can gain access to his Palette Swap from the Loveless play. Yuffie also gets access to her Moogle costume and a dance outfit from the Gold Saucer, and Cait Sith can also use his Loveless costume.
• Animal Athlete Loophole:
  • Some of the Queen's Blood opponents you can face are Rolf, the card-playing dog and Oscar the Chocobo.
  • Subverted with Red XIII during the QB tournament, which he is unable to enter due to the Shinra-8 staff mistaking him for a normal dog.
  • Aerith tries to invert this to play Run Wild herself, but her attempt at Loophole Abuse gets shot down.
    Cloud: You do know this is for animals, right? Not people?
    Aerith: People are technically animals too. Right? So it's cool!
    Naomi: Wrong. Not cool.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Meter-less synergy attacks can be used at any time. As one of the criticisms of Remake was that waiting for the ATB gauge to fill was tedious, this gives players access to unique powerful moves at any time.
  • Having a cleared saved data file from the demo will allow you to skip the Nibelheim flashback section in Chapter 1. This saves you the effort of needing to go through it a second time, since you've already seen everything there is to see in that part.
  • While riding on a Chocobo, picking up materials has a splash effect to pick up materials nearby. In the Tiny Bronco you pick them up automatically, and this can be enabled at all times after you beat the game.
  • The game creates checkpoints for you while trying to wrangle chocobos. This prevents having to start completely over if you get spotted by one.
  • Rebirth adds unlockable elemental attacks for the party which cost no MP to cast, the main use for them being to exploit certain enemy weaknesses without needing to cast MP just to knock these enemies off balance.
  • The Folio skill cores can be reset at any point with no drawbacks, so if you are at a boss that needs a specific build or party you won't be unable to change your cores to suit your needs.
  • The Queen's Blood tournament aboard the Shinra-8 isn't something that you're forced into doing to progress through the story. It can be skipped entirely if you're not interested in partaking.
  • The Costa del Sol minigames in Chapter 6 are optional when using the chapter select, since you keep your costumes from the first go-around and can change into them straight away.
  • During a certain stage of the Final Boss fight, every party member sans Yuffie is given all four basic element spells up to the second rank, because the boss needs elemental weaknesses exploited for maximum effect. Yuffie, meanwhile, can provide her own elemental damage at range with one of her abilities. That way, no matter what your party composition is or how much you've used elemental damage materia, you can't end up in an unwinnable situation.
  • There's no longer an entry fee for the Gold Saucer, unlike the original game where you had to either pay for each visit or buy a lifetime pass for the steep price of thirty thousand gil. It's justified by Dio giving Cloud a lifetime pass as a prize shortly after the group enters for the first time.
  • If Cloud isn't accompanied by someone through the Gold Saucer, Red stays at the Battle Square and is a selectable ally through the coliseum challenges but won't follow Cloud out, so no matter what you can have help to beat them when you first arrive.
  • The New Game Plus mode has a few further quality of life improvements from Remake. For players who would like to experience different permutations of sequences like the Gold Saucer dates, the player can explicitly set which outcome they would like, to avoid needing to replay many chapters to manipulate the Relationship Values to get the desired outcome. Dialogue options themselves also indicate how much of an impact they have on the relationship with the party member in question for players looking to roleplay a specific outcome. Finally, players can choose from several options on importing side quest data when replaying a chapter, such as resetting quest data for the purposes of the replay, or keeping all completed quests in this state if the player wants to focus on the main quest or missed content. Some small matters that won't affect the plot are retained, such as Sylkis greens collected in the Dustbowl, so that you won't get slowed down.
  • Enemies won't use moves that force out the last character from gameplay so that you always at least have a chance of winning when down to the last person. Remake did this too but it's far more of a problem in this game. Hard Mode disables this so that they can and will take out the last member if they have the chance. And if two of your active party members are incapacitated, you can do one Synergy skill free to give your last member a fighting chance.
  • Relationship Values can never decrease in New Game Plus, so you're free to experiment with different dialogue choices and other options such as the mine cart route on subsequent playthroughs without penalty, for it will always use the choice you've selected that provides the maximum boost.
• Anywhere but Their Lips: If Cloud takes Yuffie on the second Gold Saucer date and their Relationship Values are high enough, Yuffie will give Cloud a peck on the cheek after more or less admitting that she's developed a Precocious Crush on him.
• Arc Number: Seven, naturally.
  • At Costa Del Sol, Cloud is assigned ticket #7 when he signs up to win swimwear. Aerith and Tifa are assigned ticket #77.
  • Chadley turns out to be the seventh test subject in Hojo's experiments to create a cyborg.
  • Counting the ocean, there are seven regions to explore. Accordingly there are seven new summons to acquire, one in each region.
  • There are seven areas in the Gold Saucer, not counting the lobby.
  • During the Junon parade, Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith, grab uniforms to disguise themselves that happen to identify them as members of Midgar's Seventh Infantry.
  • With Cid and Vincent not yet joining the playable roster, there are seven party members. Every party member has seven weapons, and other than Cloud and Cait Sith, every party member has 7 odd jobs associated with them.
  • Jenova Lifeclinger has seven phases: full party, Cloud alone, full party again, Tifa and Cait Sith. Barret and Nanaki, Cloud and Yuffie, and the final round with the full party.
  • The Final Boss gauntlet consists of seven phases. First, Sephiroth is faced by Zack and Cloud, then Reborn Sephiroth gets two phases against Cloud, and then two against the party with a Zack phase in-between, and finally Sephiroth again with Aerith and Cloud.
  • The Level cap is raised from 50 in Remake to 70.
  • Johnny aspires to have his resort in Costa del Sol, Johnny's Seaside Inn, become a seven star hotel. The events of Chapter 6 gives him 7 Johnny clones.
  • In the Nibelheim flashback, Zangan tells Cloud that he has 128 (or 2⁷) students train under him from across the world.
  • There are seven moogle huts scattered throughout Rebirth's explorable areas.
  • Rebirth has a total of 14 (or 7+7) chapters.
• Arc Welding:
  • In the original game, the Huge Materia and the Weapons had nothing to do with each other. Rebirth explains that the large power cores visible on the Weapons in the original game are actually massively powerful Materia, and the Magnus Materia Project (the new name for the Huge Materia) is Shinra's attempt to artificially create Materia of comparable power themselves.
  • In the original game, the origins of the Black Materia are not gone into. Rebirth expands on it and reveals it was created by the Gi Tribe, who featured in the original game as a minor piece of background lore but were only important to the history of Cosmo Canyon and Red XIII.
• Arc Words: "Reunion", as is tradition for VII. Remake shows up from time to time as well.
• Artifact of Power: A major recurring sidequest throughout the game revolves around helping Chadley track down strange mystical artifacts called Protorelics that occasionally have odd effects on the regions they're found in. It's eventually revealed that the Protorelics are actually pieces of Gilgamesh's Genji Armor and the reason for their strange power is because they are from another dimension.
• Artistic License – Geography:
  • Of its own map, no less! The wider world maps tend to enlarge the various regions relative to the land masses they sit on. This is most present with the Eastern Continent: when the world map expands to show both it and the Western Continent, Midgar, the Grasslands and Junon take up much more space on the landmass, which is more accurate to their in-game size. This is of course for Rule of Fun when you get to Chapter 13 and it's revealed that all the regions are connected together in one big open-world, much like the Overworld map in the original game.
  • The above aside, the Meridian Ocean is much wider than it was in 1997 to provide a new area to play around in, and many of the more minor islands and landmasses are completely absent in Rebirth. These are still there as they're present in the World Map icon in the top-left of the screen, but were likely omitted so development could focus on the regions instead.
• Artistic License – Gun Safety: During the Junon parade sequence, Aerith and Tifa after changing into Shinra uniforms hold up Cloud as a joke. Apparently, Cloud should also have told them basic gun safety: always treat guns as loaded, and never point them at something you are not prepared to destroy.
• Ascended Glitch: In the original Japanese version of Final Fantasy VII, a test enemy called Test 0 was left on the encounter tables at the bottom of the well in Corel Prison. Test 0 used the Guard Hound's model, had very high evasion stats, and had dialogue when attacked. In Rebirth, Test 0 can be fought at the combat arena at the bottom of the Dustbowl's well and is a highly evasive hound that screams at you constantly in battle.
• Ascended Meme:
  • A very common joke about Cloud is his hair's resemblance to the plumage of a chocobo. Rebirth has several characters note the resemblance, and baby chocobos in particular — which are all white but for the yellow feathers on their heads — seem to have been deliberately designed to look like Cloud, to the point Yuffie nicknames one "Cloud Jr."
  • Barret's sailor outfit has long been popular in the fandom as a subject of fanart and memes, because of the contrast between his personality and the disguise, and many were eager to see if he'd still wear it in Rebirth. Not only does he still wear it, but he comes to like it and he continues to wear it through the Costa Del Sol sequence, while the others ditch their disguises on the cruise ship and acquire more typical bear wear after they dock.
  • Tifa's after-combat lines "Would kill for a shower" and "worked up a good sweat" from Remake caught on with the fandom for how she seemed to say them more often than other lines. While the after-combat banter is heavily reduced in Rebirth, Tifa still finds a few occasions in the story to mention she's looking forward to a shower, and in a couple of sidequests mentions she's looking forward to something that can make her work up a good sweat. The description for the rest stop collectable is written by Tifa and includes her commenting that she wishes such stops had showers, as sometimes she feels like she'd kill for one.
• At the Opera Tonight: The game expands on the Gold Saucer play from the original, wherein Cloud and his date companion play the roles of characters on stage.
• Backported Development: Gongaga has been significantly fleshed out, and is now dripping with references and call-outs to Crisis Core, as it was Zack's hometown. This includes Cissnei, who is now effectively the town mayor as she's upholding her promise to look after Zack's parents, which has extended to a genuine love of Gongaga and her citizens.
• Back-to-Back Badasses:
  • Cloud and Tifa do this in a fight against Elena. It serves the practical purpose of hiding Aerith who is powering up an attack. They then separate and allow Aerith to blast her.
  • Cloud and Aerith's synergy ability, Firework Blade, starts with them entering combat stance while standing back-to-back, followed by Aerith casting magic on Cloud's sword to turn it into a Spell Blade, which he then unleashes into a Blade Spam before they both finish off their enemies with a Sword Beam and fireball combo.
  • Happens twice in the Final Boss fight against Sephiroth at the Edge of Creation. First, Zack is summoned by the White Whispers to aid Cloud in his hour of need, and the two swordsmen stand back-to-back as they prepare to double-team Sephiroth with everything they've got, holding on for a while until Sephiroth commands his Black Whispers to banish Zack to another timeline. In the final phase, Cloud is transported to a secluded dimension by Sephiroth, but Aerith arrives to help even the odds again, this time successfully driving off the villain through her and Cloud's combined efforts, complete with one more back-to-back pose while Holding Hands to symbolize their victory as they depart the dimension.
• Badass in Distress: While fighting the Grasptropod, all the party except Cloud are captured and taken to its holding tank with the rest of Hojo's experiments, forcing him to fight it one-on-one while Yuffie and Johnny help take it down. Downplayed, as the rest of the party escape the tank on their own and likely could have finished the boss with a minute or two. Later in Corel, a much straighter application is encountered where Cloud and the Party are captured by Gus' men and he must win a chocobo race for their freedom.
• Bad Future: At the end of his playable segments, Zack is flung to a doomed version of Gaia that is seconds away from being wiped out by Meteor, and is forced to contend against a projection of Sephiroth's giant monstrous form. However, just as he is about to die to Meteor, Zack's consciousness transfers to another Alternate Self of him from a safer timeline, filling him with even more determination to keep on fighting for a better future.
• Bag of Spilling: Mostly played straight: most of the party's abilities and items don't carry over from Remake, but players who have played it get an Old Save Bonus in the form of extra items to start with. However, it's averted in a couple of small ways; everyone has two abilities to start out with instead of just one, they all retain their Level 2 Limit Breaks but must now unlock them mid-battle using certain synergy moves, they have a few more Materia to start with than in Remake (including the Assess Materia), and they retain all Summon Materia (even Ramuh, if you also played Intermission and completed Yuffie's story). Some of the characters also have aspects of their gameplay from Remake integrated into their base moveset in Rebith; Cloud can fire Sword Beams as a normal attack (which he could do in the motorcycle minigames in Remake but not in battle) his old Parry dodge is now his regular dodge, Tifa has the now-absent Parry and Deadly Dodge Materia's effects as a natural part of her Dodge, and Aerith's Tempest and Fleeting Familiar are part of her attack strings. And as an additional Old Save Bonus, upon completing the sidequest to help Johnny fix up his inn, any weapons the player mastered in Remake are put on display around the place (implying perhaps they really did just throw them away after all!).
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • When the party arrives at the Corel Prison underneath the Gold Saucer, they are looking for Barret to try to get him absolved of shooting up the arena in the Gold Saucer. Gus, the crimelord running the prison, tells them that they had captured a man with a gun for an arm and tied him up in a shack outside of the prison. The party assumes this to be Barret and perform a favor for Gus so that he'll point them towards the shack. On the way to the shack, they nearly get caught up in a giant dust devil, only for Barret to suddenly appear and get them all to safety. It turns out the man that Gus's people had captured was actually Dyne, the man who actually shot up the Gold Saucer, and Barret had separately made his way down searching for him.
  • While discussing Sephiroth's plans the camera focuses on Aerith in a way that looks like she will make one of the cryptic statements that she knows more than she lets on that she did throughout Remake. Then Aerith just yawns and says she needs rest after all the walking and talking, shortly afterward remarking to Tifa that whatever memories she had are no longer there because of the Whispers.
  • After saving Yuffie, she introduces herself the next day with the same elaborate song and dance from Intermission, suggesting that she will become playable then and there. Then Roche appears because Yuffie set them up and she doesn't become playable for quite some time.
  • In the Temple of the Ancients, Cloud and the party use large blocks to traverse the unstable terrain. One time the group tries to bring down a tower to make a bridge, only for the debris to destroy what was left of the bridge and make a makeshift bridge out of a nearby tower. The group takes it as a win anyway.
  • After obtaining the black materia, it looks like Sephiroth shows up to take it directly and the remake will skip Cloud’s freakout at this part of the game. Then Sephiroth tosses the black materia and orders Cloud to get it for him, intentionally invoking the events of the original timeline.
• Bathos: The inability to change outfits in the first playthrough is so that the mood of the scene isn't ruined by beachwear. Subsequent playthroughs give you cart blanche to have your silly outfits on as drama unfolds.
• Batman Gambit: In order to become a more effective threat against Sephiroth and Jenova, one version of Aerith from an Alternate Timeline made the choice to never leave Midgar, pretending to have "resigned" to fate's whims so as to keep the Whispers off her back while she secretly devoted her time to safeguarding her White Materia from them, making sure that it wouldn't be sapped of its power. Knowing that Sephiroth and the Whispers would fail to notice what she's really up to until she makes her critical move, Aerith summons the "main" timeline Cloud to her realm at a precise moment to give him the now fully powered materia just before Sephiroth arrives to kill her, gambling her hopes onto Cloud successfully delivering this materia, in turn, to his timeline's Aerith to replace her non-functioning materia, which he does upon meeting the other Aerith in the Sleeping Forest. Though the exact details aren't revealed, this seems to give Aerith access to even greater power than she had before, allowing her to control or at least work alongside her own version of the Whispers (represented by their white coloring), which may or may not have played a role in her continuing to exist in some form, if not outright surviving, Sephiroth's blade when he comes to kill her again at the story's climax.
• Beach Episode: The Costa del Sol chapter shows Johnny wearing an open floral-print shirt, while Cloud, Tifa and Aerith are seen wearing more casual beachwear on a beach in daylight.
• Beneath the Earth: The Caves of the Gi are a hellish domain located under Cosmo Canyon, where the vengeful spirits of the Gi Tribe are imprisoned. Deeper still is the Gi Tribe Village, an even more hellish village populated by the Gi Tribe's vengeful spirits, which is located on the other side of a subterranean lake of mako.
• Big Damn Kiss: If Cloud takes Tifa on the second Gold Saucer date and their Relationship Values are high enough, the date will end with them sharing a kiss.
• Big "NO!": Cloud at the game's climax yells the word in defiant fury as he breaks free of the Black Whispers and swings his sword to block Sephiroth's attack meant to kill Aerith.
• Bittersweet Ending: The ending leans more towards bitter than sweet, but how bitter it is may vary depending how the player interprets the Gainax Ending. There are only two things for certain: Sephiroth's plans to destroy the planet with Meteor continue largely apace and Cloud's mind continues to be plagued by the villain's influence (exemplified by him realizing that he still has the Black Materia, but choosing to hide it from the rest of the party within his Buster Sword while muttering "reunion" under his breath). The big question mark lies around Aerith's fate. Due to the introduction of offshoot realities and branching timelines, one could interpret what happens to her in a variety of ways. It seems that Cloud deflects Sephiroth's killing blow, yet reality appears to warp so that Aerith dies anyway, much to the great sadness and fury of the rest of the party... or at least that's how they appear to be seeing it, while another reality warp shows her still alive in Cloud's eyes. The ending sees Aerith interacting with Cloud but not the others (save for Red XIII's ambiguous acknowledgment of her presence), asking the question if she's still alive in some state or if she died and Cloud is either in denial or talking to her spirit. Meanwhile, Zack is still alive in an offshoot reality, and hopes that eventually he'll be able to reunite with Cloud and Aerith in a "unified" world.
• Bizarrchitecture: The Temple of the Ancients has been revamped to include numerous rooms that turn upside-down, deconstructed areas that require Lifestream manipulation to regain their actual structure, and traps that make exploration nigh impossible for the inexperienced.
• Black Comedy: A sidequest in Gongaga has Cloud and Red XIII tracking down escaped chickens for an old lady. When you rescue all of them, she's delighted to have them back and decides to reward the two by cooking them her famous grilled chicken, and decides the unlucky bird to be dinner will be the last one you just brought back. She then bids the two off cheerfully and tells them to visit her anyway, and that there's "plenty more grilled chicken where that came from!" Red feels rather conflicted and surprised by how things turned out, and judging from Cloud's weak attempt to make him feel better, so does he. The game goes so far as to play the game over music.
• Book Ends:
  • In the first moments of the game, Zack is the first character you get to play as. During the final boss, there are sections where you get to play as Zack, both alongside Cloud and alone.
  • The first piano you can play is Tifa's during the flashback chapter. The last is the piano in her rebuilt room in the present Nibelheim, and the last piece for the sidequest is even played there.
  • The first and last times you control Cloud in the present day mirror each other. After ending a flashback where he thought Tifa died after being attacked by Sephiroth, Cloud goes up a modest inn to meet with her after a cryptic appearance by Sephiroth, explores a new but inviting town, and meets Aerith at a clocktower, until Shinra's attack forces them into the plains and ends the chapter seeing Aerith waking him up. The last chapter begins with Aerith waking him up, exploring the familiar if foreboding Midgar with Aerith that is on its last days and goes to meet her at the church, until the two are interrupted by Sephiroth, who has a conversation with him that leads into a forest, and ends gameplay at a long forgotten capital going down to meet Aerith, where he seems to save at least some version of her and definitely believes that he did.
  • The innkeeper Broden is one of the first characters the player encounters in the present time in Kalm, in the Grasslands area which is the first open-world area of the game. He's later encountered in the final open-world area of Nibel during a side quest, having degraded into another Sephiroth clone.
  • When finally starting the journey proper, Aerith takes the first steps into a meadow and asks if everyone's coming. At the end, the party has to leave Aerith behind for unrevealed reasons and the players see Aerith as she says goodbye to them in another meadow.
• Boring Yet Practical: Some of the earliest abilities you'll unlock in each character's folio are abilities that deal magic damage to an enemy in one of the four elements. They deal pitiful damage and don't provide Synergy gauge, but they execute quickly, restore a bit of the ATB gauge used to cast them (and for specific characters who can hit multiple targets with these abilities, they can get back more ATB than they used), and they give characters a way to deal magic damage and elemental damage without magic Materia or expending MP. They aren't anything flashy, but they can be a big help across the game.
• Boss Bonanza:
  • The Gold Saucer section in Chapter 12 features multiple combat arena battles, a boss battle with Don Corneo, a battle with the Turks, and finally a one-on-one rematch with Cloud against Rufus. The player has a chance to rest up and save before battling the Turks, but it's a lot of battles in quick succession.
  • The final boss battle consists of no less than ten boss fights in a row.
  • The harder challenges in the combat simulator include ten rounds of fighting against tough opponents, compared to Remake which would max out at five. Unlike the above, there are no second chances and no ability to start from a later round; if you fail, back to the very start you go.
• Boss Rush:
  • The finale of the protorelic sidequest line takes the party to Gilgamesh Island, where the player has to battle all of the summon entities again, with the twist that they are fought in pairs. After that, they have a rematch with Gilgamesh himself, now powered up by the Genji armor. The high difficulty of the fights is alleviated by the game healing the squad to full after each fight and allowing them to leave at any point without losing progress.
  • The hardest challenge in the combat simulator includes all of the above battles, plus a final round against a virtual incarnation of Sephiroth to top it off. With the standard 50% HP and MP recovery between rounds, and naturally you cannot fail at any point or all your progress is gone.
• Bragging Rights Reward: Like in Remake, the postgame is structured such that a final reward will be this trope, but which one depends on what the player does last:
  • Many manuscripts are gated behind recompleting every sidequest, regional superboss, the personal combat simulator challenges for each character, and story chapter on Hard. The final weapon level for each character requires acquiring every manuscript, where Remake only required some of them and the last was probably used on some unimportant buff.
  • The Gotterdammerung returns as the final accessory acquired through Chadley's combat simulator, Rulers of the Outer Worlds, which does not contain any manuscripts nor needs any to unlock.
  • The final reward for making Johnny's hotel a 7 star resort is a piano sheet of One Winged Angel.
• Brick Joke:
  • While taking the elevator down to the Junon streets, Aerith asks if there are any good restaurants in the area, catching Cloud off-guard after having just explained its military prowess and prompting Barret to remind her why they're actually there. Later when you arrive at Costa del Sol, you can ask the Tourist Information Center if there are any restaurants in the area, since now you're having to kill time by relaxing.
  • On the mine tracks to Corel, Aerith speculates that the pads on Red XIII's feet must be soft. Even Cloud admits that he kinda wants to feel them. Red is unamused. Many chapters later, if you get the "intimate" version of Red XIII's "date", he asks Cloud to shake his paw to seal their agreement to keep Aerith safe. Upon doing so, Cloud notes to himself that the pads on Red's paws are soft.
  • When visiting North Corel, one of the Queen's Blood opponents is a dog named Rowlf, whose owner hopes can make them famous on television so they can leave town. In the next chapter you meet a Queen Blood-playing chocobo named Oscar, whose owner hopes is able to beat a dog in a televised match to drive up tourism in Gongaga.
  • When you first visit the Gold Saucer, the point exchange attendant in the Ghost Square urges you to hurry with your purchases before she turns from a zombie bite. When you revisit the Saucer as part of the story, her character model will be replaced by a Yin and Yang, though "she" retains her role as a shopkeeper.
  • Elena complains that the desert is too hot and that she needs some ice cream to cool off. A little while later, she's seen eating a sea salt ice cream bar.
• Broken Pedestal: Cosmo Canyon is presented as the heart of planetology and a beacon of enlightenment and knowledge, and the party is eager to meet the settlement's scholars so they can get some answers on the mysterious things they've seen in their adventure. Unfortunately, the elders turn out to be Know Nothing Know It Alls; they dismiss the party's experiences as delusions born of ignorance because they don't align with their teachings, they tell Barret that the idea of him saving the planet is arrogance and the Planet will take care of itself (though as Bugenhagen tells the party, Shinra's refinement of the Lifestream into mako really is doing permanent harm), and they show more interest in discussing personal betterment than actually learning more about the Planet itself. The party quickly becomes disillusioned with the place and moves on when it becomes clear that the answers they need won't be found here.
• Bubblegloop Swamp: Cloud and friends must ride Chocobos through a deep marsh with crooked trees in the background to get out of the grasslands.
• But Thou Must!:
  • The player cannot skip out on the clock tower date with Aerith in Kalm, regardless of their response when she brings up the offer. The only thing this changes is whose Relationship Values go up.
  • The player cannot progress without doing Yuffie's rogue assassination attempt on Rufus, thus resulting in Rufus calling the deal for Shinra and Avalanche to stay out of each other's way off.
  • When Yuffie offers to join the party in Chapter 6, there's a dialogue option to reject her, which is a Mythology Gag to Yuffie being an Optional Party Member in the original game. This time around, Yuffie isn't optional and joins the party regardless of what you say. The only thing the choices you make in this dialogue affects is Cloud's Relationship Values with Yuffie once she's in.
• Call-Back:
  • The twist regarding Cloud's identity is barely hidden (if at all), with Cloud now being shown mimicking Zack's behaviors and habits in the Nibelheim flashback to a tee - Sephiroth even refers to him as a "puppy", which is what Zack was called in Crisis Core by his mentor Angeal and Arch-Enemy Genesis.
  • In one of the Interlude sections, Zack attempts to wake Aerith up with "Hello in theeere!". This is the same phrase from Aerith that Zack woke up to when he fell into her church in Crisis Core. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for him.
  • The "Flowers from the Hill" sidequest is a call-back to the first game where Cloud helped Aerith pick flowers from her garden and delivered them to the Leaf House orphanage. Much like before, the two of them end up performing a good deed for some orphaned children.
  • When meeting with the party after being rescued from the Terror of the Deep, Yuffie zips in and out with her straight back tilted foward and her arms straight and pointing backwards. This is the exact same running pose she used in Crisis Core, where she also zipped in and zipped out in scenes with Zack.
  • During the monster attack in Costa del Sol caused by Dr. Hojo's actions, Cloud uses an umbrella to fight, much like Zack during Crisis Core's Beach Episode.
  • When the party first arrives at the Gold Saucer, Cloud spots one of the Robed Men watching him nearby, who transforms into a hallucination of Sephiroth that taunts him to "have his fun while he still can". Before it can lead to another panic attack, Aerith gently grabs Cloud's hand to comfort him and the hallucination immediately dissipates. This is a call-back to a scene from Remake where they encountered a different Robed Man in Sector 5 who also turned into a hallucinatory Sephiroth, and Cloud almost having a breakdown until Aerith clasped his hand and encouraged him to keep it together.
  • "The Spice of Life" sidequest contains a number of references to a scene that occurs in Remake when completing all of Aerith's Chapter 8 sidequests. Like before, Aerith being able to understand flowers and speak to them gets brought up, culminating in Cloud asking her if the flowers have finally learned to talk back.
  • When Cloud is overcome by exposure to S-cells in the Shinra Manor, Tifa helps him out of the room by draping his arm over her head and getting him to lean on her. Unbeknownst to both of them, Tifa did exactly that for Cloud during the trek back from the Nibelheim reactor in Crisis Core.
  • During their fight, Rufus makes note of his new gun's name, Kamui. Cloud knocked his old gun off the Shinra building after their last battle.
  • In Remake, Cloud had a vision of Aerith while she was walking in front of him that brought a tear to his eye. Here, the meaning comes full circle as Cloud can only watch as Aerith walks into the Ancient Forest.
  • Right before going their separate ways in the game's ending, Cloud and Aerith begin their last conversation together using the same lines they once said to one another in Remake back when the two of them reached Sector 7 in Midgar.
• Call-Forward:
  • During Cloud's foray through Nibelheim, there are several hints that Cloud is actually an infantry grunt and not the SOLDIER. When sitting down at the water tower, Cloud does not put down the Buster Sword. Despite saying that he was nostalgic upon going up the water tower, Cloud's face and body language are the picture of unease, because he can't stand to admit that he did not make SOLDIER. When Cloud's mom touches his arm his memory starts glitching, as the difference between his uniform and bare arm means his thoughts are at odds between his real memory and what he thinks he remembers.
  • When asking Sephiroth to take a photo, Tifa says it would mean a lot for us, while Cloud asks what harm one photo could do. In the original game this photo was one of the pieces of evidence Sephiroth put forth that Cloud wasn't at Nibelheim, as it showed Zack instead of him. Suffice to say, it does mean a lot and does a lot of harm.
  • Despite being a Super-Soldier capable of fighting giant monsters, in the Nibelheim Flashback, Cloud is heavily injured by flaming debris and spends the rest of the chapter limping. The original game showed that he was just a security officer, so him being hurt that much makes more sense with his real capabilities at that time.
  • After the Nibelheim flashback, Tifa wonders why exactly Sephiroth is back now of all times while looking at Cloud. In the original game, Cloud and Tifa's chance meeting in Midgar that revitalized the ailing Cloud is exactly what spurred Sephiroth to use him for his return.
  • At the Gold Saucer's arcade wing, aside from the motorcycle and fighting arcade games that were in the original, there is a side of the room that shows a moogle snowboarding with a message saying that a snowboarding game is currently in development. In the original game, there is a snowboarding minigame (that incidentally happens almost immediately after where Rebirth ends) that then becomes available at the Gold Saucer to replay.
  • After seeing the Highwind in Junon, the party considers acquiring it to get around. Cloud vetoes on the grounds they would need a pilot and crew to do anything with it. in the original game, Cid and his old pilot crew help steal it.
  • In the Inn of Under Junon, Cloud and Tifa's conversation ends with them promising to have a full conversation about their past, where Tifa hopes he will spill his guts and Cloud retorts that he has an iron stomach. In the original, their journey in the Lifestream had him reduced to disembodied fragments that poured out of his real memories that Tifa helped him recombine with and make himself whole.
  • In Junon, Yuffie infiltrates the parade by briefly pretending to be a camerawoman. In the original game, she infiltrated Junon during the battle with the Weapon as a reporter.
  • If Cloud has the advantage in the Shinra-8 Queen's Blood tournament, the commentator can describe him as being "hungry like the wolf!". Wolves are highly associated with Cloud in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, with his silver wolf brooch and the Fenrir motorcycle.
  • During the Costa del Sol chapter, Hojo remarks that he could use his assistants, or Tifa, to '"create a new hero," implicitly the same way he created Sephiroth after creating several mutants. Already a dark reminder of his previous plans to use Aerith as a Breeding Slave, this is also a subtle indication he still has Jenova cells in his samples that he would use on himself in his boss battle later in the original game.
  • Throughout the Terrier timeline and all the other branching ones created by Zack's choices, Cloud remains comatose on a wheelchair and stays that way. However, his "main" Beagle timeline counterpart briefly takes over the one from an unrelated Chihuahua timeline in the final chapter due to the Aerith from that timeline's Batman Gambit. This foreshadows his fate from the original game where he became wheelchair-bound in Mideel only to end up recovering with help from Tifa.
  • In the original game, Tifa was a selectable jockey in the Gold Saucer after a point. If she wasn't taken on a date in chapter 8, she will be in the Chocobo Square, and during her skywheel date she will wonder what being a jockey is actually like.
  • In the Gongaga chapter, Tifa nearly drowns when the Weapon carrying her is punctured by Sephiroth. Visions of her friends spur her to live on, but a vision of Cloud walks away with Sephiroth. She is unable to speak and stop him while Sephiroth taunts her that Cloud is beyond her words. In the original game, Cloud gets so broken by the revelation he wasn't the SOLDIER at Nibelheim that he became completely nonresponsive to her pleas.
  • The Gi reveal that those not of the same planet cannot enter its Lifestream after death. This implies the same of Jenova, who should have long since died but whose cells still teem with life and power and those infected with her cells like the robed men are hard to kill and Lucrecia from later in the game is cursed with immortality because of her pregnancy with Sephiroth.
  • In Nibelhiem, Tifa tells Cloud about how she joined Avalanche because of her hatred of Shinra, but by the time Cloud showed up the anger was fading and the fears and doubts about their mission began to bubble up. In the original game, Cloud's anger over Aerith's death faded by the time of the Northern Crater, as his fears, doubts and confusion took its toll on him. Without fresh anger, Cloud gave in to his failing emotions and surrendered the Black Materia to Sephiroth. Here, Cloud's anger over Sephiroth's manipulations allows him to give Sephiroth a Shut Up, Hannibal! and force him to retreat, but after the battle, he's giving way to complacency and overconfidence as he ignores his continued vulnerability to Sephiroth's influence and hides the Black Materia from his teammates, a condition that Sephiroth is waiting to capitalize on.
  • Vincent's meeting in Nibelhiem contains multiple allusions to Dirge of Cerberus. His coffin is decorated with a picture of Cerberus, his signature gun, his transformation into the Gallian Beast is very forced and called a creature of Chaos, hinting at the darker depths of his powers and he overhears Yuffie saying that there should be secret materia around which unbeknownst to all is closer than any of them think is.
  • Barret swiftly develops a rapport with Cid, but takes umbrage at the fact he still works with them on the side. Cid retorts that anyone who tries to lord their power over him will have hell to pay. Later in the original game, Barret appoints Cid the party leader after he has cut all ties with Shinra, stolen their prized airship, and proven himself a trusted ally. Barret in essence lords his power over Cid by giving him control over the party.
  • Later in the game, Tifa is more and more concerned for Cloud's well-being as he takes on Sephiroth's characteristics, but has less and less luck helping him and seems less hopeful that she can. Notably, when Roche degrades into a Robed Man, Tifa isn't the one to reassure Cloud that he won't turn, but Aerith is despite coming to his side second. On his end, Cloud is often most unsure of himself when he isn't the person Tifa expects him to be, especially after attacking her into the Lifestream. Later in the original game, Tifa was unable to assuage Cloud's fears that he was just one of Hojo's experiments in the shape of Cloud and that was the pivotal piece in breaking his will, breaking him into an egoless puppet that could only apologize for not living up to the real Cloud, because she never actually knew Cloud as a person and has no real confidence in her increasingly proven false impressions of him, as heavily foreshadowed in Rebirth. In the Gold Saucer while looking for Dio, Tifa will open up to Cloud that sometimes she doesn't think she is enough, but Cloud tells her never to stop believing in herself, foreshadowing her failure to save Cloud from giving in to Sephiroth's will, but her persistence in staying by him and helping Cloud sort out his real memories when he himself gives up is key to healing his troubled mind later in the game.
  • While looking for Dio in the Gold Saucer, Cid can be found in the Speed Square looking at the space ranger exhibit. Cid's desire to go to outer space was a big part of his story back in the original game.
  • After going through the Temple's trials, Aerith talks to the team about how true strength isn't forged from pain and hate, but the ability to forgive the past and create a new future. That strength is something even Sephiroth couldn't stop, though the meaning of the speech is completely lost on Cloud, given Sephiroth's stranglehold over his mind. Later in the original game, Cloud's descent into his emotional pain gave way to Sephiroth's manipulations and he gave him the Black Materia because he could not look beyond the false past that was constructed for him. The party's ability to forgive him gave Cloud the strength to rise again and defeat Sephiroth in both body and mind.
  • After the events in the Ancient Temple, Hojo remarks that Shinra has to think bigger and he also takes a fascination with the Weapons and wants to study one himself. After a point in the original game, Hojo came to realize the power of Sephiroth was something he had to be a part of or match, leading him to try and shoot the Sister Ray at him for a boost of mako energy and afterwards hijack the final Weapon, Omega, in Dirge of Cerberus.
  • While the Temple's guardians expound on their history, they notably refer to the Black Materia being used to cause our star's demise. You would think the sun might be one of Sephiroth's targets.
  • Jenova Lifeclinger's middle phases has the party fight within falling platforms surrounded by flowing water, greatly resembling the ones leading down to the penultimate boss in the original game.
• Cannot Spit It Out: Continuing from the previous installment, Tifa simply can't bring herself to tell Cloud that his memories of Nibelheim are wrong, partially because she's very confused as from her perspective, Cloud was never even there. It reaches a new level when they return to Nibelheim and Cloud begins to remember Zack, but his unwell mind rationalizes Zack's disappearance as him being swept away by the river they fell into. Tifa still doesn't correct him, instead simply choosing to comfort him, presumably out of fear at this point that Cloud would just completely shut down if she challenged his memories. Later, if they are the date at the skywheel, Cloud asks Aerith or Tifa if they talked about Zack. They flashback to a conversation about Zack but lie to Cloud and say they didn't, likely knowing that whatever they discussed could harm Cloud's mind.
• Canon Foreigner: The story introduces Weapons much earlier on than the original with two Weapons that did not exist in the original game. These weapons seem to be a fair amount more benevolent than their counterparts, as one of them even saves Tifa when she falls into the Gongaga reactor's lake of mako after being pushed by Cloud, although this is perhaps just due to the fact that the situation hasn't reached critical mass as it had when all the other Weapons wake up in the original.
• Can't Drop the Hero: Enforced on the first playthrough, but then subverted afterwards. Players cannot remove Cloud from the active party during their initial playthrough of each chapter, but will be able to do so on subsequent replays.
• Card Battle Game: One of the new minigames is Queen's Blood, a popular in-universe card game that can be played at many points in the story. New cards can be obtained to enhance your decks, and it also has its own side narrative.
• Cast from Hit Points: The new Darkside materia allows a character to enter a supercharged state where they do increased damage at the cost of losing 5% health each move. This can be stacked on top of other buffs to do some obscene amounts of damage. Barret has a new move that utilizes his HP to deal a devastating move.
• Central Theme:
  • Enjoy life to the fullest while you can. Not only is the planet dying from Shinra, but during the game the party learns that Jenova is returning, the Weapons are stirring, there may be another war between Shinra and Wutai, and of course there's Sephiroth's plans for the Black Materia. The party, and other characters, often espouse their desire to do and see all they can while they have the time, and not being too hasty to pursue Sephiroth if they can stop and enjoy some fun and relaxation along the way, because no one knows when their lives may be snuffed out unexpectedly. This also ties into the game's large amount of side content that gives players the chance to learn more about the world and bond with their party members over their adventures instead of just rushing through the main storyline, and is important to the ending twists where Aerith still dies (seemingly), and in a parallel world a mysterious rift in the sky is considered an omen of the end times, so people are doing what they can to enjoy themselves before the world is destroyed.
  • The second one is what we leave behind. Virtually every character is defined by what has been left to them by others and what they in turn leave behind for those after them. Many side quests revolve around helping families bond and make new homes and futures, and past friends are remembered for what they left behind. Cloud and Tifa have their families and childhood home taken from them but manage to make the best use of what they were given to make a new future with all their new friends. Barret lost his family and friends' home but works to create a world for his best friend's daughter Marlene. Aerith constantly works to use her Cetra heritage help her friends and leaves a recording at the Gold Saucer of her wishes. Red comes to terms with his family and his place in it. Yuffie wants to leave her family's legacy and create a new one with materia. On the flip side, Shinra either doesn't care what they leave behind or creates abominations in their wake and Sephiroth wants the complete opposite: a world where the only thing that exists is him.
  • Acting on hatred will not only blind you to greater truths, but also leave you hollow and unfulfilled in the end. Aerith even makes a touching speech about it after the characters sans Cloud undergo their trials within the Temple of the Ancients. Tifa further expounds the moral in a previous chapter by relating how her own hate and anger towards Shinra began to abate by the time Avalanche's bombings started, leaving her doubtful of her chosen path. For his part, Sephiroth deliberately stokes Cloud's rage in order to turn him into an unfeeling puppet, even going so far as to make cruel remarks right after murdering a version of Aerith. Unfortunately for him, he is denied of that emotion when Cloud sees Aerith seemingly alive and well.
• Cerebus Rollercoaster: The game's tone tends to frequently bounce between light-hearted wacky comedy and serious drama, especially regarding certain sidequests.
• Cessation of Existence: This is what the Gi strive for, since they are barred from entering the lifestream due to being extraterrestrial, and the Black Materia was originally created for this purpose.
• Cheated Death, Died Anyway:
  • Wedge survived the destruction of Sector 7 (where he died in the original game) only to get thrown out a window during a failed attack on Shinra Tower the next day and plummet to his doom.
  • During the climax, Cloud actually manages to stop Sephiroth's killing blow on Aerith, but a reality warp seemingly causes her fate to "rewind" to its intended outcome, or at least that's what befalls one version of her, maybe.
• Circling Birdies: Invoked by Cloud Jr. in Chapter 7, who spins around the head of a motion-sick Yuffie after the minecart section that favors Barret.
• Combination Attack: All the party members can perform tag team moves called synergy abilities, which are essentially Limit Break attacks but done with two people. There are also meterless abilities that can be used at any time, but far weaker to keep the balance. During the battle with Jenova Lifeclinger the second phase is capped off by all the party members attacking it one at a time with the final attack done by Cloud, Tifa and Barrett at once.
• Company Cross References:
  • The Combination Attack used by Cloud and Sephiroth makes an X overlapping their synchronized strikes, like Crono and Frog's X-Strike in Chrono Trigger.
  • Tifa and Cloud's synergy attack has them hold his sword at the same time, much like Sora and Riku's Combination Attack in Kingdom Hearts II. In the final battle, Cloud and Zack's friendship allows them to team attack Sephiroth even though the two are in separated worlds, much like in the final world of Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance].
  • In chapter 8, Elena is seen eating what appears to be sea salt ice cream while preparing to drop the Anuran Suppressor on the party near the Golden Saucer.
• Comically Missing the Point: A sidequest in Gongaga has a militia member ask Cloud to stay and train the militia. To try to dissuade them, he sets his price at a seemingly prohibitive 1 million gil (and is then shocked when another militia member says that such a price is doable). A few minutes later after getting another trainer in town, the first militia member apologizes that it didn't work out but then suggests that Cloud should really rein in his prices before walking off. Cloud can only Face Palm.
• Commuting on a Bus: Reno is absent for much of the game (Rude comments that he's on vacation), and the few appearances he does have just use archived audio recordings instead of new dialogue. This is because his Japanese actor, Keiji Fujiwara, passed away between the development of Remake and Rebirth.
• Company Town: Nibelheim is almost entirely centered around Shinra, due to the very first reactor being built there, providing power and job opportunities to the remote town. Tifa also admits that the rent of the plot of the Shinra's mansion is basically what keeps the town afloat, money-wise.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: The later Queen's Blood players outright know exactly what is in your hand and refuse to play a pin you can take back. Conversely, they make aggressive plays when you cannot take ground.
• Contrasting Sequel Setting: Remake had gameplay solely inside the Shinra-controlled cyberpunk city Midgar. This game takes place all over the world in a much more open environment than Midgar's often cramped industrial setting.
• Continuity Nod:
  • There are several references to the Final Fantasy VII Remake: Trace of Two Pasts novel:
    • In Chapter 1, Zangan feels Cloud's muscles without prompting and invites him to be his student. That is almost exactly how he met Tifa in the novel, who had a much more extreme reaction to this behavior.
    • The Nibelheim villagers exercising in Chapter 1 is a nod to the calisthenics classes that Zangan and Tifa started in the village near the start of the novel.
    • One of the villagers in Kalm reminiscences about buying delicious steamed buns from a gorgeous girl in Sector 8, which is a reference to Tifa when she worked as a steamed buns salesgirl alongside Pops.
    • While sailing to Costa del Sol, Aerith and Tifa talk about Faz, the man who was madly infatuated with Ifalna and who later stalked Aerith during her early years of living in Sector 5.
    • If Tifa accompanies Cloud during the first visit to the Gold Saucer, she'll reminisce about Jessie once they find her portrait. She'll talk about how Jessie saved her and took her under her wing, a reference to the incident in the novel where Jessie saved Tifa from being accosted by a Corneo thug, which led to the two becoming friends and Jessie introducing Tifa to Planetology and Avalanche.
    • During the "Missing: Mr. Birdie" sidequest, Barret has a heart-to-heart with Cloud where he confesses Tifa set him straight as a parent, citing the incident in the novel where she was furious at him for not caring about sleeping in the streets with Marlene.
  • While fighting as Zack, he'll dash straight to the target if he's locked on to them. This is exactly how his combat worked in Crisis Core: Reunion, and in the original PSP game, Zack did this with every attack.
  • During Sephiroth's rampage through Nibelheim, Cloud is shown crawling to his mother's house while it is burning down, in a near shot-for-shot recreation of his flashback early in Remake.
  • An NPC in Kalm mentions someone named "Baron Kylegate", likely a title for or relative of Mutton Kylegate, a character from the Turks' installment of the On the Way To A Smile novellas that abducted Rufus and held him prisoner in Kalm.
  • In Cosmo Canyon's inn, across the bar there's an acapella group of singers performing "The Promised Land" from Advent Children.
  • On the noticeboard that Zack and Biggs examine with the Avalanche poster, there's an advertisement for Banora White. These are the "dumbapples" from Angel's hometown of Banora in Crisis Core, and a second poster is for Banora White apple juice (the factory for this is a major location in Crisis Core). There's also a poster for "Clear Icicle" mineral water, a nod to the Icicle Inn that appears just after the point in the story Rebirth ends.
  • Yuffie mentions the events of Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis' "The First Soldier" while recapping the Wutai War, particularly the involvement of Glenn Lodbrok, Lucia Lin, and Matt Winsord. Glenn Lodbrok himself even shows up as the leader of Wutai's interim government... as well as one of Sephiroth's minions.
  • Christine in Nibelheim mentions someone named Nick, presumably Nick Foley, a minor character from The Kids are Alright: A Turks Side Story who was in Nibelheim at the time.
  • The performance of Loveless in the Gold Saucer is specifically "Loveless - G Edition", implying that it's based off of Genesis' notes that were published posthumously after his (reported) death in the prequel. The play indeed starts with a scripted sequence of three warriors fighting each other over an angelic female character, which is what Genesis frequently drew parallels to in Crisis Core regarding the conflict between himself, Angeal and Sephiroth.
• Controllable Helplessness:
  • During the end of the flashback chapter in Nibelheim, Cloud is injured in the flames, and has to crawl towards Sephiroth. However, the player can't crawl fast enough or do anything else to stop Sephiroth from slaughtering even more townspeople, no matter what they do. This happens to Cloud again when he attempts to chase after Aerith in the Sleeping Forest while fending off the white Whispers.
  • At the Temple of the Ancients, while undergoing one of the trials the temple demands, Nanaki re-experiences being captured by Shinra and used in Hojo's experiments. At one point, he's seen being dragged by chains to an operating table, and the player is given prompts to hold R2, then L2, then both R2 and L2 together to have Nanaki resist being taken to the table. But no matter what you do, he's eventually dragged onto the table and branded with the number XIII before being experimented on.
  • After the Temple of the Ancients, Sephiroth appears and claims the Black Materia, before compelling Cloud to come to him. Even if the player tries to move in the opposite direction, Cloud will still be forced to move towards Sephiroth.
• Costume Evolution: Yuffie's buttoned up the fly of her shorts and is now wearing a belt. She has also changed the armguard into one made of leather plates.
• Crapsaccharine World: Par for the course for the setting of VII, but nowhere is this expressed more than in the Corel Region. Contrasting the luxorious resort of Costa del Sol and the opulent theme park of The Gold Saucer are North Corel, a town impoverished by a mako reactor accident that looks like little more than a junkyard with shacks in it, and The Dustbowl, a former worker village taken over by manic Mad Max types. In the latter case it's directly under the Gold Saucer!
• Creative Closing Credits: Similar to Remake, the credits sequence starts with Rebirth's main theme "No Promises to Keep", and also includes renditions of the Final Fantasy VII main theme and Aerith's theme, while cutscenes from the entire game play in chronological order.
• Cruel Mercy: Dyne saves Barret from Shinra troopers, seemingly because he wants Barret to live with the guilt of his decisions.
• Cruel Twist Ending: One Gongaga sidequest has Cloud and Red XIII finding a grandma's lost chickens. Once pets and owner are happily reunited, grandma cooks the chickens and serves them to Cloud and Red XIII.
• Cue the Falling Object: As the party climbs aboard the top of the Tiny Bronco and surveys the damage it took on its emergency landing, one of the wings completely falls off.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: After the party fight the Midgardsormr, it drags Cloud into the swamp to eat him only for Sephiroth to show up and send it flying with a single attack that impales it on a giant tree.
• Cutscene Incompetence:
  • The party is easily taken captive by a squad of Corel goons in an ambush. The group doesn't fight back after waking up, even though nobody bothers to disarm them.
  • When Cloud is manipulated into giving Sephiroth the Black Materia, only Tifa and Aerith take the initiative to stop him while the rest of the party does nothing but watch after a pillar gets in their way. Possibly justified, as the Black Whispers circling Sephiroth might have prevented the party from reaching them.
• Cutting Corners:
  • Shinra has a bad habit of cutting operation costs of their reactors by reducing or eliminating the maintenance cycles, which eventually causes the reactors to catastrophically fail because they weren't being properly maintained. This has apparently happened at least two times.
  • After Shinra defeated and absorbed the Republic of Junon, they shut down a lot of public infrastructure projects that the former government ran, like maintaining the roads between Junon and the Grasslands and running a chocobo bus service. As a result, most places that aren't good sized towns, and thus not money makers for a major corporation, are considerably worse off now that Shinra is in charge.
• Darker and Edgier: The Nibelheim incident alone puts this game's violence above the previous entry, with visible blood when Tifa gets cut, and creative ways of a Gory Discretion Shot like when Sephiroth either cut the throat of or potentially outright decapitated the town mayor. It only gets darker from there as the story progresses, darker than the original game in some cases.
• Deadly Upgrade: Roche opts for one after Cloud beats him in Junon, taking part in an experimental procedure of Hojo's which grants increased power, at the expense of imminent mako degradation. This results in in Roche dying shortly after his rematch with Cloud, and becoming a Sephiroth clone.
• Dead Person Impersonation: Sephiroth declares that he killed Tifa during his rampage through Nibelheim five years prior, and that the Tifa traveling with the party is a Jenova doppelgänger. Cloud later brings this up to Tifa, who shows him her scar and describes the events with enough detail that she couldn't possibly have faked. Coupled with meeting the doctor who treated her shattered sternum and Sephiroth is proven a liar, to a point... though he nevertheless gaslights and mind-controls Cloud into accusing Tifa of being a fake and attacking her, knocking her into the mako pool of the ruined reactor.
• Demo Bonus: By playing the demo and starting with its clear data, players can not only skip going through the Nibelheim flashback again, but they also get a "Survival Kit" of various items to help them along.
• Designated Girl Fight: The climax of the Gongaga Reactor situation has Tifa, Aerith, and Yuffie (with Cissnei assisting them) racing to the scene and subsequently facing off against Scarlet in her powered armor after Cloud starts to lose focus and Barret, Red, and Cait Sith are on the ropes defending him.
• Detrimental Determination: Cloud's absolute commitment to convincing himself and everybody else around him that he really was a First Class SOLDIER gets deconstructed throughout the game. Not only is this self-delusion transparently a lie to those who know Cloud like Tifa or have access to his original files when serving under Shinra like Rufus, or had intimate knowledge of First Class like the Turks, but it makes it easy for Sephiroth to repeatedly mess with Cloud's head throughout the game, exploiting their Psychic Link to mess with Cloud's perception of reality, questioning his memories^*such as hinting that Tifa might be a Jenova clone because Cloud witnessed her apparently getting fatally sliced by him in Nibelheim, and Tifa's outrage that Cloud would question her about it —assuaged by the scar left on her body to prove she's the real deal — puts further strain on their relationship and otherwise making it obvious he's mentally unstable to the party to undermine their faith in him. Each character for their own reasons do not call Cloud out about this, but by the end of the game the party is mainly working alongside Cloud half out of concern for his mental issues and need to have his skills in use to stop Sephiroth's plans, and whatever happened with Aerith in the Temple of the Ancients is left unclear if it's beneficial for the party to stop Sephiroth's grander plans with the timeline, or a sign that Cloud's delusions have reached the breaking point of being in denial about Aerith's death.
• Developers' Desired Date: While the game offers the same options for the Gold Saucer Date as the original game (Aerith, Tifa, Yuffie, Barret) along with the addition of Red XIII, Cait Sith, Cid, and Vincent, the date with Aerith at the Gold Saucer is heavily marketed in the 2023 Games Award trailer, along with her High Affection version of the "No Promises to Keep" scene. If the player picks a date with any of the male options, the game defaults to Aerith playing Princess Rosa during the Loveless play. Aerith also gets a significant non-optional date with Cloud after the Temple of the Ancients that ties into the main plot, and the player cannot reject going to climb the clock tower in Kalm with Aerith no matter their choices when she brings up the offer.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Normally, any party members who aren't selected as the active three will simply stand back and watch from the sidelines. Barret and Aerith are exceptions as, both being long-ranged fighters, they'll still provide support by attacking enemies at a distance.
  • During Barret's Duel Boss battle with his old friend Dyne, all of Barret's usually boisterous and taunting lines have been replaced with more serious and anguished lines to reflect the gravity of the situation.
  • Some sidequests acquired before you recruit Yuffie and Cait Sith may have additional dialogue from them if you wait until after you recruit them to do the side quest. For example, in the case of the Junon proto-relic quests that concern the Fort Condor game, Yuffie will make a Continuity Nod to learning the game in her Intergrade DLC episode.
  • Upon reaching Cosmo Canyon, Red XIII reveals that his gruff demeanor and deep voice were just an act to make himself be taken more seriously by the party. From then on, he has a much higher-pitched voice and more youthful demeanor, and also gets referred to as "Nanaki" much more often, as that's his birth name. As you can do sidequests both before and after visiting Cosmo Canyon, there are two sets of voiced lines for Red for all sidequests that involve him in some way — either "serious and gruff" Red XIII or "youthful and energetic" Nanaki, depending on if you've visited Cosmo Canyon or not. Other characters will also have slightly different dialogue, referring to Red as "Nanaki" if you've gone to Cosmo Canyon and "Red" if you haven't.
  • Certain side quests have alternate dialogue or events depending on if you've done other sidequests first. In particular, doing Kyrie Canaan's sidequest chain out of order will cause her to not be present, instead leaving behind a Moogle plushie with her hat and a prerecorded message.
  • During New Game Plus, you retain the ability to fast travel to places you've already discovered, greatly speeding up progression. However, to avoid any Sequence Breaking, you're not allowed to travel to areas that would let you bypass the main quest, and you can't call a chocobo or a buggy if they'd let you bypass the main objective somehow.
  • After beating the game, you can change your party members into any outfit they might have worn throughout the game. If you put Aerith in a swimsuit, and then have her perform the team attack with Barret where she puts on sunglasses, the sunglasses will be pink with a flower on them, matching her swimsuit.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage:
  • Barret, Yuffie, and Cait Sith will occasionally sing the Final Fantasy victory fanfare after a battle, and Cloud himself hums it if he wins the Queen's Blood Tournament.
  • If you beat Barret at Queen's Blood, he will sorrowfully sing the Game Over theme.
  • While he's altering the party’s wanted posters, Reeve hums Cait Sith's character theme.
  • Multiple Final Fantasy VII tracks exist as piano music in universe, and are played either by Cloud, Tifa, or other pianists around the world.
  • When riding on a chocobo, Yuffie can sometimes start singing a song to the theme of "Electric de Chocobo".
  • When the party splits up after first arriving in Gongaga, a bored Yuffie can be found singing a song set to the tune of her own character theme.
  • Upon meeting the head chef Christine for the first time, she can be heard singing a rendition of Cloud's character theme with lyrics.
  • During a side quest in Nibelheim to seek out a monster, the fiend in question can be heard singing the first few chords from "Trail of Blood".
  • Scotch and Kotch briefly sing the Turks' and Rufus's themes during the battles against them in the Gold Saucer.
  • Cid hums the series' main theme to himself while repairing the Tiny Bronco in the game's ending.
• Dissonant Serenity: After the final battle, the game cuts to the entire party sitting around a lake within the Forgotten Capital. Players of the original would recognize this as where Aerith was laid to rest in the original, even though it's not replicated here. Most of the party appears to be in mourning, with Barret struggling to hold his tears back. But when Barret suggests that they need to move on, Cloud agrees in his usual blunt detached way, completely at odds with everyone else's mood. It becomes clear that he still sees Aerith up and about, though whether he truly does or not is left very ambiguous, while the ending scene suggests that she is "real" in a sense that Red XIII is also able to sense her presence.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Shinra began their takeover of the world after they discovered mako could be used as an energy source, and used their technological superiority to wage a brutal and one-sided war against the Republic of Junon, and later a stiffer fight against the very traditional Japan-like nation of Wutai. It's not much of a stretch to see the parallels to the end of World War II and the way America bombed Japan into submission with nuclear technology.
• Double Entendre: When Hojo captures Tifa and puts her in the holding tank with his mutated experiments, he comments whether she would help make a new hero, an unsubtle statement that he wants her to mate with the creatures. Considering that he just asked his Paid Harem if they would birth one, it barely counts as a double.
• Double-Meaning Title:
  • The subtitle, Rebirth, is another word for Remake, but also refers to Aerith possibly cheating death at the end of the game, as well as the theme of second chances in Zack's interlude storyline.
  • The title of Chapter 1: Fall of a Hero most immediately refers to Sephiroth's descent into madness and death, however it also refers to Cloud, as this is where he is broken before being captured by Hojo, as well as Zack since this is Cloud's last memory of where his friend should be.
• Dressing as the Enemy: The last part of the Junon arc features Cloud, Tifa and Aerith wearing Shinra infantry uniforms and leading a parade formation drill, something that was in the original game but upgraded into something far more elaborate than it originally was. Tifa and Aerith have entirely too much fun doing so.
• Driving Question: The "First Look" trailer posits a big one: what is Sephiroth's endgame? While Cloud believes it's to rule the world, Sephiroth's actions in Remake put this in question. The Release Date trailer has another: "The world will be saved, but will you?". Developer interviews clarify that many characters are asking that question to many others. At the end of the game, neither are truly answered.
• Dub-Induced Plot Hole:
  • In the English dub, Tifa mentions that she and her dad hid from Sephiroth in the reactor when Nibelheim burned and when Sephiroth turned up, Brian Lockhart went out to confront him. Trouble is, every time Tifa talks about or flashbacks to her father and Nibelheim, Brian is portrayed as being alone and having a choice in entering the reactor. The Japanese original had the two hide in the mountains and Brian confronting Sephiroth when he saw him enter the reactor.
  • The game has a running subplot that Tifa is trying to get to the bottom of her and Cloud's memories. While the English dub doesn't change too much, it does remove context that when Aerith mentions how she lost her memories from the Lifestream to the Whispers, Tifa wonders if they did the same to her and questions her own memories much more.
  • In the English dub, during the flashback of signing over the coal mines 6 years ago, Barret ends his plea to Dyne to sign by saying Marlene will be given a better life with the help of a mako reactor. The timeline at this point would mean Marlene wasn't born yet, while the Japanese original had Barret give a more selfish reason by expressing concern over his wife Myrna.
• Dumbass Has a Point: When the Shinra department heads meet at the end of Chapter 11, it's brought up by Tseng that, even with Avalanche's apparent destruction, more resistance groups are now forming against Shinra, this time formed from some of the same people that fought against the Junon Republic. Of the entire board, it's Palmer that points out this shouldn't be a surprise, noting that after these groups underwent a Full-Circle Revolution and ended up oppressed under Shinra, it would be more shocking if they weren't rebelling against them.
• Dude, Not Funny!: In the Nibelheim flashback, Cloud can play off peeking in Tifa's wardrobe as a joke. The entire party calls him out on it.
• Elegant Classical Musician: A recurring mini-game is to find sheets to play their melodies on a piano. Visiting Tifa's house in the Kalm/Nibelheim flashback serves to get the player better acquainted to the piano mechanics.
• Enemy Mine:
  • Cloud, Barret, and Tifa temporarily team up with the Turks when the latter are under attack by some monsters in the Temple of Ancients. Barret initially suggests the pragmatic approach of doing nothing and letting them wear themselves out, which Cloud vetoes for lack of time. This briefly results in some Teeth-Clenched Teamwork, and as soon as the monsters are dead, everyone immediately goes back to trying to beat the hell out of the other party as normal.
  • While the Black and White Whispers are opposed to each other in all other regards, they both stop the party from meeting Aerith at the Forgotten Capital.
• Environmental Symbolism:
  • The water tower at Nibelheim is used as a point of interest several times, each time reflecting Cloud's state of being. Cloud goes up it in the prologue at dusk, alone and unnoticed to show the disconnect between him and the rest of the Shinra troops. During Sephiroth's burning of the town, it nearly crushes Cloud to show how following Sephiroth has nearly destroyed him. It shows up in Tifa's flashback through the Lifestream, reminding her and the player of Cloud's better virtues at a time they need to be reminded most. A recreation of the water tower is found in the rebuilt Nibelheim, where Cloud accompanies Aerith during a bright and sunny morning and the two of them see Tifa in her rebuilt room who exchanges waves with Aerith, showing that while Cloud didn't become the hero he set out to be, he has found loved ones who care and have joined him in his new journey.
  • The path through the Temple of the Ancients that Cloud's party go through is a violent mess of Lifestream winds that corrode the Temple as they make their way, a representation of how Cloud's mind is fragmenting as they get closer to the Black Materia. Aerith's party takes a more pleasant stroll where they repair the walkways and face Elena and Tseng on stable ground, showing her presence calms and stabilizes.
• Escort Mission: One sidequest in Junon has the party escort Rhonda's dog Salmon to her son so he can deliver a package. Salmon has his own health bar and the party must protect him from monsters along the way. At least Salmon is smart enough to not wander off and wait for the party to catch up to him.
• Evil Counterpart: This game formally introduces the Black Whispers: corrupted forms of the technically "neutral" gray ones from the previous game, which are enforcers of Sephiroth's malicious will rather than being stewards of fate's intended course. Then there are the White Whispers, which are also not strictly bound to fate's will, but are instead drawn to working with those who wield sufficient power to combat Jenova, Sephiroth, and their corrupted black "brethren", essentially acting as the Good Counterpart in this equation. Aerith later gains command over the White Whispers upon coming into possession of the empowered White Materia.
• Exact Words:
  • During the Junon parade, Rufus personally talks to Cloud and calls his performance worthy of SOLDIER. He also tells Cloud that he looked over his case file and found it enlightening, meaning he now knows that Cloud never made it into SOLDIER, but decides not to confront Cloud with the issue for it would only lead to disinterest.
  • Gi Nattak wants the party to find the Black Materia so that his tribe can finally achieve "cessation of existence" for themselves and escape their practically undead state. He conveniently fails to mention that "cessation of existence" would also apply to everyone on the planet, not just the Gi.
  • After hearing about the Black Materia, Cloud gets more and more driven to acquire it. After a while it becomes obvious to the party that he is only saying that he wants it, not to keep it from Shinra or Sephiroth.
  • During the last chapter, the Aerith whom Cloud keeps running into has a predilection of using these to make it ambiguous if she is the same Aerith who has accompanied him up to this point.
• Fake Shemp: The late Keiji Fujiwara's previously recorded dialogue for Reno was repurposed for his in-game appearance. Tetsuya Nomura promises that Reno will have a bigger role in the third entry.
• Fastball Special: A common move in synergy attacks is one character throwing the other.
• A Father to His Men:
  • The prologue chapter reveals that Sephiroth was one, at least pre-Sanity Slippage. In addition to praising one of his troops (who is really Cloud) when they defend Tifa from a monster while Cloud (who is really Zack) is showboating and not paying attention, he goes to great lengths and personal risk to try to save one of his subordinates from being swept away in a river, and lamenting that his missing trooper is in fate's hands compared to his cold indifference in the original. He's also pretty tolerant of Cloud's antics, and comes across as a mentor advising their student, instead of looking down on Cloud for some of his rookie mistakes.
  • Cloud proves to be one during his time posing as a Shinra trooper in Junon, inspiring such loyalty in the soldiers under him that they insist on fighting alongside him and stick by him even after they figure out he's the enemy spy they've been ordered to capture and/or kill. When they part ways, the soldiers salute Cloud and say it has been an honor serving under him, and that they hope to see him again.
• Five Stages of Grief: In the ending, the party is in various stages over what happens with Aerith. Cloud goes through an unhealthy combination of all five throughout the ending as Sephiroth's manipulations and seeing Aerith alive jumbles him through every stage in quick succession, whether he is in denial or acceptance over leaving her after all is said and done is unstated. Upon seeing Aerith cradled by Cloud, most take a second of denial, swiftly into anger they direct at Jenova/Sephiroth. Barret, Yuffie, and Cid hit bargaining afterwards, believing that Aerith gave them a chance they have to make use of. Tifa, Nanaki, and Cait are in depression, too saddened over what happened to her to do anything other than grieve. Vincent seemingly is the only one at acceptance, as his stoic demeanor gives no sign of changing in the end.
• Flashback: Chapter 1 is centered around Cloud explaining the Nibelheim Incident from 5 years ago after reaching Kalm.
• Flash Forward: The "First Look" trailer is intercut with graphically updated scenes from the original Final Fantasy VII of Aerith praying just before her iconic death and the Holy Materia falling to the ground.
• Fling a Light into the Future: Upon fulfilling all of the world intel objectives, Chadley reveals that this was his main motivation for having Cloud collect the data: with the planet on the brink of collapse between Shinra's excess and Sephiroth's machinations, he wanted to preserve as much knowledge of the world as he could before it vanished.
• Flyover Country: Almost the entire Corel Region is treated as this for the tourists, thanks to a helicopter service taking them from the Costa del Sol resort on the coast to the oppulent Gold Saucer theme park in the mountains. This skips over the inhospitable desert, the Bartertown-esque settlement of The Dustbowl, and helpfully ignores the impoverished town of North Corel.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In Cloud's recollection of the Nibelheim incident, one of the unnamed Shinra troopers has Zack's voice actor talking about his girlfriend waiting for him back home, has blond hair poking out from under his helmet, and during Sephiroth's rampage is shown struggling to crawl towards the Strife residence while groaning "Mom..." — and when Cloud is blown backwards by the house exploding into flames from inside, his position overlaps with where the fallen trooper was, and during Cloud's brief period of likewise crawling forward to stop Sephiroth attacking the Mayor and those trying to stop him not long after his memory briefly glitches to show that said Shinra trooper is the real Cloud.
  • Aerith unconsciously dropping her white materia on a puddle of water in Zack's timeline serves as an ominous foreshadowing of her intended fate in the final chapter.
  • In Junon, Red XIII, represented in subtitles as ??? can be heard speaking to Aerith in private using his natural voice before the reveal several chapters later.
  • When holding the crate of Shinra infrantry gear in Junon, Cloud solemny muses that it's "been a while", alluding to the fact that Cloud was always a Shinra grunt and never made it into SOLDIER.
  • All three of Cait Sith's predictions are now accurate to some degree:
    • "Things are looking up, so throw caution to the wind. Put your faith in others, and a last-minute twist may pleasantly surprise you". This refers to the gang relaxing in the Gold Saucer, as well as Cloud needing to put more faith in his friends for his own sake, as well as the climax where all party members and even Zack help fight Sephiroth. The last-minute twist refers to Aerith's ambiguous survival in the ending.
    • "Watch your belongings. Lucky color: Black". This refers to Cloud socketing the Black Materia into the Buster Sword at the very end of the game. More obliquely, it may also allude to Yuffie stealing the party's Materia in the original game: while this doesn't happen in Rebirth, it implies that Yuffie will steal their Materia in the next game, Cloud's Black Materia included.
    • "Seek, and you are sure to find. But alas, you shall forever lose what you cherish most". Similar to the original game, this prediction refers to Cloud obtaining the Black Materia, but in the process falls heavily into Sephiroth's thrall that leads to Aerith's apparent death. Unlike the original, this ends up upsetting Cloud enough that Barret rebukes Cait.
      Barret: See what this crap does?
  • For those who haven't played Crisis Core, Cissnei recognising Cait Sith and then signalling the villagers to stand down alludes to her being an undercover Turk, and by extension, that Cait Sith is in league with them.
  • When seeing the party for the first time, Cid says the Tiny Bronco would have trouble with a load of 7 passengers but can barely manage it if the weight is balanced right. When Vincent comes along for a ride, the plane crashes halfway through the flight and must be used as a boat from then on.
  • When everyone starts praying at a memorial in Gongaga, Yuffie gets confused and clearly has no idea what they are doing. She is later revealed to be an atheist who does not believe in souls or the Lifestream.
  • During Tifa's voyage into the Lifestream, Sephiroth taunts her with the fact Cloud is beyond her words as a vision of Cloud follows Sephiroth. During the fight over the Black Materia, Cloud literally stops hearing her as Sephiroth's hold over him drowns out all other thoughts than to get the Black Materia.
  • After learning the battle the planet is having with Sephiroth, Barret declares that they need to be willing to give their lives to her safety, and asks who's with him. The first person to sign up is Aerith. Aerith also tends to look back at scenery a few times, most notably when leaving the beach at Costa del Sol, likely feeling that she might not get the chance later.
  • During the Festival of Lights, Aerith says that being a Cetra has meant being held against her will, watched, hated, and ignored. While Aerith was ignored when playing with other children in the slums, Aerith's test in the Temple of the Ancients reveals that everyone ignored her as a child when she tried to get help for her mother, resulting in her death.
  • Cait Sith's final weapon can be acquired far earlier than the others, in Chapter 11. He also has no side quest or odd jobs associated with him. This is because he won't be accompanying the party through the final dungeon.
  • The Gold Saucer play has more foreshadowing for the game's finale. Cloud/Alphried is told that he is a puppet, fated to dance until his strings break, and Cloud becomes even more of a puppet for Sephiroth after the play, doing his bidding even when not directly under Sephiroth's control and is seeing and doing things against the wishes of the party by the end. The staff wielding Rosa is said to be fated to part with the hero and is the one to defeat the Dragon King Varbados using the power of the Phoenix, a creature known for living and dying, and Aerith seemingly both lives and dies at the end, and it is her power that proves most critical to saving Cloud and the party from Sephiroth. But no matter her fate at the end of the game, the party must go their own way without her.
  • The use of Jenova cells in Sephiroth clones is foreshadowed by bodily fluids like sweat glowing in the same purple color under a blacklight as Jenova's blood in Remake.
  • Cloud's status as a Jenova cells carrier in danger of becoming a Sephiroth clone is hinted at in several instances. In Costa del Sol, Hojo says that Cloud is here for the Reunion, if unconsciously, and calls the Robed Men his brothers. Robed Men have a tendency to be drawn to him, like in a Corel side quest when one points to him, and multiple times he finds one looking at him a few feet away.
• For the Evulz: After escaping the Temple of the Ancients with the Black Materia, Sephiroth successfully takes hold of the Black Materia after it falls out of Cloud's hands during an argument with Barret. He then proceeds to compel Cloud to come to him and deliberately drops the Black Materia just to make Cloud give it back to him for no apparent reason other than to enjoy rubbing his hold on Cloud's mind.
• Four Is Death:
  • The floor level in Gold Saucer that Cait Sith gets suites for the party is on the fourth floor. Cloud goes in the Tonberry room, a monster already very associated with death.
  • Counting both games and including the bike minigame in Remake, Roche is fought a total of four times.^note On motorcycle in Midgar's railroads with Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie, at the armory on the Sector 7 Plate, in Junon after the assassination attempt, and after leaving the Shinra Manor in Nibelheim. At the end of the fourth, he dies and turns into a Sephiroth Clone.
• Freak Out: Sephiroth suffers a panic attack after discovering a facility hidden within the Nibelheim mako reactor where failed test subjects from Hojo's experiments with Jenova cells and mako saturation were stored, leading to him starting to realize that he's a successful product of these experiments.
• Fusion Dance: As seen during the trip to Costa del Sol, the artificial Jenova-derived monsters created by Shinra are capable of merging with Sephiroth clones to create even more powerful mutated beings. When Hojo becomes aware of this, he deliberately replicates the process on several occasions since he wants to study them further.

G-O

• Gainax Ending: The ending is a bit of a question mark, especially for those who know the original's story. Cloud actually manages to save Aerith from being impaled by Sephiroth. However, unexplained timeline distortions seemingly cause her fate to revert back to its original tragic outcome, only for more time distortions to occur as Cloud grieves, which end with the previous distortion apparently being undone as Aerith wakes up in his arms. After this, Cloud continues to interact with Aerith and Red XIII is shown to at least acknowledge her presence, even as the rest of the party seems to behave like she died and are in mourning. It is not explained whether Cloud is hallucinating the whole thing due to a refusal to accept her death, him being able to see Aerith's spirit due to connections to the Lifestream, him being briefly transported to an alternate timeline where he saved Aerith and which he still has some connection to, or if Aerith actually managed to survive, but was "removed" from the physical world for everyone except Cloud due to the unexplained timeline distortions. What's actually going on is unclear, leaving things open for the third game in the trilogy to provide the answers.
• Game-Breaking Bug: Downplayed in that it only breaks one sidequest, but the 1.02 update resulted in an infamous bug where the G-Bike objective in "Ultimate Party Animal" doesn't register as complete even when you hit the target score, which locks you out from completing the sidequest or even progressing to the next objective.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: When the final boss battle begins, everyone except Cloud starts with their limit breaks fully charged. This is because only Cloud is able to see or at least perceive Aerith still alive in some form, thus leaving him in a calmer state of mind, whereas the other party members are seething with rage due to only seeing the outcome where she died at Sephiroth's hand.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Whenever there is a battle, only up to three party members can fight at a time, even when the whole party is present. Ranged characters like Barret and Aerith will also engage in combat using normal weapon attacks, but this only does Scratch Damage.
  • Despite being wanted fugitives with six-digit bounties, they can freely walk about Junon, and nobody in the Corel Region attempts to turn them in for the reward.
  • At the end of the Queen's Blood tournament aboard the Shinra-8, Red XIII throws his hat into the ring. The reigning champ, Regina, will only agree to compete with him if he proves himself by beating Cloud first. After your match, if Red wins, everyone is astounded by his "amazing skill" and Regina concedes the trophy without playing. The game is strongly implying that Cloud is an amazing player and that Red beating him is proof of his skill. This still happens even if you've never played a single game of Queen's Blood in the entire playthrough, or never won one, play like a chump against Red, or even if you forfeited the tournament before it began.
• Gang of Hats: In Junon, there is a bar that exclusively serves bald people. Men, women, doesn't matter. You just have to be completely bald. Rude is even there. They even have a special "bald person salute". And they get very worked up at the idea of a non-bald person entering their space...
• Gang Up on the Human: As in Remake, enemies will prioritize attacking whichever party member is being actively controlled by the player, even if other party members are closer or more vulnerable. This serves the purpose of encouraging the player to swap between characters frequently; since it takes the AI a few seconds to redirect themselves, players can give themselves the space to build up attacks by manipulating enemy aggression towards or away from different characters. Fortunately, there's a Materia that can deliberately avert this trope for the party member holding it when the player is low on health.
• Give Me a Sword:
  • Cloud gives Cait's moogle his sword for their Synergy attack, SOLDIER Moogle Class. Tifa and Cloud use his sword at the same time for theirs. The Midgar Seventh Infantry return Cloud's sword to him before they fight their way out of Junon.
  • At the end of the Dyne fight, Barret detaches his gun-arm and drops it on the floor to show his old friend he will not kill him. Despite Dyne's continued aggression and the arrival of Shinra forces, Barret refuses to reattach it and defend himself. It is only when Cloud gives him his gun-arm and tells Barret he needs him does he finally rearm himself.
  • In the Temple of the Ancients, Aerith drops her staff as the Lifestream separates half the group when she is unable to calm it. She is so distraught over failing that she does not pick it up. Yuffie instead gives her a pep talk and returns her staff to her.
• Good Colors, Evil Colors:
  • The "First Look" trailer and promotional cover show that the traditional blue and green of the "Final Fantasy VII" logo are undercut by the sinister red of the Rebirth subtitle.
  • Promotional material like the cover art◊ emphasize the main trio being associated by their traditional colors, Cloud being surrounded by green light, Zack by blue and Sephiroth by Purple and Red. This time, however, Sephiroth is standing in the yellow light of the sun for reasons currently unknown.
  • This also applies to the Whispers with the white-colored ones aiding the Planet's attempt to course-correct destiny and the black-colored ones siding with Sephiroth.
• Gory Discretion Shot:
  • Sephiroth killing Nibelheim's mayor: all that's shown is Sephiroth putting the middle of his sword up to his neck, a slicing sound, the body falling over to the side, and the hat floating to the ground. It's ambiguous whether it was a neck slice or a full-on decapitation, but given the hat and placement of the sword, the latter is more likely.
  • The aftermath of Wedge's fall from the Shinra building at the end of Remake is not shown, but from the sickening noise, the large fall itself, Wedge's size, and the horrified reactions of the Avalanche members who witnessed it, it was definitely not pretty.
  • While there is some blood shown, a lot of the blood during Aerith's apparent death is hidden between the camera angles and character positions in the scene. It can be briefly seen to be pooling in one shot, but is mostly out of frame or concealed.
• Great Offscreen War:
  • Before even the big war between Wutai and Shinra, much of the Eastern and Western Continents were part of the Republic of Junon, with their eponymous capital being located on a City on the Water in the middle of the Meridian Ocean. Shinra, with their early technological advances and the start of their mako power utilization, decided to start their efforts to Take Over the World in this region, and various veterans and survivors of the conflict infer that it was much more brutal than the Wutai War due to Junon being much more prepared to defend themselves on a larger scale, and Shinra lacking the SOLDIER contingent or later powerful weaponry to precisely take down any forces like in Crisis Core.
  • The Wutai war is also mentioned multiple times, but thanks to her now being a guaranteed party member, Yuffie brings it up more prominently this time around, making the war more important as backstory compared to the original game and dovetailing with Crisis Core, which showed the end of the war as its opening.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: Despite being wanted fugitives with six-digit bounties on their heads (and half a million gil in Aerith's case), the party can roam about the Junon aerodrome completely unimpeded despite the president's inauguration happening that day, and can slip into a disguise as it's assumed they are soldiers who haven't changed into their uniform yet. Even then, Cloud still carries his massive sword on his back while in disguise in the Junon city itself, which absolutely nobody comments on. This discrepancy isn't resolved until Chapter 8 where Reeve alters the faces on the wanted posters, but until then the party can still win a Queen's Blood Tournament on a cruise ship, play tourist in Costa del Sol and walk through a town where everybody has very good reason to turn Barret in.
• Guest-Star Party Member:
  • Sephiroth is a party member during Chapter 1 while Cloud explains the Nibelheim Incident 5 years ago.
  • According to the interview on the PlayStation Blog, some characters will join the party but won't be playable until the third part, similar to how Red XIII is one in the first part.
  • In the final boss fight, Zack joins Cloud in fighting Sephiroth, at least until Sephiroth sends him back to his own universe.
  • Two of Chadley's Hard Combat Simulators give you Zack and Sephiroth as party members alongside Cloud.
• Guide Dang It!: Many of the rewards and accomplishments are for things you cannot replay without the Chapter Select, including several Collector's Items (which aren't titled until you get them and have very vague clues).
  • The best, worst and middling star ratings for dialogue options aren't revealed until after you beat the game. Even then, you're only told the star rating for options you already picked, and you're left in the dark on anything you haven't chosen yet. At the very least the worst option is always easy to avoid.
  • The Outstanding Achievement award in the Junon Parade requires getting 101,000 upvotes in the parade, which you can only do on a near-flawless run on anything but the easiest parade formation sets.
  • One of the ways to increase your relationship with Tifa and/or Aerith is to match their dress-sense on the Costa del Sol beach, which the game never tells you about beforehand.
  • The Stuffed Fat Moogle is awarded for smashing 10 boxes in Cait Sith's surprisingly finnicky box-throwing minigame as you escape Shinra Manor near the end of Chapter 11.
  • Reaching Chapter 12 unlocks a new side quest and an extra set of combat challenges in the Shinra Manor's combat simulator, which the game doesn't call out at all.
  • Every female date has a Best Actress award in Loveless requiring you to have them all as your date to acquire every award. It's incredibly difficult to have Yuffie as the chosen date, but fortunately the Extra Settings unlocked after beating the game lets you choose her manually.
  • The mechanics behind the party for the final boss gauntlet are very finicky and hard to pre-plan and also impossible to see in the first run. Every character is placed 1-5 according to their affection ratings, their place at the White Whisper battle, and the order they joined Cloud since Remake. Jenovah Lifeclinger is at first fought with Cloud with 1 and 2, then 3 and 5. Sephiroth Reborn is fought with 1, 2, and 4, then 2, 3, and 5.
• Hand Wave: The discrepancies between Loveless in Crisis Core and Rebirth are explained as the Gold Saucer play being its own take on the work. This implies that Crisis Core is inherently Truer to the Text as Genesis is directly quoting it, however that comes with the huge caveat that Genesis is about the only person who talks about it, and he only reads exactly what he wants to read into the work (note how the later part of the Gold Saucer's rendition isn't mentioned by him at all since it doesn't apply well to his view on Crisis Core's events).
• Have a Nice Death: Just as in Remake, Scotch and Kotch narrate over the game over screen if you lose during the battles with Corneo's forces.
• Helpless Kicking: In Chapter 1, a young Tifa flails and kicks after Sephiroth effortlessly holds both her and the Masamune in a Barehanded Blade Block.
• Hope Spot:
  • During the Junon parade, Rufus arranges for an impromptu meeting with a disguised Cloud, Aerith, and Tifa, where the new president generously offers to remove Avalanche's wanted status in exchange for the party agreeing to eliminate Sephiroth on Shinra's behalf. Since hunting Sephiroth was already the party's main objective by this point, Cloud readily agrees. Unfortunately, their Enemy Mine is immediately ruined by Yuffie (who hadn't joined the party yet) choosing that moment to try publicly assassinating Rufus, who just narrowly survives thanks to Heidegger Taking the Bullet for him. An incensed Rufus automatically assumes that Cloud and co. were behind this (despite Cloud trying in vain to explain their innocence) and calls off the truce, resuming hostilities between the party and Shinra for the foreseeable future.
  • A debatable case. In the climax, Cloud spots Sephiroth diving down to impale Aerith and blocks the attack, using all his strength and determination to knock Sephiroth's sword out of his hands. Before Cloud can catch his breath, reality and time distort. The next thing he knows, Sephiroth has just impaled Aerith, seemingly rendering his efforts for naught, only for more time distortions to occur as Cloud cradles Aerith in his arms, with the previous distortion apparently being undone as Aerith wakes up and smiles at Cloud. However, she's only seen interacting with Cloud after this while the other party members don't directly acknowledge her presence in the final cutscene, with the game ending by leaving things ambiguous as to whether he failed or succeeded in saving her life.
• Hotter and Sexier: The Costa del Sol section of the game features Cloud, Aerith, and especially Tifa wearing swimsuits that show off a lot of skin, with camera angles in some cutscenes emphasizing Tifa's cleavage; and a sit-up minigame Tifa can engage in features a significant amount of Jiggle Physics absent from the first game due to her spending most of it wearing a sports bra.
• I'll Kill You!: Said word for word when Barret spots Sephiroth standing triumphantly over Cloud holding Aerith's seemingly dying body. Barret immediately and correctly pieces together what happened and is ready to shoot Sephiroth dead for what he's done - the only thing that stops him is the tension of the situation.
• Immediate Sequel: The game picks up right where Remake and its DLC, "Episode INTERmission" leave off with Cloud and company in Kalm and Zack arriving in Midgar.
• Improvised Weapon: During the Costa del Sol section, the team leave their weapons behind in their hotel rooms. When monsters attack, Cloud immediately goes to reach for his non-existent weapon, and then settles for grabbing a nearby beach umbrella to use as an improvised sword.
• Injured Self-Drag: At the end of the Nibelheim flashback, the wounded Cloud futilely drags himself across the ground in a desperate attempt to stop Sephiroth from massacring the villagers. It doesn't work; nothing you can do here will have any effect.
• In Spite of a Nail:
  • This is one way to interpret the game's Gainax Ending. Despite the Whispers of Fate no longer being able to intervene, Aerith is still apparently slain by Sephiroth even though Cloud successfully deflects Sephiroth's blade, thanks to unexplained timeline distortions seemingly causing her fate to revert back to its predestined outcome, rendering Cloud's efforts fruitless.
  • A similar interpretation is that even if Aerith did survive in some form or another despite (or even because of) the distortions, the party still has to continue without her because she still needs to concentrate on praying for Holy to stop Meteor.
• Instant Expert:
  • Aerith and Tifa manage to keep up with Cloud and the parade in Junon despite no experience in formation marching.
  • Aerith, Tifa, and Yuffie also take part in an impressively choreographed dance sequence on the fly without missing a beat when first going to the Gold Saucer.
• Interface Screw: Whenever the gaps in Cloud's memories become apparent or Sephiroth tries to exert control over him, he gets a sudden migraine—signified by the screen becoming staticky. Cloud's retelling of the events of the Nibelheim Incident in particular starts glitching out via Static Screw, such as skipping over his interaction with his mother due to the gaps in his memories. Towards the end, he's briefly shown from a first-person perspective wearing a Shinra Security Officer uniform before glitching back to the SOLDIER First Class uniform. In the ending, a similar effect seems to affect Tifa, and she sees Aerith's blood disappear and reappear.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • It's possible to defeat Gilgamesh before entering the finale of the game. This unlocks the Brutal and Legendary Combat Challenges in Chadley's simulator, and the pop-up spoils that some of these challenges let you fight alongside Sephiroth and Zack, far before you've played as Zack in a fight again to see his full moveset.
  • During the game's last chapter, players are able to change Aerith's equipment and materia despite her being separated from the party. This serves as a hint that she's playable for the final battle which proves to be the case when it's just her and Cloud against Sephiroth within the Edge of Creation.
• Intertwined Fingers: If Cloud takes Aerith on the second Gold Saucer date and their Relationship Values are high enough, the date concludes with them intimately Holding Hands in this manner. A particularly powerful gesture when you consider the Star-Crossed Lovers nature of their romance. They also do this at the end of Rebirth, symbolizing their resolve to be together as the universe forces them to part.
• It's a Wonderful Failure: Invoked during the Final Boss fight with Sephiroth. If players fail to defeat him in his final phase, they're treated to a unique cinematic version of Octaslash and Octaslash Prime, forcing players to watch as Sephiroth ruthlessly cuts down Cloud and Aerith. The Game Over screen doesn't immediately appear after they die, but instead the screen lingers on Sephiroth turning to face them and giving a sinister smile, then the screen fades to the Game Over screen.
• Item Crafting: Broden gifts the party with an Item Transmuter when they leave Kalm, which allows them to create all kinds of items using material found in the overworld, bought in shops, or dropped by monsters. A few items can only be acquired via crafting.
• "Just Frame" Bonus: If you guard an attack right before it hits a character, it completely deflects the attack and spares the character all damage with an "Immune" effect, which can be handy for aggressive but predictable foes. There's also Materia explicitly for helping widen the parry window, and Sephiroth's Promoted to Playable stint in Nibelheim emphasizes him as a parry-centric character. However, it only blocks the initial attack, and not a stream of continuous projectiles or damage, plus this game adds some unblockable attacks specifically to force players to not solely parry everything all the time.
• Killed Off for Real: This game confirms that Wedge did not survive the events of Remake — he survived the plate drop, but fell to his death from the Shinra building.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: The elders of Cosmo Canyon are supposed to be experts on the planet and planetology, but wind up looking like this trope instead. The party recounts their experiences with the planet's inner workings to them, and at every occasion are dismissed as ignorant or misinformed; at best the elders humor them but clearly don't believe them. Bugenhagen, at least, recognizes that the world is bigger and more complex than they believe and comes to accept the party's stories as plausible.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: In Remake, Aerith had knowledge about the events of the original story, including her own death, and she apparently gave these memories to Red XIII. In Rebirth, a conversation between them reveals that the Whispers took away their knowledge sometime between the end of Remake and after leaving Midgar, apparently as punishment for meddling with fate, meaning they are just as in the dark about the future as everyone else now.
• Laser-Guided Karma: When investigating the second Cactuar Rock in the Corel Region, Yuffie mocks Cloud over his hesitance because the previous one forced him to pose like a Cactuar. Appropriately, when he touches the second one, Yuffie is the one who's affected.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler:
  • In the original game, Tifa kept quiet about the disparities between her memories of the Nibelheim Incident and Cloud's recollection for a significant chunk of the game; but here, we see her confiding in Aerith right after the prologue that as far as she is aware, Cloud was never even at Nibelheim during the incident, immediately letting the audience know that there's something off about Cloud's story.
  • On a similar note, the existence of Zack Fair and his role in the story is something of a plot twist in the original, especially since finding out everything about him was entirely missable. In Rebirth he's the very first character you play as, shortly after entering Midgar with a comatose Cloud after somehow surviving his canon death. Further, Cissnei in Gongaga has the end of one of her quests heavily hint that Cloud has something he needs to figure out, if you pick a specific option at the end of it. All that said, while Rebirth has gone the farthest with its hints, neither it nor Remake have directly revealed that Zack was the man of action in Nibelheim instead of Cloud, who was the reclusive blonde-haired Shinra Trooper. This is turning out to be in Cloud's detriment in-universe: in Nibelheim he remembers that Zack was there 5 years ago, but to keep his self-delusion going, Cloud's fractured mind instead places Zack as the secondary unnamed Shinra trooper who got swept away by the river (although he's clearly only convincing himself, not anyone else).
• Laughing Mad: During the battle with the Demon Walls, with the Black Materia nearly within reach, Cloud starts randomly giggling throughout the battle. It's subtle enough that in all the chaos and noise of the battle, the player might not notice. They will notice it shortly after at the Black Alter with him giggling at the sight of it and leaving the Temple with the Black Materia, where Sephiroth compels Cloud to take the Black Materia from a fleeing Aerith, and Cloud creepily tries to get Aerith to hand it over to him while giggling like a madman.
• Lazy Backup: Played straight, though there's some attempts to avert it. While only three characters can participate in battle, your inactive characters will stand off to the sides watching, and occasionally will jump in to launch a basic attack on enemies (or in the case of Barret and Aerith, stay on the sidelines and use their ranged abilities). Additionally, if you're struggling particularly badly, you'll be thrown a lifeline in the form of a "Backline Command" option appearing in the command window, which allows you to perform a free Synergy ability with characters on the sidelines, which doesn't necessarily need to include one of your active characters either. But this can only happen once per battle, and if your three active characters are knocked out, it's still a game over despite your allies still being raring to go.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • During the Nibelheim flashback sequence, in the original game the screen simply darkened or had the characters talking in the middle of scenes. Here, other characters interjecting enough to divert the narrative instead of simply asking questions or talking on the side tends to result in a screen filter like someone put a CRT television movie on a glitchy pause.
  • In the English version of the scene where Cloud searches through Tifa's wardrobe, if he says it's just a joke Barret will join Aerith and Tife in scolding him by saying "Come on, Cloud. I know you're better than this." In the Japanese version, however, he says "The times have changed." instead—a nod to the remake's removal of Cloud stealing Tifa's panties.
  • In the final battle, Aerith looks directly at the camera as she says "Let's end this - together".
• Lethal Joke Item: The HP <-> MP Materia returns from the original Final Fantasy VII, with the changes to MP now multiplying its original effect tenfold: any character equipped with it will be left with two-digit HP in a game where even the weakest attacks do three-digit damage. However, perfect blocking an attack will charge the Limit gauge as if the character had taken damage, and the amount by which the Limit Break gauge gets charged is dependent on how much damage the attack would deal relative to the character's maximum HP, something which also applies to the invincibility gained while a character is charging up their Limit, meaning in the hands of a sufficiently skilled player, the Materia is the ticket to the ultimate Glass Cannon build.
• Level Scaling:
  • The Dynamic Difficulty mode causes enemies to level up with you, ensuring a challenge regardless of level.
  • Queen's Blood players will also scale with your current QB rank, meaning you can't cheese past tricky bosses by beating later, simpler opponents (only better cards and knowing how to use them will do that). It also means that rematching them will give you a decent challenge rather than being a total cakewalk.
• MacGuffin Delivery Service: A heroic and benevolent example of this occurs when Aerith from an Alternate Timeline summons the "main" timeline Cloud to her world in order to give him a fully functioning and powered up White Materia to then deliver to her counterpart from that Cloud's timeline to replace her non-functioning materia, knowing that the other Aerith will make great use of it in the battle against Sephiroth and Jenova when the time is right.
• Male Gaze:
  • While vacationing in Costa del Sol, Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith get changed into swimsuits, with Cloud getting flustered and awkwardly stammering his responses while trying not to stare at her. Tifa's "Shining Spirit" swimsuit in particular emphasizes her chest, and she adopts a Coy, Girlish Flirt Pose that emphasizes her cleavage even more while asking Cloud if something's wrong. There's also a sit-up minigame that Tifa can take part in, with the camera not shying away from the ensuing Jiggle Physics.
  • Yuffie's butt has a remarkable tendency to be emphasized whenever she is doing something.
• Marathon Boss: The climax of the story has two in a row.
  • First is Jenova Lifeclinger. You fight her with two party members, who then get dragged away, leaving Cloud to fight alone for a while. Then you enter a phase where the entire party fights her, then the party splits into three groups that cripple both of her wings and head, then you enter the final phase where you destroy her.
  • Immediately after, Cloud gets dragged into another reality where Sephiroth awaits to fight him. But in phase 1, Zack arrives to fight alongside Cloud. After his health is depleted, Sephiroth separates the two, then transforms into Sephiroth Reborn (which players of the original game will recognize under the name Bizarro Sephiroth). For phase two, Cloud fights this Sephiroth alone. For phase 3, this Sephiroth enters the "main" reality where the rest of the party is and summons a copy of Bahamut Arisen, which the party has to fight while trying to cripple Sephiroth's wings which heal Bahamut. Phase 4 then has Zack, now in another reality, face Sephiroth Reborn by himself. Phase 5 has the main party destroy Sephiroth's wings again and then destroy his core, fully destroying Sephiroth Reborn in all realities. And then for the final phase, Sephiroth returns to his human form for one last battle with Cloud, but Aerith arrives to back Cloud up.
• Meaningful Echo:
  • In the Nibelheim flashback, Cloud tries to save his mother, and she tells him "he has to leave [and] to live". This is echoed by Sephiroth in Remake, to mock Cloud by turning his mother's dying words back at him.
  • As Dyne tears into Barret, he echoes his famous words from Remake about how He is here to take the load off your shoulders!, apparently showing Barret has always made a habit of saying that.
  • In the Gongaga Reactor, when Cloud is influenced by Sephiroth into attacking Tifa, the shot selection and editing directly mirrors when Sephiroth attacked her in the Nibelheim reactor, further pushing the narrative that Cloud is becoming his enemy.
• Minigame Zone: The famous Gold Saucer is back for Rebirth. Other areas like Costa del Sol are also given their own set of minigames.
• Mistaken for an Imposter: Discussed. Cloud mentions finding Tifa lying on the ground, seemingly dead, after she attacked Sephiroth during the Nibelheim Incident, only for Tifa to indignantly question if Cloud thinks she's some kind of imposter. This is echoed by Sephiroth, where he states that the real Tifa is dead and that the Tifa traveling with the party is a Jenova offshoot impersonating her. In the Gongaga mako reactor, Sephiroth gaslights and brainwashes Cloud into attacking Tifa while accusing her of being a Jenova offshoot.
• Mistaken for Romance: When the group reaches Barret's hometown of North Corel, an obnoxious man asks him if Tifa is his new wife.
• Mood Dissonance: The aftermath of Dyne's shooting in The Gold Saucer has large connotations to public shootings, which have grown far more common and publicly-known since 1997 (the original game being pre-Columbine). Thus it's more than a little strange to have Dio show up on the scene acting his usual self, with a flamboyant tone, flexing his muscles and even making his pecks dance in one moment, while wearing nothing but spandex and a cape.
• Mood Whiplash: The boss battle between Dyne and Barret is one of the more somber moments of the game up until that point, culminating in Barret mourning the death of Dyne. Immediately after this moment is another boss battle against the Shinra director Palmer, who goofs around trying to operate his mecha as well as spanking his posterior in front of the camera.
• Mook Horror Show: Cloud's actions result in this, when strongly under the influence of Sephiroth. He utterly slaughters a Shinra squad in the Gongaga reactor, executes a SOLDIER in cold blood while they're begging for their life, and nearly does the same to an incapacitated Elena while telling her not to worry about her imminent death in an extremely creepy tone, until stopped by Tifa. The rest of the party are all suitably horrified.
• Mundane Utility: While in the Costa del Sol weapons shop, filled with steel blades of all kinds, a woman can be heard exclaiming "Just what I need for fileting tuna!". A man at the desk meanwhile asks the store clerk "I'm looking for something I can use to split watermelons". Hawaiian-Shirted Tourist, indeed.
• Musical Nod: The final and hardest Chocobo duel race is set to a remix of the "Crazy Chocobo" theme from Final Fantasy XIII-2.
• Mythology Gag:
  • A background vacation poster shows a silhouette of Final Fantasy VIII's Zell doing his version of the Dolphin Blow technique. One can find a poster over Tifa's piano in the flashback chapter, likely referencing that they share the move. Other posters advertise the Emerald Seas and the Ruby Rocks of Corel; in the former the poster shows green fields and water shaped to look like Emerald Weapon with flowers marking its power core and eyes, and in the latter the poster shows Corel's desert with certain rocks glowing red to form the shape of Ruby Weapon.
  • Cloud and Aerith's synergy skill, Firework Blade, has them strike a pose very similar to a piece of Amano artwork◊. They also strike this pose in the ending after repelling Sephiroth, now knowing that this is where they must part ways.
  • Almost all of the recovery benches throughout the game have graffiti of the Save Point from the original game, continuing the tradition set by Remake.
  • While the dragon that takes up the road is missing, the Midgardsormr takes many of its traits. It now breathes fire, outright blocks your progress, nearly kills Cloud, and Sephiroth takes it out in two hits.
  • When exploring the Grasslands region, an instrumental version of "Hollow" - the end credits theme of Remake - begins playing if the player ventures into the wastelands between Midgar and Kalm.
  • Elena's Mythril Mines encounter has nods to her events in the original game. Elena can throw a solid punch and she and Cloud trade dodges, a nod to their interactions at the Icicle Inn, where she could lay out Cloud if he didn't dodge her punch.
  • The latest iteration of the Fort Condor minigames uses the core Final Fantasy VII cast as field commanders, and they appear as high-resolution takes on their original polygonal PlayStation 1 incarnations.
  • The inclusion of Gilgamesh in this game continues the trend of him being added to new releases of previous Final Fantasy installments. At the end of the sidequest involving him, he namedrops the Warriors of Light, the recurring title for various Final Fantasy heroes, but most likely referring to the group from his origin game, Final Fantasy V, as he mentions he has "unfinished business" with them. There's also his "It's morphin' time!" line, which he's been saying a variation of since the FF5's Game Boy Advance localization.
  • One of the movies showing at the Junon Theater is a Chocobo cowgirl movie called Tango of Tears. This is the name of the track on the original game's soundtrack for when you lose one of the Chocobo Races.
  • The marching band will play the classic victory fanfare if the Seventh Infantry does well at the parade in Junon. Cloud will also perform his victory animation from the original using his disguise's ceremonial sword.
  • While Tifa was not actually an impostor for most of the original game, Sephiroth did briefly impersonate her in one instance to distract the holder of the Black Materia, either Red or Barret, meaning that his claims of her being an imposter have some basis in truth.
  • While Hojo locking Aerith and Red XIII in a tube was Adapted Out, Hojo's actions in Costa del Sol suggest that putting forth Soldiers instead of Red to breed was just pragmatism in front of the board on his part. He is astounded by the possible unique genetic structure the mutated men in black on the Shrina-8 have and creates several mutants on his own and captures them in a tank for study. He also asks his aides if they would help "birth a new hero," and when he captures Tifa he mockingly asks if she will help the same way before putting her in the tank too, implying that an unholy mating between woman and beast was the plan all along.
  • When Yuffie first sees the massive materia embedded in a Weapon, she voices a desire to take the materia from it. In the original game one of her unique weapons was acquired by stealing it from Diamond Weapon.
  • Hojo expresses a desire to study the anatomy of a Weapon, whose bodies are born from the Magnus Materia in their chest. He tells the rest of the board that he has no use for the materia itself though. Diamond Weapon was killed by the Sister Ray putting a hole through the crystal in its chest but left most of the body intact, on the outskirts of Midgar no less. On the subject of Weapons, there are three spikes of mako energy related to the Weapons but only two are seen, in the Corel and Gongaga reactors. The third spike is under Midgar where the Omega Weapon was resting in Dirge of Cerberus.
  • The Gold Saucer's exterior appearance has been greatly expanded compared to 1997, but if you look closely the original design is still there sitting on top of the central saucer!
  • In Nibelheim, when Cloud starts to remember the Crisis Core scene where Zack talks to him in the Inn, he initially cannot see the upper half of Zack's face. This is how Zack is presented in Crisis Core's original key art.
  • The Gold Saucer play is no longer an unnamed story, but Loveless - G Edition, the completed version of the poem made up of Genesis' publicly shared academic research on the matter and published posthumously for him by the Study Group in Crisis Core
  • Barret's Evil Overlord costume during the Gold Saucer play looks a lot like Golbez from Final Fantasy IV. During the Loveless play, Cloud performs a Warp Strike and even summons the sword very similarly to how Noctis calls his, down to the particle effects.
  • While Kujata's appearance in Gongaga may seem odd, it actually references that you acquired the summon soon after the one time the party has to visit Gongaga in the original game. Titan's old prescence in Gongaga is alluded to, as this is the area where you can acquire the Quake spell. Likewise, Bahamut Arisen's appearance in Cosmo Canyon references that you can acquire the Bahamut Zero materia there in the original.
  • The Gi Tribe's expanded story significance has a lot of inspiration from the Phantoms from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within being extraterrestrial ghosts who have been Barred from the Afterlife and are spitefully lashing out at the inhabitants of the planet.
  • Sephiroth being unable to meaningfully harm either of the Weapons. In the original game, rather than face the unleashed Weapons head on, he erected a barrier to mask himself from them, for even as strong as he is, he still didn't want to face every literal embodiment of Gaia's Vengeance.
  • The Protorelic side quest has many call backs to Gilgamesh's varied appearances throughout the games. He first has a duel with Cloud one on one, then fights the full party, than transforms for the final bout, much like Final Fantasy V. He is suffering from amnesia before the final battle restores his memories, much like how he is found wandering the Interdimensional Rift, also in V. He brings out various weapons in the final battle and his greatest move is Ultimate Illusion, much like in XII. During one of the last Protorelic cutscenes, Gilgamesh calls Cloud a thief for taking the Genji equipment. Making the Genji equipment yourself is accomplished by transmuting them with Pirate Jetsam. It has been a running gag ever since Final Fantasy V that you get the Genji equipment by stealing it from Gilgamesh. He also says that Cloud will never get his hands on the Genji Shield, a nod to the fact that no playable character in the world of Final Fantasy VII uses a shield.
  • As you are going to the Nibelheim reactor with Yuffie, she mentions making a Spec Ops Unit known as the "Yuffie Recon Patrol" or Y.R.P. It is also the same initials of the group you play as in Final Fantasy X-2 (this time standing for Yuna, Rikku, and Paine).
  • The combination to the vault door that Cait has to unlock below the Shinra Manor? Same as the safe in the original game to get the Basement Key to Vincent's coffin room and the Odin materia: 36, 10, 59, 97.
  • Late in the original game, Cid tells Cloud how he once watched Loveless but fell asleep halfway through. Here he does the exact same thing and falls asleep during the parties play.
  • Aerith's attempts to soothe the Lifestream in the Temple of the Ancients via dance ritual resembles the sending ceremony performed by Yuna in Final Fantasy X.
  • During the Temple of the Ancients, the spirit energy brought out of the dead Soldiers turns their bodies into fiends, much like the unsent in Final Fantasy X.
  • The first characters to touch the Black Materia are Cloud, Nanaki, Barret, and Sephiroth, in that order. In the original game, Nanaki and Barret were the only two characters who could hold the Black Materia when Cloud got it back after the Jenova Death fight. Fulfilling the gag, Barret unthinkingly chucks it at Sephiroth's feet when he gets sick of Cloud's obsession with it, referencing the original scene when Sephiroth manipulated the holder to give it back to Cloud and then Cloud to himself.
  • In the Final Boss fight, Sephiroth's Skewer ability is a reference to the numerous times he's impaled Cloud and singlehandedly lifted him off the ground. Fail to stop his final attack, and Sephiroth lands a devastating Octoslash Prime, that is based on his opening move in Kingdom Hearts II.
  • In the ending, Aerith sees the Tiny Bronco take off in the same pose as the famous keyart of her seeing the Highwind from the original instruction manual.
  • The Test 0 Dog that you fight in the Beast Battleground is a reference to an accidental encounter from the original first-run Japanese version of Final Fantasy VII: It was a debug enemy that was supposed to be removed from the final game, but got left in by mistake. This is referenced in its Assess entry, which says that it escaped from Shinra's R&D division due to "developer's oversight."
• My Eyes Are Up Here: When Cloud first sees Tifa in a bikini, his eyes immediately lower to focus on her breasts for a moment, causing her to lower her head to meet his eyes when she wants to catch his attention.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: In the 3D brawler mini-game at the Gold Saucer, your opponents can combo moves in quick succession. Cloud's player character however is unable to do this. The player also has to dodge attacks and failure results in a hit, meanwhile opponents can only be hit if they deliberately drop their guard, or exhaust themselves missing every hit in a combo. This isn't just The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard; it also applies to human opponents Cloud faces in-universe.
• Nerf:
  • The HP Up and MP Up Materia have undergone a very large nerf from granting a maximum of +50% to their respective stats, with a hard maximum of +100% when equipping two, down to both an individual and hard cap of +30%.
  • Third-tier spells have been changed to require two ATB bars instead of one, hindering but not eliminating the Remake strategy of using the long flinch animation they cause to keep bosses stunlocked.
  • Tifa's Focused Strike no longer refills an entire bar on hit. As Synergy Bars are a powerful commodity, it is a tradeoff to keep her from filling her entire gauge easily.
  • The Gotterdammerung accessory is directly nerfed by substantially reducing the rate at which it charges the Limit gauge, and indirectly nerfed by the changes to the Limit system requiring the use of certain synergy skills to access higher-tier Limit Breaks, something the Gotterdammerung does not circumvent^note a separate accessory, the Enhanced Expeditionary Medal, does do this. These changes make it somewhat So Last Season, being visibly weaker than it was in Remake and now having equally powerful competition for the accessory slot where it once stood unchallenged at the top.
• New Game Plus: Just like in Remake, finishing the main story will unlock the option to return to any chapter with your full endgame kit as well as the option to play on Hard Mode. In addition, you also unlock the option to freely customize your party makeup without Cloud being locked in as well as the option to freely change character costumes at any part of the game and not just the area around Costa Del Sol.
• No Cutscene Inventory Inertia: At the end of the quest "Dreaming of Blue Skies", you receive a photograph consisting of Cloud, Tifa, the Condor of Junon and the quest's NPCs. The photograph will not take into account any outfit changes made by the party.
• "No Peeking!" Request: In Chapter 4 when Tifa and Aerith go to change into their Shinra uniforms, Aerith asks Cloud to back away from the dressing booth while they change, forcing Cloud to use another one far away. If he tries to approach them, they'll both keep warning him not to get closer.
• Non-Indicative Difficulty: Continuing the trend from Remake, the Easy difficulty is more accurately "easier than Normal", as it still requires fairly good knowledge of the gameplay mechanics and can offer a hefty challenge for the end of the game and those trying to punch too high above their weight. It also only affects combat and doesn't do anything to make the minigames any easier, which can be annoying when trying for all the Collector's Items and you get stuck on something like Queen's Blood, 3D Brawler or playing the piano.
• No Smoking: Cid in the original game smoked like a chimney. However, not only is he not seen smoking in the Game Awards trailer, but his pack of cigarettes is absent from the strap of his goggles.
• Not What It Looks Like: After saving Yuffie when she's attacked by the Terror of the Deep, Cloud is conscripted into helping Mayor Rhonda perform CPR. Yuffie regains consciousness to the sight of Cloud crouching over her with his hands over her chest and assumes he was about to molest her. Before she can attack him, she recognizes Barret and Tifa as members of the extremist Avalanche splinter cell, and when Rhonda clarifies that Cloud helped save her, Yuffie scolds herself for almost attacking him.
• Off the Rails: As Aerith discusses "The past is forever. But the future─even if it has been written─can be changed". While Rebirth is surprisingly adherent to the overall story of the original Final Fantasy VII, just like with Remake it almost completely derails during the finale.
• Old Save Bonus: Having save data from Remake INTERgrade and its DLC Episode INTERmission will get you Summon Materia for Leviathan and Ramuh respectively. Further, these will also put your old weapons on display in the rebuilt Johnny's Seaside Inn... but only the ones you actually obtained!
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • Cloud was remarkably chatty and peppier than usual during the Nibelheim flashback, and treated Tifa with less familiarity. Those who've played through the original game know that there's a reason for this, especially that Cloud's mannerisms are a direct copy of Zack's.
  • Johnny's unrequited crush on Tifa has been a running joke across both Remake and Rebirth, and he laments working for the mayor means not being able to see Tifa in beachwear. So when Johnny walks by the party while they are in beachwear and he is barely able to say hello, you know something is going on with him.
  • In the hidden protorelic cutscene, Sephiroth is briefly taken aback upon seeing the Eccentric Swordsman. Whether it was because he recognized him or not is unstated.
  • Several times in the game, Cloud enters a fugue state and acts more like an extension of Sephiroth's will rather than his own person, especially once he starts quoting Sephiroth directly, and especially when Cloud quotes him before Sephiroth has actually said it. It's never not Serious Business when this happens. It gets even worse when the party enters the Temple of the Ancients. Cloud, while still seemingly lucid, becomes very cold and uncaring towards his comrades (when he, Barret, and Tifa get separated from Aerith, Nanaki, and Yuffie, his first concern is continuing towards the Black Materia rather than regrouping with them). To make matters worse, in the battle with the Demon Walls, he can be heard giggling to himself throughout the fight like a lunatic. It all shows that he is falling closer and closer under Sephiroth's thrall.
  • One of Roche's defining characteristics is his love for his custom motorcycle, he is basically never seen without it and especially loves fighting while riding it. During his second rematch with Cloud, the first thing he does is ride it out of an aircraft to crash-land and explode it without a care, resulting in the fight being fought on foot, similarly to Sephiroth and other traditional SOLDIERs. It quickly becomes clear that he is on his last legs and only cares now about a final battle with Cloud before he succumbs to SOLDIER degradation, whilst taking on a few hints from Sephiroth.
• Optional Boss: Chadley will create a special Combat Challenge for each region involving a boss fight with a digital recreation of the patron deity for each region. (Titan for the Grasslands, Phoenix for Junon, Alexander for Corel, Kujata for Gongaga, Bahamut Arisen for Cosmo Canyon, and Odin for Nibelheim) Competing these challenges will unlock said deities as summon materia, and uncovering every Divine Intel point for the specific regions will rank up said materia as well as unlock an easier version of the fight.
  • Each region also has a hidden boss which unlocks once you have collected a certain amount of intel for each specific region.
  • Finally, completing every Protorelic quest cumulates in a battle with Gilgamesh. Defeating him gives you his summon materia as well as the ability to craft his Genji gloves, earrings, and ring as accessories.
  • While most of Chadley's challenges pit the player against remixes of the previous bosses and summons, the final one is a virtual reconstruction of Sephiroth that fights with all his powers but none of his delusions that cause him to prolong the battle.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: Every participant of the Loveless play recieves an award Collector's Item, including Red XIII for Best Supporting Animal. So that Cait Sith isn't left out, he wins Best Feline Narration.

P-Z

• Paper-Thin Disguise: While aboard the Shinra-8, Red wears a security officer's uniform to disguise himself during the Queen's Blood tournament that still leaves his feline features very exposed. Only the party is able to see through it, the excuse being that his flamboyant moves disguise his animal posture.
• Pass the Popcorn: While exploring the Temple of the Ancients, the party spots the Turks in the middle of a scuffle against the temple's monsters. Barret suggests that they all just hang back, grab some popcorn, and let both sides tear each other apart.
• Pervert Revenge Mode: Subverted. After saving Yuffie when she's attacked by the Terror of the Deep, Cloud is conscripted into helping Mayor Rhonda perform CPR. Yuffie regains consciousness to the sight of Cloud crouching over her with his hands over her chest, and Yuffie assumes Cloud was about to molest her. Before she can attack him, Yuffie recognizes Barret and Tifa as members of Avalanche, and when Rhonda clarifies that Cloud helped save her life, Yuffie scolds herself for almost attacking Cloud.
• Please Wake Up: After driving off Sephiroth in the Forgotten Capital, Cloud heads towards where Aerith is lying down and asks her to wake up. Unlike most examples of the trope, she opens her eyes and smiles, though it's left unclear whether or not this Aerith is a figment of Cloud's imagination or the one he ended up saving within a branched timeline.
• Point of No Return: Accessing the Northwood Region, and by extension the Temple of the Ancients locks you into the following dungeons until the end of the game, after which chapter selection is unlocked.
• Poor Communication Kills: While prevalent in Remake, Rebirth takes Cloud's privacy over his Sephiroth-induced visions (and anything conflicting his fabricated past) to distressing lengths. Rather than divulging what's happening to him, Cloud prefers to keep it to himself and says he's perfectly fine afterwards. Inversely, the party never takes Cloud to task over these moments and don't pry any further. If both sides had opened up, they would realize how utterly dangerous it is that Sephiroth can influence or even outright control him, which is exactly what happens in The Temple of the Ancients.
• Power Perversion Potential: During Johnny's side quest, Yuffie suggests using her cloning abilities to make more of the party members. Cloud vetoes each one for various reasons, but when Yuffie suggests Tifa he immediately stammers, obviously flustered by the very idea of multiple Tifa's. Yuffie notices this and eggs him on having pervy thoughts, something Cloud cannot actually deny.
• Previously on…: The game opens with a quick CG recap of the climax Remake, to set the stage for the state of Midgar in Zack's altered timeline. A full recap (though it does not cover the events of Episode INTERmission) narrated by Red XIII can be accessed from the main menu.
• Prolonged Video Game Sequel: While Remake already came on 2 discs, that was mainly because of the PS4’s disc size limit. Rebirth comes on two PS5 discs despite it having larger disc sizes^note Specifically, PS5 discs have a max size of 100 GB, twice the size of PS4 discs, giving a good idea of the game’s scope.
• Psychic Link: Cloud appears to share one with Sephiroth. Several times throughout the game and Remake, Cloud sees and hears Sephiroth where nobody else seems to. While it's left ambiguous how much of these are just hallucinations, at one point during one of his flashbacks Sephiroth directly tells him, "Bring me the Black Materia," implying that he's using them to send messages to Cloud.
• Punched Across the Room: Elena is strong enough to send Tifa and Aerith flying with punches and kicks.
• Put on a Bus: The Shinra Shock Troopers and their variants - the Helitroopers, and the Enhanced/Armored Shock Troopers (or Magitroopers) - are not among the forces sent by Shinra and are completely absent as a result.
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • Dio proves himself to be one in Rebirth, compared to having innocent people immediately arrested and imprisoned in the original game. Firstly he has the shootings in Battle Square investigated by a crime squad, and because the cameras were destroyed he only has some vague eyewitness accounts about "a man with a gun for an arm" to go by, which is so rare that one can't blame him for thinking it refers to Barret. Even then, he still at least hears the party out over Barret's character, and gives them a chance to prove his innocence. Those who Dio does threaten to detain are also accused by Shinra of a terrorist bombing, and so he has an actual reason to do so.
  • Similarly, the Commander of the Midgar 7th Infantry Unit turns out to be this, despite also being a Drill Sergeant Nasty at first. She's immensely proud of what her unit does at the parade under Cloud's leadership, and even when she (much later in the game) figures out that he's one of the suspected terrorists that she's supposed to be hunting down, she intentionally turns a blind eye due to knowing that Cloud and Avalanche are not the monsters the top brass had painted them to be.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: The spirits of those barred from the Lifestream, such as the malignant Gi Tribe and the tyrannical Shadowblood Queen, are wreathed in an ominous red and black miasma instead of the usual green-tinted glow. The Black Materia, crafted through corrupting a sacred relic of the Cetra by the Gi's unending desire for oblivion, crackles with red and black streaks in this game.
• Relationship Values: More overt than in the original and Remake where they were more of a hidden mechanic, though other than a few subtle changes in dialogue, they don't have any real impact in the story itself apart from the Gold Saucer date, where Cloud can potentially enter into a romantic relationship with someone. For example, both Tifa and Aerith's respective dates are heavily romantic, with the former receiving a Big Damn Kiss and the latter holding hands with Cloud via Intertwined Fingers. Yuffie also strongly implies she's developed a precocious crush on Cloud—comparing him to a SOLDIER she once had a crush on, and kissing him on the cheek before getting flustered.
• The Reveal: The TGS livestream confirms a long-standing question, that moogles do indeed have a physical presence and live in the Final Fantasy VII world outside of temporarily showing up in summons.
• Retcon:
  • The game added a black sports bra to Tifa's cowgirl outfit compared to the same scene from Final Fantasy VII Remake (which was patched just before Rebirth's release to also retcon this in for consistency). This change is retained from Crisis Core Reunion.
  • At the end of Remake and especially Intermission, Midgar was shown to be very far from Kalm to the point that Barret said a full day's walk was between them. Here, the outskirts of Midgar can be seen from the top of Kalm's clock tower.
  • The Gold Saucer play about a hero who fights the dragon king to save the princess was originally just that. In Rebirth, it has been retconned to being an adaptation of Loveless, the poem infamously recited by Genesis Rhapsodos in Crisis Core.
  • Previous depictions of the Nibelheim incident had Sephiroth slash Tifa across her chest, and this was the description of her injuries in Traces of Two Pasts. The subplot that Tifa has an unseen scar means Sephiroth slashes Tifa's abdomen so that it can be hidden by her shirt and beachwear.
• Retraux: The player can control blocky versions of the characters in a certain part of the game. These blocky versions look like the models used in the original Final Fantasy VII release on the PS1.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: The Chocobo chicks that wait at each Chocobo Stop. They're smaller and pudgier Chocobos that do a Happy Dance whenever Cloud fixes a Chocobo Stop sign, and can be petted as if they were a dog or a cat.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons:
  • Cloud comes to the conclusion that Zack from the original timeline is dead. This is correct, but Cloud believes this due to false memories of Zack being washed away in the river during the flashback sequence, instead of being killed while getting Cloud to Midgar after escaping Shinra.
  • Much ado is had about how every SOLDIER succumbs to cellular degradation, and the consequences that it has on their body and mind. However, all of the characters who discuss it misattribute the cause of degradation to the mako infusion that's part of the procedure, while the actual effects on those suffering from it make it clear that they're actually being taken over from the inside by Jenova.
• Rock Monster: Yuffie can be seen clinging to Cloud's side at one point as they watch a giant rock monster emerge from a ravine. The rock monster turns out to be Gilgamesh using the power of the Protorelic to move sand in his form.
• Rubber-Band A.I.: The player gets to invoke this in Chocobo racing with the help of the Hyperion gear set, named for the infamous black chocobo in the original game that was near impossible to beat. Of the three pieces of Hyperion gear, one of them boosts all your Chocobo's stats when you enter the final lap, and another boosts its speed in the final lap. These advantages allow you to rapidly make up lost ground and turn a sure loss into an easy win.
• Ruder and Cruder: Continuing from Remake, Rebirth has a large amount of profanity in it for a T rated game, with "shit" being thrown around frequently. While the original game's original translation did have characters "swear" in censored text, it didn't have quite as much casual profanity as Remake and Rebirth do.
• Rule of Cool: The Loveless performance at the Gold Saucer uses Shinra-type VR headsets to put audience members in the play, allowing everyone to be the hero of their own story. This explanation starts to fall apart when Cloud's other allies appear in his simulation of the play, and then afterwards Aerith performs, during which time it seems like the group is back in the real world and in front of a live audience (they even line up for a curtain call bow and the audience applauds them), and Chadley and the spirits of Jesse, Biggs, and Wedge appear in the audience as well. But Cloud and his allies are still in "costume", and the scene then cuts to Cloud taking off his headset. It's unclear exactly how the play is supposed to work in-universe, but odds are the player won't care because they're enjoying the fun and epic play and Aerith's emotional ballad.
• Rule of Symbolism:
  • The cover art◊ and second cover on the preorder page on the Square Enix goods Website shows a lot of the symbolism of each character. According to Square Enix, the artwork represents the three worlds that form the axis of the story in Rebirth. Sephiroth is in the center, as he represents the instigator of the events of the past. Cloud and Zack are on the side as they represent their destinies being torn apart by Sephiroth. The image of blood, fire, and red that evokes Sephiroth, stains the sky and spreads over the world. The subtle red shade in the logo is also inspired by the same imagery.
  • In the Nibelheim flashback, Cloud is nearly crushed by the water tower that had been the place where he made his promise to Tifa to be a hero like Sephiroth.
  • In the ending, Cloud hides the Black Materia in his Buster Sword in between a linked green and blue materia, showing that Sephiroth's control over Cloud is breaking his bonds.
• Rule of Three: Cloud is awoken by a knock at his door and goes out to see who is calling him three times during the game. The first time it has to be Tifa and the rest depends on his Relationship Values.
• Running Gag:
  • "Two thousand gil." Initially Cloud jokes about still requiring mercenary payment to help the party out, and this quickly becomes the team's inside joke as they throw the number around whenever any one of them needs help with something. At one point they end up cancelling each other out by "charging" for mutual assistance.
  • Once again, when facing a large monster, Yuffie claims that she doesn't taste good.
  • Yuffie getting motion sickness in any sort of man-made transportation, including mine carts, off-road buggies, airplanes and more. Tifa and Aerith are also the ones consistently making sure she's okay once she steps out and collapses on solid ground. It becomes a minor plot point in her character arc that riding on Chocobos doesn't do this.
  • After Don Corneo is defeated in the Musclehead Colosseum, everyone in the party threatens him with a Groin Attack once again: Cloud, Tifa and Aerith bring back their threats, while Barret threatens to fill them with lead and Red XIII with biting them off.
• Sanity Slippage:
  • The entire game is one long slip for Cloud, who is struggling with reconciling his memories with reality combined with his mental connection to Sephiroth. It leads to him very nearly handing the Black Materia over to Sephiroth and nearly killing Aerith while under Sephiroth's control. And as the ending shows, he's still very much mentally unwell, both hiding the Black Materia in his sword without the others seeing and also seeing a tear in the sky that no one else can see.
  • Barret's subplot with Dyne has him be at the tail end of a long case of this following the destruction of their hometown and the loss of his wife and (to his knowledge) daughter, motivating him into going on a shooting spree against any Shinra forces he encounters, regardless of who gets caught in the crossfire. It's given an extra dimension in that Dyne is also implied to have suffered a severe blow to the skull when falling off the cliff, resulting in him gaining two long jagged scars running from his cranium to his jaw by the present. The implied brain damage has him vividly hallucinating that the shack he's tied up in his family home with Marlene and his wife still present, until he gains enough lucidity to remember Barret and the fallout of his decision to trust Shinra. Even then, he claims that he still hears his wife's voice begging him to forgive Barret for his mistake, which is implied to either be her spirit in the Lifestream, or the remnants of his own conscience manifesting as her. Once Barret tells him Marlene is still alive, he's devastated by the news because he knows he's become a vicious lunatic who can no longer see her after all the people he's killed.
• Screw Destiny:
  • Sephiroth declares that this is part of his end goal to fuse all of Gaia's many realities into one, because he wants to create a world where the very notion of predestined fate is non-existent, if only because he also wants absolute control of everything himself.
  • It's also heavily implied that Aerith is working meticulously to avert or at least subvert her own fated death at Sephiroth's hands, because she knows that she can gain even more strength and be a true, powerful threat against Sephiroth's designs by doing so, hence why one of her Alternate Timeline selves (Stamp the Chihuahua) devises a plan to send a powered up White Materia to the Aerith of the "main" timeline (Stamp the beagle) just as she's about to pray for Holy, which is successfully delivered by Cloud. This seems to grant the other Aerith access to new abilities she never had before, such as control of her own Whispers, and may have even reached a state of being that transcends life and death itself, similar to Sephiroth himself.
  • By virtue of being the only person to pass through the Whispers in the Forgotten Capital thanks to his Heroic Willpower, Cloud inadvertently creates a branched timeline where Aerith survives her fated death at the hands of Sephiroth. However, this means only he can interact with her while the rest of the party members are left to believe she had died like in the original timeline, assuming he isn't just in denial about her death anyway.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Yuffie reacts with fear and then runs away when Sephiroth appears from a black portal that looks identical to the ones Nero the Sable uses. Understandable since she barely survived facing Nero back in Intermission.
• Self-Serving Memory: Upon entering the inn at the rebuilt Nibelheim, Cloud begins to remember who Zack is and that they were both at Nibelheim 5 years ago. He remembers them both being SOLDIERs at Nibelheim, and then later when he and Tifa pass the spot where they fell into the river after the bridge collapsed years ago, his memory changes the soldier that was swept away to being Zack. As the game heavily hints, this is all Cloud's mind desperately filling in the blanks in his memories that still lets him continue to believe that he was ever a SOLDIER and not just one of the grunts that accompanied Sephiroth and Zack to Nibelheim.
• Serial Escalation: Just about everything in Rebirth is an upgrade from Remake, with the game now featuring much more open exploration and traversal, lots and lots of minigames compared to the first game, more party members to choose from, a large variety of environments, usage of vehicles, Synergy Attacks from Intermission, and more.
• Series Continuity Error: In Final Fantasy VII Remake: Trace of Two Pasts, it was explained that Tifa's lack of any major scarring despite the near-fatal slash she took from Sepiroth during the Nibelheim incident (which cut several of her bones and required medical wire to keep her ribs in place) was due to getting skin graft surgery during her recovery. In this game when a vision of Sephiroth starts messing with Cloud's unstable mentality by pointing out how his own recollection means Tifa should be dead, and bringing up the possibility that she's a Jenova offshoot impersonating Tifa, an offended Tifa reveals that there is a scar left on her chest as proof when Cloud brings it up with her, normally hidden by her tank-top. It's possible that the surgery prevented the scarring from being too large or noticeable, but given the novel made a point about it, the fact there is one is still noteworthy.
• Serious Business: Several people take Queen's Blood way too seriously, culminating in a plotline straight out of Yu-Gi-Oh! where Cloud must stop an undead queen from taking over the world by beating her in a card game.
• Ship Tease: Cloud's relationships with Aerith and Tifa are given more focus than any other previous piece of Final Fantasy VII media, and while past entries implied romantic affection existed between him and the women but stopped short of directly confirming it in non-ambiguous syntax, Rebirth has no such hesitations. Cloud's date with Tifa has them kiss if her affection is high enough, while in Aerith's date the two hold hands with fingers intertwined. In scenes that occur regardless of the player's choices, Cloud and Tifa have an Almost Kiss in Gongaga, and twice in the game Cloud and Aerith go on a date together, and a scene during the ending shows them clasping hands again. Furthermore, when a tearful Cloud sees Aerith awake in his arms after apparently dying, she puts her hand on his face which he subsequently grasps, in what can only be described as an extremely intimate gesture. On their end, scenes with the two women over the course of the game, both with Cloud and separately, make it clear that they love Cloud, too.
• Shout-Out:
  • When Gilgamesh reclaims the pieces of the Genji armor and readies to fight Avalanche, he shouts "It's morphin' time!"
  • Staggering Gilgamesh may cause him to exclaim a phrase very fitting for him: "Tis but a scratch."
  • Red dances like Michael Jackson while he's in disguise during the Queen's Blood tournament.
  • The Space Ranger minigame in Gold Saucer is highly reminiscent of Star Fox, including calling the spinning dodge a barrel roll. Considering that the Custom Valkyrie used the proper flight maneuver's name an Aileron roll, the reference is likely intentional.
  • The subtitle for Junon Protorelic Phenomenon 3, where Gilgamesh pretends to be a Damsel in Distress during a game of Fort Condor, is Princess in Another Castle.
  • When Yuffie first offers to join the group, she does a transformation monologue straight out of Cutey Honey.
  • The rift in the sky during Zack's playable sections bears a strong resemblance to the cracks in the skin of the universe in Doctor Who.
  • In Gongaga Village, there is a level six Queen's Blood player who happens to be a green chocobo named Oscar.
  • In Cosmo Canyon one of the names of the main story quests is Gadgets and Gizmos Aplenty.
  • Continuing with the Compilation's taste for references to the Gundam franchise, the final boss uses a move that distinctly resembles the Wing Zero's Twin Buster Rifle, including a variant based on the infamous Rolling Buster Rifle scene.
  • Using Yuffie's "Art of War" and "Supreme Art of War" back-to-back may cause her to shout "Run like a chocobo, stab like a Tonberry!"
  • A quest involves Red and Cloud taking to the seas to search for a legendary treasure left behind by a figure called the "pirate king".
  • The structure of the final boss is evocative of the battle with Kefka, with the players fighting their way up the boss' "body".
• Show Within a Show: Remember the Gold Saucer Play? Well it's back, and this time the others get roped into it as well! Barret does a particularly Hamtastic job as a gun-toting Evil Sorcerer.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: In the final battle, Sephiroth claims that Cloud is only hallucinating. Cloud tells him not to bother because he will never be fooled by his shit again.
• Shut Up, Kirk!:
  • While possessing Cloud at the Temple of the Ancients, Sephiroth listens in on Aerith as she makes a heartfelt speech about how true strength isn't forged from hatred and obsession over the past, but the ability to forgive and to focus on creating a better future. Speaking through Cloud, Sephiroth disdainfully asks, "Are you done?" at the end of Aerith's speech, clearly irked by her words because she essentially just insulted the very essence of what made him who he is: a man so consumed by his obsessive hatred that he turned into a monster.
  • In the final battle, Aerith asks And Then What? will Sephiroth have at the end of his schemes but unending loneliness. Sephiroth's answer is to tell her to be quiet, as her role in them has ended.
• Signs of the End Times:
  • Averted, as pointed out by Red XIII to Aerith when she's amazed by the greenery of the Grasslands. Because there aren't any signs of the end times coming, people assume the planet is doing fine, when it's actually barely hanging on.
  • In the alternate timeline, the people of Midgar believe that the world is ending due to the Whisper tornado having ravaged the city and a glowing white tear having opened in the sky.
  • During the ending, a white tear like from the doomed timeline has appeared in the sky, but only Cloud can see it. Whether he can due to being the only one there to have visited an alternate reality or whether it's just a sign that he's losing his mind is unclear.
• Sliding Scale of Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • Synergy skills take into account the relationship and battle styles of each pair. Cloud and Aerith have limit the charging Firework Blade to show how their Sword and Sorcerer dynamic works, allowing Cloud to hit harder and Aerith to protect better. Cloud and Tifa have Unrelenting Assault that extends Stagger time, giving the two free reign to pour more offense on.
  • Sephiroth's materia cannot be customized and even his equipment doesn't show up in the inventory, showing the disconnect between Cloud and Sephiroth in the Nibelheim flashback.
  • When the gameplay shifts to a Guest-Star Party Member, and Cloud during the Midgar sequence, the menu only allows you to save or leave the game, showing how you don't have full control over their lives at that point.
  • During the parts where you do not have access to the full party, the character you don't have will not show up in Chadley's simulator and their associated challenges will be blocked off. There is one exception during New Game Plus, during times the party is Aerith, Tifa and Red at Costa del Sol and the girls at Gongaga, Cloud's challenges alongside Sephiroth and Zack will still be available. Chadley is already using old data to replicate one of the characters and could do the same for Cloud. That does mean it is likely one of the girls is crossplaying as Cloud.
  • Weapon abilities are tied to where in the story you get them. Barret learns a skill to increase his HP and take damage for the party in the Corel region, where he takes the abuse of his fellows for his part in their plight. Red learns moves that utilize the Vengeance gauge for more than assault in Cosmo Canyon, where he learns there is more to him and his family than just slaying enemies. Aerith comes across a skill that renders her unconscious in exchange for fully healing or reviving party members in the Temple of the Ancients, where she fully comes to terms with her Cetra lineage and willingly chooses self-sacrifice for the sake of others. The final abilities in the folio is a representation of who the character is in the party as their bonds get to their deepest. Cloud learns an ability to bring aerial enemies down to show how he is the point man to bring enemies into range, Barret pours his strength and life into one massive attack now that everyone is sharing the load and he can hit as hard as he can, Tifa has a high damage but slow and cumbersome combo to show how she can trust the others to hold the enemy down, Aerith takes her time to concentrate on one big magical attack while putting her faith in the others to hold the ground, and Yuffie has a massive attack that requires 3 bars that she couldn't do on her own.
  • Cait Sith has no relationship value and you cannot deepen your relationship with him. The rest of the party knows that he is a Shinra employee using an alias so they regard him with suspicion at all times, and he knows that he will betray them sooner or later when the time comes.
  • In the lead up to Rebirth's climax, the entire party enters the battle with Jenova Lifeclinger with full Limit Break gauges across the board... except for Cloud, whose gauge starts at zero like normal. This is notable, as it can be assumed that the rest of the party have their limit gauges right off the bat out of fury from witnessing Aerith's death at Sephiroth's hands. But Cloud, either due to seeing Aerith in an offshoot reality or simply out of pure delusion and denial, doesn't believe that Aerith is actually dead. Therefore, he enters the battle at a much more even emotion, believing he has just stopped Aerith's death.
  • When controlling a character other than Cloud, you cannot use the UI to view the Relationship Values indicator to see how Cloud is getting on with the entire party.
  • Queen's Blood cards take their cues from the gameplay of the characters and monsters they are based on. Unlike previous card games, the power of the character cards is not unmatchable and must be utilized by their own strengths. For example, Cloud is a card for the center who when empowered himself, strengthens those around him, Barret is an enfeebler who knocks down cards a space away, Tifa is support with great area control and a lane victory modifier, while Aerith is an empower card. Sephiroth notably is a destroyer card whose high requirements mean he must be played after carefully manipulating ally and enemy alike.
  • The second last player in the Queen's Blood side quest, Vincent, is testing Cloud if he has what it takes to defeat the Shadow Queen. Appropriately, his deck is a commercial mockup of hers, designed around enfeebling and empowering through card destruction.
  • When Cait Sith betrays the party and they leave him behind, the game goes so far in removing him from the roster that his synergy skills on other characters get his name replaced with question marks again.
  • In their brief Enemy Mine in the Temple of the Ancients, Rude's crush on Tifa means he will look out for her, even curing her of Frog status if she is afflicted.
  • During the section after the Temple of the Ancients, Cloud won't even look in another direction that doesn't have the Black Materia in it, showing how tunnel visioned he is and how badly Sephiroth is dominating his will.
  • Sephiroth's gameplay in the prologue does translate quite a bit into how he fights in the final battle. If a character perfect blocks his regular strikes they will make his named moves less powerful and he won't be able to use his follow up attacks.
• Start of Darkness: Chapter 1 of Rebirth is the Nibelheim flashback (now appropriately titled "Fall of a Hero") shows how Sephiroth turned from a respected Shinra SOLDIER to the Omnicidal Maniac he would later become after Sephiroth finds out that he was created from Jenova.
• Stealth Pun: As the rest of the party celebrates their victory over the Demon Walls, Cloud coldly finishes off the still clinging to life one and abruptly smashes through the wall, collapsing the rest of the entrapment. He literally Killed the room.
• Story Branch Favoritism:
  • The Queen's Blood tournament on the Shinra-8 allows you to face a selection of challengers, but the ones favored by the commentary and plot are Wise 3.0, Tifa, and Andrea. Wise returns as a player during the proper side quest and Chadley singles him out in his game. Tifa is the only one who challenges Cloud before the tournament begins and only loses to him or Regina, the reigning champ. Andrea beats both his competitors in the first two rounds and as Cloud's sponsor in the previous game has the bigger connection between him and Madam M.
  • During Costa del Sol, the girls' conservative beachwear options and helping Red and Tifa are more favored by the narrative. Red's comment that Tifa reminds him of a breaching whale has more story weight when a whale-like Weapon eats her and shows her the battle for the Lifestream later in the game. Aerith calls out for Cloud when she is captured, Tifa just exclaims to get free, Hojo has something to say for both Red and Tifa, while Barret is treated as an afterthought when he is captured.
  • Chapter 8's small date has the most impact with Tifa^noteTo make this work with Aerith's full date, Tifa has more side quests in the first half but less in the second, and getting full marks in some of Tifa's later quests can be unintuitive., as the two have the most to say over Jessie's poster and the most reaction to hearing that a man with a gun arm shot up the Battle Square.
  • Chapter 12's larger date makes the most sense with Aerith. Rosa in the play uses a wand, so the staff wielding Aerith is the best fit. Aerith's skywheel date gets a call back in the ending where Cloud and Aerith once again intertwine hands as she leaves. Additionally, the story of a wandering hero who must leave Rosa but promises to return makes the most sense with her as well. Cait is most heartbroken when Aerith turns her back on him, and she is the one who is seen accepting his apology after the Temple, which makes more sense if they had a bonding moment just now. The trophy image of the Skywheel framed by fireworks is only seen on her date as well.
• Story Overwrite: Literally, and done twice in this case. In the City of the Ancients, Cloud musters the willpower to break free from Sephiroth's control and manages to save Aerith from being impaled, only for Sephiroth to seemingly use his command over the Black Whispers to cause a time distortion and rewrite reality so that he impaled Aerith anyway. But then, another time distortion occurs, this time implied to be caused by the White Whispers that are working with Aerith, and the result seems to negate the previous distortion in a way, allowing Aerith to live on in some form. The exact nature of this strange outcome isn't made clear, however, leaving plenty of room for speculation.
• Strike Me Down with All of Your Hatred!: Sephiroth constantly goads Cloud throughout the game with this, stoking his hatred to make him that much more malleable and easily controllable.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • In the original game, Shinra were incredibly hands-off with Avalanche's actions, mostly butting heads with them because the party kept intruding upon their own plans to chase Sephiroth. In Rebirth, not long after resting at Kalm, Shinra immediately overrun the town looking for them, considering them all terrorist fugitives causing hell and a half in the hunt as they're priority targets alongside Sephiroth himself.
  • Cloud's work with Shinra military operations qualifies him as the most experienced fighter in the party as far as they're concerned, since even with Tifa's training under Zangan she's mostly been fighting on the low until Avalanche, Barret is an untrained terrorist who improvises everything he does, Aerith is a civilian with magical expertise but no real major combat experience, and Red XIII prefers to defer major matters to the others as more of a tagalong than anyone intending to lead. Hence, instead of Cloud simply taking charge because of his personal hatred for Sephiroth leading the chase and being The Hero, the group ultimately picks him to take the lead because he's functionally The Ace by their standards.
  • It's been a dozen years at least since Vincent was last up and about, and Shinra's technology took massive leaps in the time gap. When he finally wakes up again, he fumbles a portable security card reader because they simply didn't exist in his time.
  • The depiction of CPR on Yuffie in Junon is quite accurate. To start with, Mayor Rhonda is shown doing CPR immediately to keep her airways working, a lot of the crowd are standing around doing nothing, a classic example of Bystander Syndrome where people aren't generally sure what to do in an emergency if a professional is already working. Mayor Rhonda does the right thing to mitigate this by explicitly ordering Cloud with "you, help me" instead of asking generally "someone help me". The mayor also takes advantage that as he has a military background, Cloud would have undergone first aid training for this sort of scenario, and Cloud's reaction and body language indeed has the air of someone who is familiar with the procedure. Cloud is also reluctant to start chest compressions on Yuffie for the same reason that men are reluctant to perform CPR on women in real life — the fear of it being misconstrued as trying to grope the woman in question. And indeed, this is what Yuffie thinks when she's revived and sees Cloud's hands hovering over her chest; she goes into Pervert Revenge Mode until it's explained that Cloud was trying to save her life. Finally, upon being revived, Yuffie also starts throwing up water, which would realistically happen to someone who almost drowned. While Yuffie does recover very quickly, there is some justification in that she's a teenager in otherwise excellent physical health.
  • When Aerith, Cloud, and Tifa are taking part in the parade march in Junon while disguised as Shinra soldiers, they don't conceal their faces, which means they get noticed by Tseng on security footage.
  • A side quest gives the truth about Billy and Chloe's missing parents. Deciding they wanted to go into animal conservation to help chocobos, they sold their business over to Sam. However, they try to run it as a self-supporting normal business instead of as charity or using government funding, which ends up going as badly as you would expect ^note in Real Life, many animal conservation efforts rely on charity or government funding for this reason; staff and running costs have to be paid for somehow and a business would be very unlikely to support itself without another source of money. Taking out loans from sharks like Don Corneo to pay for all this since they have no other option, they end up deeply in debt and a lot of trouble with some very nasty people, and the only way to service the debt ends up being to agree to take part in Shinra experiments. Subsequently, they are never seen again, and knowing Shinra their ultimate fate was probably not a nice one.
  • This game lowers the subtext that those in Shinra know Cloud is not an ex-SOLDIER but a common infantry grunt. While the reactor bombings would have piqued their interest in him, getting one over on Shinra in their own tower led Rufus to actually look into Cloud's record, and though he doesn't say it outright, Rufus implies that he knows full well what rank Cloud actually made.
  • During the ascent of Mount Corel, Aerith, being the least physically fit member of the party ^note Which as a recap, by this point also includes: a genetically empowered super soldier, a martial artist in peak condition, a musclebound ex-miner native to the Corel region, an athletic wolf-lion species from Cosmo Canyon, and a ninja also in excellent physical condition struggles to cope and has to go at a much slower pace. Later on, she gets a bit loopy and disorientated, showing early signs of altitude sickness.
  • Barret's flashback to him and Dyne losing their arms in the Shinra attack had it implied in the original that both arms were shot off at the time by Scarlet's gunfire. Instead, the bullets merely damage both their extended limbs until Barret can no longer hold onto Dyne's weight and he slips free. Barret was instead able to escape without the massive blood loss that would have resulted from completely losing the arm and comments that the bullet-riddled limb had to be amputated at a later date whilst he was being treated by Doc Sheiran, being simply too far gone to recover.
  • A Gongaga sidequest notes that Barret's gun arm has great technology to keep the shockwaves from shooting a full-powered assault cannon fastened to the stump of his arm from breaking it further.
  • When going up Mt. Nibel, Cloud's party go up a newly constructed bridge and buildings to get to the reactor. While Shinra may pay bottom dollar for repairs and infrastructure, even they would find fixing an old rickety ropeway underperforming. Especially considering they put in the effort to rebuild the town.
  • Cloud's memory issues and PTSD: while he flinches upon first hearing Zack's name, he doesn't remember anything about him right away. Upon returning to Nibelheim, his broken memories start filling in the blanks and he recalls one of his conversations, but this doesn't automatically snap all of his memories back into place. Instead, his mind creates a new explanation for what happened. At this point, he's been given no reason to doubt his memories, and something as simple as remembering Zack wouldn't fix that.
  • Likewise, Tifa spent most of the original game not directly confronting Cloud about his inaccurate memories despite the glaring inconsistencies with her own, in part because of how he knew things that only somebody who was at Nibelheim could have, leaving her confused. In this game, she immediately brings up her confusion with Aerith once out of earshot with Cloud, and at several points gently coaxes Cloud into questioning his memories about events, only stopping once it becomes clear that doing so threatens to send Cloud into an unstable breakdown. Rather than avoiding confrontation over an uncomfortable subject, Tifa is willing to bring up the narrative that Cloud's Fake Memories aren't real, but is forced to let the subject drop because of their escalating situation with Sephiroth and needing to have Cloud functioning as a vital part of the party, even as this leaves Cloud vulnerable to Sephiroth's mental manipulations.
  • Similarly to both points above, in the original game Cloud's brief moments of becoming a mental mess were mostly overlooked by the party because Cloud recovered quickly, and it's only at the Temple of the Ancients that they began to realise something more serious was going on. His mind being hijacked by Sephiroth much more frequently since Remake and especially during this game has him become much more aloof, prone to becoming The Load at inopportune times as he tries to fight off the influence, and jump the gamut to extreme paranoia because of constant Gaslighting. In turn, while he does have his heart-to-heart moments with the party, they're much more keenly aware that something is wrong like he's some sort of ticking time bomb. After the Gongaga incident where he thought he killed Tifa, Cloud fully admits to her that even he's aware of these issues even if he chalks it up to SOLDIER degradation, whereas the original game had him in denial right up until Sephiroth killed Aerith and outright called him a puppet, and the party is notably more weary of him towards the endgame as Sephiroth's control keeps strengthening over him.
• Suspicious Videogame Generosity: As in Remake, a bench and a flat empty area while traversing a dungeon might as well be a giant flashing neon sign saying "Boss Fight This Way". The fight at the end of the Shinra Manor goes a step further: it outright pauses and warns the player that a vicious battle lies ahead.
• Symbolic Blood: Sephiroth attack on Tifa disguises some of the blood to keep the rating. Looking closely shows that the small dark objects let loose are actually pieces of Tifa's vest but the intention is so clear it is hard to notice that it isn't blood, especially because she does have a bleeding wound.
• Symbolic Distance: Used quite a bit to note the dissonance between party members, not just from a physical sense, but also emotional, psychological, and perhaps even spiritual. Most notably, in the ending Cloud puts his sword in between him and Tifa but doesn't have anything between him and the Aerith he sees. This is also used to showcase Sephiroth's control over Cloud, as he is often so much in Cloud's face that the rest seem far away, even those physically touching him.
• Tagline: "The unknown journey continues."
• Take Our Word for It: After Cloud begins to question Tifa's identity as a result of Sephiroth's manipulations, Tifa lifts her top and shows Cloud the scar on her chest from when Sephiroth slashed her during the Nibelheim flashback to prove her identity. Obviously, due to the game's rating, the audience never sees it. This is played with later on when Sephiroth gaslights Cloud into believing said scar doesn’t exist.
• Take Over the World: Cloud states that Sephiroth plans to reclaim what he sees as his birthright and rule over the Planet with Jenova at his side. He's right, sort of, because Sephiroth doesn't want to just conquer the world, but the entire multiverse.
• Taken for Granite: This game brings back the petrify status which had been absent in Remake. Some enemies are capable of petrifying the party, though the player can also do the same by means of Quake spells and certain enemy skills.
• Taught by Experience:
  • The Midgarsormr and Terror of the Deep boss fights show that Cloud and the party make sure not to make the same mistakes twice. Rather than fight an aquatic enemy near the shoreline where it has the Homefield Advantage, the party lures it to a pier so its water powers are not at full strength, and Cloud makes sure to finish the enemy when it tries to make a tactical retreat.
  • Both fights with Rude and Elena showcase that they learn their opponents' moves and adapt for the next one. Rude learns the timing to block Aerith's shots and Elena covers Rude's back from Tifa while he is distracted.
  • Rufus has learned new moves to shore up his weaknesses in Remake. He has more close range attacks, more moves to keep Cloud distracted and when Darkstar is hit no longer reflexively defends his pet. On top of those, he now boasts a full compliment of status immunities so he cannot be put to sleep or stopped.
• A Taste of Power:
  • When you start a fresh save, you briefly get to play as Zack, who has a drastically different moveset from Cloud and no HP bar as he tears through a couple Shinra squads like a hot knife through butter.
  • During the Nibelheim flashback, Sephiroth is playable with endgame stats and Cloud is nearly on his level. While downplayed from the literally invulnerable original who one-shotted almost every enemy in your path, it is a very high leg up from what the party is capable of when the flashback ends.
• Tech Points: One of the character progression systems is skill points gained via both leveling and the obtainable manuscripts, which are used to unlock nodes on a Final Fantasy X style sphere grid system. These provide access to new synergy abilities, permanent stat increases, improvements to existing abilities, and new limit breaks.
• Temple of Doom: The Temple of the Ancients is even more of a death trap than its original incarnation due to the various mechanisms, labyrinth guardians, and violent Lifestream currents impeding the party's path. The Shinra troops fare much worse there with many of them losing their lives to either the player or the temple's hazardous environment.
• Thematic Sequel Logo Change: The game's logo now has red changing the logo from the bottom up.
• Theme Music Powerup: The beginning of Jenova Lifeclinger's boss theme is mournful and alien as the party sees Aerith seemingly dead in Cloud's arms. As the battle goes on the song becomes more and more hopeful, while incorporating more technological instruments, to show how the group's collective Unstoppable Rage is so great they absolutely do not care that this is an abomination from the stars.
• To Be Continued: Naturally, since Rebirth is part two of a trilogy and covers events up to the end of the first disc in the original.
  "No Promises Await at Journey's End."
• Tonight, Someone Dies: Played With. The promotional material has not been shy about the fact that this entry will include the City of the Ancients segment of the original game, most famous for being where Aerith dies. Unlike most examples of this trope, it's not that it's teasing that an unknown major character will die, leaving people to question who will die. Rather, it advertises the question of whether the major character will die like she did before, whether she will die the same way, and whether someone else might die in her stead, which has been one of the major mysteries of the remake series. Ultimately, it's a Gainax Ending where it's left unclear whether Aerith died or not. She appears to have been killed by Sephiroth at the City of the Ancients just as in the original game, but with multiple timelines and twisting fates in play, it's left ambiguous if Aerith really is gone, she somehow survived, or she's in some sort of state between life and death.
• Tournament Arc: The first half of Chapter 5 features a Queen's Blood tournament involving the entire party. That said it is entirely optional and the player can forfeit at any time.
• Trailers Always Spoil: The trailers for the game aren't exactly subtle about the fact that things are going to be different this time around. This is best shown at the end of the "First Look" trailer where a very much alive Zack Fair reaches the Gates of Midgar and made even clearer during the "State of Play" trailer where Zack and the comatose Cloud from his timeline are extensively featured.
• Traveling at the Speed of Plot:
  • Inside the Temple of the Ancients, despite the fact that it explicitly took many hours for Cloud and company to reach the Black Materia, Cait Sith somehow makes it there in apparently minutes after the Black Materia has been removed from its pedestal with the Temple beginning to collapse.
  • After the party gets split up within the Temple of Ancients, we control Cloud for a segment that should only take the player maybe 20-30 minutes to complete, only for the game to rewind to Aerith's perspective with a graphic that states that the story is rewinding hours earlier. It does this a second time after another segment with Cloud's party that also should take less than an hour to complete yet "canonically" took hours.
• Underground Monkey: Numerous enemies have variants in the different areas, as well as Palette Swap versions that are harder and have a few more abilities. Almost a literal inversion with the Desert Sahagin, when the original in Remake was underground in the sewers.
• Uneven Hybrid: According to the Gongaga Region intel, some descendants of the Cetra settled down in what is now Gongaga. The human descendants still have a trace of their blood but has diluted so much they have no ability to hear or communicate with the planet. On the other hand, the one confirmed SOLDIER from Gongaga, Zack, does seem to have a higher tolerance for mako poisoning and the corrupting power of Sephiroth.
• Unreliable Narrator: Cloud's recollection of the Nibelheim Incident has more than a few holes in it, and the game doesn't make any big secret of it.
• Unstoppable Rage: The party absolutely loses their collective shit at seeing Aerith's supposed death at Sephiroth's hands, and fittingly, all of them, sans Cloud, enter into the battle with full Limit Breaks, ready to murder Sephiroth and JENOVA Lifeclinger for what they've done.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight:
  • Shinra troops are so preoccupied by the parade in Junon that they don't notice some of the most wanted people in the world wandering around, or Cloud wielding a giant sword when disguised as a Shinra trooper. Subverted when the Turks and Rufus do notice but let things slide for a time.
  • Side quests often fall into this, where only designated characters react to what's going on, while the other party members not part of the quest stand around in the background completely unfazed. For example, during the Corel Protorelic Phenomena side quest Cloud is magically forced into a cactuar pose, which Yuffie and Red both find hilarious. Meanwhile, the remaining members of the team a few feet behind them don't react at all and are in their idle animation poses, as if this bizarre phenomenon is so insignificant that it doesn't even warrant a passing comment.
• Upgrade Artifact: One of the new materia in Rebirth is a support materia that boosts the level of the linked materia to the next level.
• Variable Mix: Continuing on from its predecessor, the game will seamlessly switch from the region or dungeons main theme onto a specific battle theme for that region, or even specific fight, when entering combat.
  • Unlocking more towers in a region will also subtly change the mix of the field music of a region.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Though it is no secret the game ends at the Forgotten Capital, the final dungeon of the game is actually The Temple of the Ancients, which not only houses several bosses but also every final weapon for nearly each playable party member.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Fail to get anyone's affection high enough and Cloud will be put on a date with Cait Sith, Cid, and Vincent. While the Loveless play goes off without a hitch, the Skywheel section becomes a total bummer, with Cloud, Cid, and Vincent avoiding talking to each other while Cait tries and fails to liven the mood, culminating in him shouting out that he just wants the ride to end. Considering that Cloud would have to ignore, avoid, let down, and intentionally anger his comrades to get everyone's affections low enough to get this date outside of New Game Plus, it seems to be a quick shot at whoever somehow managed to see this.
• Voice of the Legion: The Gi collectively speak in such a way that you almost expect them to start talking about assimilation.
• "Wanted!" Poster: Upon the party's arrival in Under Junon, the mayor, Rhonda, pulls up a screen on a computer pad with a wanted message for Avalanche, showing images of Barret, Biggs, Wedge, Jessie and Tifa, listing a 100,000 gil reward for each of them. She then pulls up a separate screen indicating that Aerith is wanted, specifically alive, and that there is a 500,000 gil reward for her. She then tells them she knows how to keep her mouth shut. Later in the game, Reeve is seen altering the photos for the next batch, and by the time the pictures reach Cosmo Canyon they look nothing like their targets.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Played for Laughs in the Nibelheim flashback, if Cloud admits to rooting through Tifa's stuff, she and Aerith simultaneously call him an asshole. A more subdued example happens in Gongaga when Cloud tells Aerith to forget about Zack because he's "a loser", earning him an indignant glare from both her and Tifa for being unfairly harsh.
• Wham Episode:
  • The visit to Gongaga. Cloud's mental breakdown intensifies to the point where Sephiroth is able to take control of him and uses him to slaughter some Shinra troopers, and he then successfully goads Cloud into nearly killing Tifa. Instead she falls into the reactor pool and is taken into the Lifestream, where she sees Whispers fighting each other, the Weapons fighting Sephiroth alongside some of the benevolent Whispers, and has visions of her past. With the rest of the game up until this point being fairly faithful to the original game, this sudden turn is very unexpected.
  • The Cave of the Gi. It's identical to the original game up until the end, when Gi Nattak appears, purified of his hatred, and invites the party to accompany him to the village of the Gi Tribe. There the party learns the tribe's history, that they were the ones who created the Black Materia, and the strong implication that the Cetra were not quite the benevolent and pious stewards of the planet that the party had assumed.
• Wham Line:
  • For Tifa, hearing Dr. Sheiran telling her to thank Shinra, as it was them and one of their helicopters who got her to the doctor in North Corel so she could be treated for the injury Sephiroth gave her. It's quite a shock to her considering that incident is why she has such a deep hatred for the company in the first place.
  • Because of Cloud's broken memory, any mention of his fallen friend, Zack Fair, is this for him and is muted while causing him to wince in pain, just as in Remake. In a unique instance, Cloud manages to do it to himself when, explaining why there's been no sign of Zack in Aerith's life for five years, he says that "The man is dead", making him wince again since he accidentally told the truth on himself.
  • Red XIII crying out "Hey guys, I'm back!" in his normal voice. While Cloud and the player have heard it unattributed beforehand, this is the full reveal that the deeper, more mature voice they've been hearing is a fake, and Red actually sounds like a teenager (because, as they find out soon after, he is).
  • While visiting Nibelheim, Cloud suddenly remembers Zack and even says his name. Though the context he remembers is still fake — he remembers both him and Zack being in SOLDIER — the fact he remembers Zack clearly enough to know his name is a huge departure from the original game, where Zack's existence was a twist preserved up until the Northern Crater.
• Wham Shot
  • Shortly after the player reaches Under Junon, they hear a voice calling for help. Fans of the original game will remember that Priscilla is attacked by Bottomswell and assume it's time for that boss fight. While the boss fight still happens (against a renamed "Terror of the Deep"), the imperiled girl isn't Priscilla, but Yuffie instead.
  • While the party is infiltrating Junon, the player sees a scene of Tseng in the control room talking to Rufus on his cellphone, and the security monitors nearby show close-ups of Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith. The party's infiltration has not gone unnoticed in this continuity, and Shinra is fully aware of their presence and watching them. It gives the impending scene of their meeting with Rufus an entirely different kind of tension.
  • The party is heading through the ruins of the Corel mako reactor when suddenly a Weapon surfaces in the pool of mako, the first time in this continuity the creatures have been seen or mentioned, and much earlier than in the original game, too.
  • During the fight in the Gongaga Reactor, Cloud, who has been suffering from mako poisoning, suddenly makes contact with a Black Whisper when he tries to save Tifa. Afterwards, Cloud's body language changes and he shifts into Sephiroth's sword stance, then proceeds to brutally murder the Shinra grunts in this way, performing Nonchalant Dodges and showing off a Psychotic Smirk, demonstrating how deep Sephiroth's claws have dug into Cloud's psyche.
  • More of a gameplay-related moment than story, but while exploring the Temple of the Ancients, the party fights Elena and Tseng, who was never fought in the original game and only ever featured in combat in any capacity as an optional boss in Before Crisis.
  • The party meeting Vincent when they visit the Shinra Manor in Nibelheim is not unexpected. What is unexpected is when Vincent angrily confronts them about going somewhere he told them not to, transforming into the Galian Beast, and being fought as a boss.
• The Worf Effect: When Tifa is eaten by a Weapon, it takes her to a battle between the White Whispers and the Weapons against the Black Whispers and Sephiroth. In one of the rare times he's ever had to do so across his many appearances, Sephiroth actually strains to hurt it and has to visibly put in effort, and all he does is succeed in a flesh wound that the creature will recover from. It really emphasizes the power of the creatures to show that even Sephiroth can barely scratch them.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: Each of the game's regions are presented as a small version of this complete with Crow's Nest Cartography and minor activities, though at first only two pairs of them are connected (Grasslands and Junon, and Corel and Gongaga). Starting in Chapter 12 you get the Boat!Tiny Bronco to sail along rivers and across the Meridian Ocean, as well as free fast travel that's no longer restricted to just the region you're currently in, turning the entire game world into a version of The Overworld from the original game but at 1:1 scale. In fact it's possible at this point to get to any location in the game without having to use fast travel at all via in-game methods, such as the Buggy Garage that takes you up to the Gold Saucer.
• The World Is Just Awesome: Aerith is amazed by seeing the fields of greenery of the Grasslands, after living her whole life in the desolation of Midgar and its dead plains.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Enforced and then possibly subverted. In the alternate timeline, Zack learns from Marlene that Aerith is bound by destiny to be killed by Sephiroth, which is proven later in a scene that takes place in another timeline where Aerith never leaves Midgar, yet Sephiroth still shows up to kill her. Despite Avalanche's struggles to break free from fate's shackles, Sephiroth cruelly enforces this by using his control over the Black Whispers to seemingly rewrite reality so that he impaled Aerith even after Cloud musters the willpower to fight off his control and save her, smugly gloating as she dies in Cloud's arms... but then the White Whispers show up and seem to rewrite reality again to undo what Sephiroth just did, allowing Aerith to live or perhaps even Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, although the exact nature of this outcome is left intentionally ambiguous and open to interpretation as the game ends. Ironically, Sephiroth himself declares that he actually wants to destroy the very concept of preordained fate as part of his end goal to unify the worlds.
• You Can't Go Home Again: More than half of the playable characters are put through this for different reasons.
  • Cloud and Tifa used to have homes before their hometown got burned to the ground by Sephiroth. And to add insult to injury, the village itself was later restored by Shinra to cover up the aforementioned incident.
  • Barret is considered Persona Non Grata by the residents of North Corel for convincing them to trust Shinra and lose almost everything due to an unfortunate accident involving their mako reactor.
  • Aerith deliberately invokes the trope on herself in order to help stop Sephiroth's plans. Despite suffering homesickness in the middle of the journey, she knows that going back would only lead to her being captured by Shinra again. Plus, her current state at the end of the game means she might never even go back there for real.
  • Although Red XIII averts the trope by making it back to his hometown safely, Bugenhagen later tells him not to return until he's completely broadened his horizons by following the party once more.
• You Killed My Father: Twice in the Nibelheim flashback of chapter 1:
  • Tifa grabs Masamune and goes to take revenge on Sephiroth, by shouting that he killed her dad and burnt her village.
  • Soon after, Cloud follows Sephiroth to Jenova's cryo chamber and shouts at him that the man killed Cloud's mother, Tifa, and his village.
• Your Days Are Numbered: Degradation due to the SOLDIER creation process gets repeatedly mentioned, with multiple characters impacted by it in some way. Cloud in his more lucid moments chalks up his memory issues due to it.
• Your Worst Memory: While in the Temple of the Ancients, the whole party minus Cloud and Cait due to his absence are forced to relive their worst memories as part of a trial:
  • Red XIII relives his capture and subsequent torture by Shinra and Hojo.
  • Tifa relives the destruction of Nibelheim and the death of her father.
  • Barret relives the aftermath of Shinra's purge of Corel and the death of his wife, Myrna.
  • Yuffie relives Sonon's death at the hands of Nero.
  • and finally, Aerith relives the death of her mother, Ifalna, after trying in vain to get help for her.

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"You were here with me. Five years ago. Where are you? What happened to you?"