Chocobos are the ultimate stress test for Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s open world
Meeting and riding a chocobo is a tried and true fun of a Final Fantasy game. The magical creatures combine the trot of a horse with the yellow plumage and shape of a dinosaur-like bird. Chocobos are my favorite fantasy chickens and that’s no I wonder if they’ve become one of the mainstays of the series. In Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, chocobos are back – and better than ever. You can ride different types and even dress them up. There’s just one problem: riding these beautiful creatures pushes the limits of riding Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth‘s open world.
Rebirth expands across the world of Final Fantasy 7 Remake and introduces different regions for Cloud and his friends to explore. Each region is large – the developers have filled these regions with hidden caves, vast fields and jagged cliffs overlooking the ocean. From the start, finding your way through the world on foot can be a bit tricky. Luckily for players, the game wastes no time in giving them access to their first chocobo.
Many aspects of riding the chocobo feel great. The bird has three different speeds: a slow walk, a trot and a sprint. The sprint feels very fast and Cloud and his friends will be zooming along at a speed of 100 meters every 10 seconds by my own estimation. In addition to speeding things up on land, chocobos can also allow Cloud and his friends to traverse areas such as swamps by swimming through them. And they’re still pretty cute. You can collect different equipment sets to dress them up, and even customize the colors.
While I appreciate all the details the developers added as part of the game, the chocobos still struggle with navigating the wider world perfectly. At the highest speed it can sometimes look like chocobos are sprinting at fast. You also can’t force the chocobos to jump, and it’s not always clear when a particular rock is too high to jump over or onto. This caused me to bump into things and ruin my driving rhythm while exploring the world. So even though you’re in an open world, you’ll pretty much have to keep your bird on the paved paths if you want to get anywhere quickly.
However, if you stick to the paved path, the world contains plenty of distractions, such as objects or interesting places that invite you with hooting owls. Luckily, the developers added a feature that allows you to pick up multiple items from the ground while riding the chocobo. This is great because if you time the button press you can pick up multiple items at once as you run along, although I still found myself having to stop my mount so I can go back and grab items I missed . Sprinkle in the fact that my chocobo can smell hidden and buried objects, which provides another possible distraction to throw me off track. All of this has made chocobos feel a bit unwieldy as the main means of getting around.
Of course, this isn’t all the chocobo’s fault. It illustrates a larger incongruity with the game where the world design and the chocobo just don’t fit together perfectly. Rebirth both is and is not an open world game. Sometimes certain parts of a region can be closed off so you can’t explore them, but it’s not always clear where you can go and when. Chocobos in one region may have a power that another region’s chocobos do not, so the game forces you to unlock each chocobo region by region, rather than just upgrading a single chocobo. It’s bizarre.
Despite all this, this isn’t the worst part of the game. I still enjoyed trotting around on my chocobo, and I’ll never get tired of hearing the various adaptations of the chocobo theme – but it just felt like a bumpy ride. I guess if I want to experience that smooth sailing, I’m destined to spend a lifetime playing the chocobo racing mini-game in the Golden Saucer.