Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Slump Is Reviving Remake Runs

When a Sequel Stumbles, Players Return to the Beginning

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth arrived in February 2024 with enormous expectations riding on it. Square Enix had delivered one of the most celebrated RPG remakes in recent memory with Final Fantasy VII Remake in 2020, and Rebirth was supposed to build on that goodwill and carry it further. Instead, the sequel quietly underperformed commercially, generating muted word-of-mouth compared to its predecessor and failing to land the cultural moment Square Enix had clearly planned for.

That stumble has produced an unexpected side effect: a visible surge in players going back to Final Fantasy VII Remake.

PlayStation Store charts, streaming activity on Twitch and YouTube, and fan community chatter all point in the same direction. Rebirth’s mixed reception did not kill interest in the series – it redirected it. Players who bounced off Rebirth, players who never got around to Remake, and veterans who want to re-examine the foundations of the trilogy before its third installment arrives are all finding their way back to 2020.

Why Rebirth’s Reception Created a Remake Moment

Rebirth’s commercial underperformance has been discussed openly at Square Enix’s executive level. The game reportedly sold below internal projections, and while it earned strong critical scores, those scores did not translate into the sustained player engagement the company needed. The consensus reason is length and bloat – Rebirth is an enormous open-world game with an aggressively packed content calendar, and a significant portion of players either stalled out before finishing it or never started because the size felt overwhelming.

That friction created a kind of retroactive appreciation for Remake’s tighter design. Remake is a focused, contained experience. It covers only the Midgar section of the original 1997 game and clocks in at roughly 30 to 40 hours. Its structure is linear but deliberate, its combat system satisfying without becoming exhausting, and its story beats are emotionally precise. For players who felt lost in Rebirth’s sprawl, or who are now curious what the series is about after seeing discourse about the sequel, Remake offers an accessible and narratively complete starting point that does not demand a 60-plus-hour commitment upfront.

There is also something specific happening with new PlayStation 5 owners and players who joined via PlayStation Plus. Remake has been available through the subscription service, which means discovery costs nothing. That accessibility, paired with renewed conversation about the series, creates a natural pipeline. A player sees discourse about Rebirth’s story controversies, gets curious, downloads Remake for free, and falls deep into it within a weekend.

The Streaming Effect and the Long Tail of 2020

Streaming culture has given games a much longer commercial life than the traditional release-week sales window ever allowed, and Remake is benefiting from exactly this dynamic now. A growing number of content creators are running what the community calls “blind playthroughs” of Remake – full playthroughs with no prior knowledge of the original game – and these runs are pulling in consistent viewership. The appeal for audiences is genuine: watching someone experience the Midgar sequences, the Wall Market chapter, and the final hours of Remake for the first time produces reliable emotional beats that experienced fans want to see played fresh.

This is not a new phenomenon – announcement cycles and sequel reveals routinely push players back to older entries in a series, exactly as Naughty Dog saw with Uncharted 4 following Intergalactic’s reveal. But the Remake situation has an extra layer because the conversation around Rebirth is unresolved. Players are debating plot decisions, debating whether Rebirth’s changes to the source material worked, and debating what the third installment should do – all of which sends curious onlookers directly to the beginning of the trilogy to form their own opinions.

Square Enix has not officially responded to the Remake resurgence with any campaign or promotion, which is itself worth noting. The revival is organic, driven by community behavior rather than marketing. That makes it more durable in some ways – players who return because the conversation pulled them in are more likely to finish the game than players who responded to a discount banner.

What This Tells Square Enix Going Into Part Three

The third and final installment in the remake trilogy has no confirmed release window. Square Enix has acknowledged it is in development, but beyond that, almost nothing is public. The renewed activity around Remake could actually work in the company’s favor by the time that game releases – players who return to Remake now and then work through Rebirth over the next year or two will arrive at Part Three with the full context fresh in memory.

That matters because the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy has made significant, deliberate changes to the original story. Those changes are cryptic and layered in ways that reward close attention across all three games. A player who only played Remake in 2020 and then rushed through Rebirth at launch may actually be at a disadvantage compared to someone who plays both games consecutively closer to Part Three’s release. The current Remake surge, unintentional as it is, could be building a more prepared audience.

Square Enix needs that audience to be large. The company has been navigating a difficult period commercially, with several high-profile projects underperforming expectations across different franchises. The Final Fantasy VII trilogy is its most visible ongoing IP commitment, and Part Three will need to land with weight – both critically and commercially – to justify the decade-plus this project will have spanned by the time it concludes. A healthy, engaged community re-reading the earlier chapters is a better starting position than a burned-out one.

The Irony Square Enix Probably Did Not Plan For

Rebirth’s struggles have done something its success probably would not have: they made people care about Remake again, four years later, in a gaming landscape where a four-month-old release is already considered old. Square Enix spent years building toward a sequel that would expand the world and deepen the story, and the result is that a large portion of the audience responded by returning to the smaller, quieter game where it all started – and finding it holds up better than they remembered.