It’s a big year for Square Enix. After a rough financial patch, it’s coming out swinging – with a massive, sentimental Buster Sword, to be exact.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth isn’t coming to PlayStation 5 until February 29, but press and critics will give audiences their 50 gil much earlier: the review embargo for FF7 Rebirth lifts at 6AM PST/ 9AM EST/ 3PM CET on February 22. This means you’ll be able to read the reviews and have time to pre-order a full week ahead of the game’s release.
FF7 Rebirth is the heaviest-hitting exclusive PS5 game this year. The review embargo lifting so early only confirms Square’s confidence in the product.
The Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy will re-tell the events of the original Final Fantasy 7 from 1997. After FF7 Remake took care of the Midgar portion of the classic JRPG, FF7 Rebirth will pick up immediately. It will follow Cloud Strife’s party as they venture outside Midgar for the first time through the Forgotten City. But like FF7 Remake, FF7 Rebirth is expanding on the original material. Zack Fair is now a playable character in the sequel and Square promises to dig deeper into Sephiroth’s motivations. It’s also making changes to the combat system and difficulty – you can now choose to have enemies scale to your party’s levels, making the game ever-challenging. Finally, Vincent and Cid are finally joining the party, but not as playable characters – yet.
Review embargoes are telling of a developer’s confidence in their product. A good example is Warner Bros. Games, which didn’t give out review copies of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Perhaps fearing the backlash to the experimental live-service game, the reviews of Rocksteady Studios’ latest project didn’t come out until after the game was released. If a developer gives review copies a week ahead of a game’s launch, it can only mean one thing.
With FF7 Rebirth, Square Enix has already begun distributing review copies with the review embargo set a week ahead of the game’s availability – you very rarely see this unless it’s a marquee title.
Unlike other companies who may want to try and limit the fallout from the negative reviews, Square is feeling confident about the game and what critics have to say about it. It means it wants to use the reviews to build hype for FF7 Rebirth. The last time a PlayStation exclusive’s review embargo was lifted this early was in 2022 with God of War: Ragnarok, which went on to win many accolades.
In comparison, Square lifted the review embargo on FF7 Remake on April 6, 2020, four days before it came out on April 10. It averaged an “87” score on Metacritic and received critical acclaim. Thus, this is a good sign that FF7 Rebirth might be an early GOTY candidate.
