10 Biggest WTF Moments In Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth
This is easily the weirdest Final Fantasy game ever made.
Douglas Adams - legendary author and creator of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - once wrote that "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is".
Replace "Space" with "Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth" and "big " with "weird", and you've got the latest Final Fantasy in a nutshell.
Final Fantasy VII has always been bizarre - how many other games let you take a talking dog, a robot cat and a failed astronaut into battle? Yet we're only two games into the Remake Trilogy, and it's already far surpassed its source material in terms of absurdity.
FF7 Remake had its own eccentricities (such as pitting players against a homicidal house, and having the sickeningly sweet Aerith embrace her inner wrestler by KOing a thug with a steel chair), yet by the time the credits roll on Rebirth such events seem quaint in comparison.
It's fair to say that not all of Rebirth's weirdness works in its favour, but one thing's for sure - love it or hate it, nobody who plays Rebirth will ever forget it.
Massive spoilers ahead.
10. The Mako Vacuum
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth gets off to an utterly electric start. Between killing off half the cast (in an alternate timeline, thankfully), letting players control franchise-favourite villain Sephiroth and having Tifa and Aerith lambast Cloud as an a**hole for digging through the latter's closet, Rebirth's opening hours are a merry old-time for Final Fantasy fans.
And then, in a moment designed to give gamers flashbacks to all those times their parents told them to stop playing video games and start tidying their room, Square Enix brings the fun to a screeching halt by forcing the player to indulge in a spot of vacuuming.
Yes, in order to progress through the game's opening chapter, you are forced to use an industrial vacuum cleaner to hoover up hazardous material. Because nothing screams "Fantasy" quite like slowly dragging a plus-sized household appliance across the floor!
Watching protagonist Cloud partake in tedious menial labour - while supervised by future nemesis Sephiroth, no less - is such a bizarre moment you can't help but chuckle at Square-Enix's audacity for including it. Kudos to you Square, but please - no more chores in the next game. It's a joke that only works once.