I’ve never played the OG FF7 but I loved Remake. Beautiful environments, great music, story, and characters. I rarely pick games back up after finishing them, but I finished remake twice.
I was really excited to play Rebirth, especially after seeing the all the great reviews, and wow what a let down. The graphics are downgraded, the story is filled with Ubisoft style open world bloat, loaded with pointless minigames. It felt like SE tried to pad out the game with as much time wasting garbage as possible. I put the game down shortly after reaching the second area and haven’t felt compelled to come back.
Does the game improve at all later? Is it worth pushing through?
Yeah your understanding about the towers is correct. I don’t think it’s inherently bad, I’ve even enjoyed it in some of the AC games, but in rebirth it just feels like a bad chore list. Some of the combat challenges can be interesting but the ones with the summon stones (I forget the name, but they reduce the power of summon fights and do other things) and scanning the life springs are just terrible imo.