It probably has to be contextualized first by my general feelings about this series, which to summarize would be that I like almost all of them on some level, with the major exceptions where the pendulum tilts toward dislike being anything Hajime Tabata had a major creative role in, and Final Fantasy XVI. The latter belongs to the recent string of Final Fantasy action games including Rebirth, which are perhaps easier to compare between one another, and of the three I've played within the year--Stranger of Paradise being the third--Rebirth at least has no fear of being stuck dead last in favour, either narratively or mechanically.
The strongest aspect of this game is almost unquestionably how it reframes the party dynamic across the entirety of it. Back in the olden days, you had the cute cellphone justification and inexplicable "can't have too big a group rolling across the hills; it's too dangerous" contrivance to facilitate how an RPG party would limit themselves to just three members, and it was never an issue or implausibility of the narrative in its context... yet game design shifts over time, and modes of presentation with it, and now Rebirth is defined by the party always occupying the same space and being together, even as the playable trios are maintained. Replaying FFVII can be interesting because you can only ever bring two people with you, so many smaller moments and interjections are mutually exclusive across playthroughs; I am certain I've never seen all of them to this day. On the flipside, it also contributes to the game's overall writing voice where it follows FFVI's lead and precedent in that character arcs and significant moments are mostly done as soliloquies with perhaps a player avatar looking on to witness the events--there's ultimately not much interplay and characters don't interact amongst themselves very often, particularly outside the needs of the critical plotting.
Rebirth's reinvention of these characters comes through in that there's much more focus dedicated to internal party dynamics in ways that were previously inferred or left to a player's imagination, as if between the pages of a comic book, when the party was literally separated on the road, across the travelogue that the game is structured around. Now that everyone is on screen all the time, there is passing-the-time banter, there are character spotlight sidequests, and all the plot-critical scenes and events are littered with commentary and discourse between the party at large instead of Cloud speaking on everyone's behalf. It completely transforms the feel of the game and the cast, and allows characters outside of the initial foursome to better impress themselves as unique personalities because they have mechanical as well as written character to support both aspects of themselves. It would be uncommon for people to single out Red XIII or Cait Sith as their favourites from the original, because they are so underplayed in that context--for Rebirth, it's likely and expected that every single character will cultivate a fanbase through their depiction, this time leaning on more than impressive Tetsuya Nomura designwork. My favourite narratives (and games) in the series are stuff like V, VIII and XIII, and what those have in common is emphasis on group interplay, group unity, and group friction--Rebirth amps up the interpersonal interactions considerably and comprehensively through all its runtime in ways that textually unite this group of characters in ways they've lived in people's heads for decades.
It's not like I like all of it, though. VII in its original incarnation has one foot in horror genre works and has a capacity to be grim, dreary and lonely--the melancholy is a large part of my imprinting on and affection for it. Rebirth cannot do the same, and I'm not sure it's even interested to: disquieting or anxious scenes are often supplanted by loud spectacle, and the game is not really willing to let any scene breathe or leave the player to their own devices to decompress. Everything's always going forward at full blast, and you're caught between that momentum and the infinite loop of overworld activities to perform, which are similarly framed as to-do-list tasks instead of organically taking in the world for what it is. There's an artificiality to the world design that has nothing to do with deliberate juxtaposition of Shinra's encroachment and abuse of the environment, but of dopamine-motivated design loops structuring what the world is allowed to be and how you interact with it. It's "fun" to accomplish those goals, or it may be exhausting, but it rarely lets you get lost in the serenity and vastness of the Planet in the ways the original could impress on you, simply because there's so much vying for attention and engagement when the scale of the presentation that's been accomplished here would have sufficed on its own.
Contrasting elements like that extend to interrogating the game for its tonality, which is interesting for the legacy it seeks to uphold. FFVII is one of the most presentationally transitional and liminal games there are, and much of that unique character was expressed through juxtaposition of the macabre with the comical. It's something many players struggle with in many video games (or other media), but there was so much wild experimentation and sketching out the rulebook in what the original did that it could usually turn that befuddlement into captivation. Rebirth does not discard these elements, and it frequently even plays them up--the inexplicable curiosities become fixated-upon sources of humour or levity, and this supercharged facet of the material's treatment is surely one of the most personal assessments to be made in whether it lands or doesn't, but it is typically the game's approach. For me, this was the moment to bring the absurdity to the fore in the game's narrative arc, as the critical plot for Rebirth's events takes an extended leave of absence for increased focus on character vignettes and the party maintaining a set course for the duration, so why not go full hog with the most mini-games any RPG has ever had? Why not break out into a musical number conducted by Dio's jiggling nipples? In retroactive estimations of the game's merits, I'm willing to believe that it will follow the precedent set by another middle chapter of a blockbuster RPG trilogy, in how Mass Effect 2 is talked of to this day: lauded for its focus on making you care about its cast through their personable mutual interactions, and given much leeway for not doing very much with a thinner of substance central plotline, because the weight of staging an explosive opening act or sticking a satisfying landing are not on its shoulders.
I don't follow the trajectories for Rebirth's glowing reception that I often see and what facilitates them. I am not a lapsed fan; I replay FFVII every few years or so, as I do with many games I like. I don't have a fixation or thirst for a "feature-rich" RPG that emulates the genre's formative breakthrough and bubble era semiotics and design trends; games in the genre come out all the time that are highly specific expressions of the form and which land as some of the best I've played in their niches. I am not inherently impressed by the amount of money spent on a project, or deride others for their seeming lack of "budget." There's still a 2010s-vintage narrative being pushed in this one game supposedly redeeming a studio or even entire genre's output for the past twenty years, in that the genre "fell" and now can soar again, if only for a moment. Rebirth to me isn't a miraculous game, or an extensively satisfying one where some aspect or another of it would push me to adore it... but it does very many things at a consistently considered level, in that that generalist impression of an all-game, the "quite possibly the greatest game ever made" showmanship that whisks one away through its sheer diverse mutability is its greatest asset propping up all the rest beyond their individual strengths.
