WithFinal Fantasy VII Rebirth, Cloud and the rest are finally out of Midgard, which means it’s time to explore the wider world. You might be wondering if, like the originalFinal Fantasy VII, it has a world map.
It really depends on your definition of “world map,” but by a lot of metrics, no, it doesn’t.
Don’t get me wrong, you do explore the world beyond Midgard, which takes you across large swaths of land that was once featured in 1997’sFinal Fantasy VII. You are free to go back and forth, and a lot of the regions are very open, allowing you to explore. However, the key indicator there is “regions.”
The classic definition of a “world map” when it comes to JRPGs is the zoomed-out, abstract view of massive landscapes that you travel. This has been standard sinceUltimain 1981. You would move about the world map, and when you reach a dungeon or town, it would zoom in and you’d explore in greater detail. When you encounter an enemy, it would then move further in to depict the fight in the closest detail.
By contrast,Final Fantasy VII Rebirthis closer to an open-world game likeGrand Theft Auto IIIor, to use a more recent example,The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The camera never leaves your party.
To move further from the classic definition of “world map,” the environments inFinal Fantasy VII Rebirthare not continuous. They’re broken into regions, and they’ve got a pretty hard separation beyond them, which allows each to provide their own set of goals and subquests. It kind of works with the way thatFinal Fantasy VII’sworld was set up progression-wise. It’s not as big of a departure as it sounds, though, in my opinion, it feels a lot more artificial.
So, to summarize, if you consider a “world map” in a JRPG to be a zoomed-out transitional map, thenFinal Fantasy VII Rebirthdoes not have one. If you consider a contiguous, loading screen-less open world to be a “world map,” that isn’t here either. However, if your definition is landscapes with towns that you travel between, then yeah, that’s what you get. You can also hit a button and get an overview of the region you’re in, then zoom out to see how it relates to the other regions. Which is a map. And technically, that’s a world map. It just probably isn’t what you think of when someone mentions a world map in a JRPG.
