This article was originally published on December 30, 2024.
One of the hardest yet most powerful things for a piece of media to do is make you feel the weight of time. No matter how grand the adventure, experiencing it as an observer or a player will mean that you can never fully get into the mindset of the characters. Events that were months ago for the characters may have been just hours ago for you, and that can create a disconnect where characters have had time to process events that you have not.
Take the time-skip in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, for example. Five years pass in an instant and every character you’ve grown to know and love moves on without you, finding ways to survive in a war-torn world until you finally reappear. It’s unbelievably tragic, and yet, it’s barely ten minutes of gameplay, so when all your friends show up to help you out five years later do you in any way feel the emotion of the reunion? Or are you much more caught up in how your favorite anime boys and girls have different hairstyles from ten minutes ago? I was much more in the mood for critiquing fashion choices than I was crying and hugging my dearest friends.
There are ways that games can simulate the effects though. Take Xenoblade Chronicles 3, for example, where the crushing relentlessness of time is one of the main themes and greatest threats to our characters’ happiness. When this game came out, I took the week off work and played it non-stop. I’m talking truly no-lifeing it, only pulling myself away from the game when I needed to eat or sleep. It meant that this story that was supposed to be taking several months took just a few days for me.
And yet, the narrative constantly draws your attention to the fact that time is running out – quite literally for one of the characters, so much so that it forced me to confront the emotional weight of what I was doing, and sometimes it gave me pause. Every step these characters take on their adventure is one step closer to their end and by playing through the game this quickly I was accelerating that demise. It feels a bit silly to say, but I did at one point think that if I were to just stop playing, that terrible day would never come.
So it goes with Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth – which I’m about to completely spoil, by the way.
Decades-old spoilers for Final Fantasy 7 follow…
Like many, I went into this game pretty certain that it was going to end with the most iconic death in all of gaming: Aerith’s. This created a scenario a lot like that of Xenoblade 3, only this time the characters didn’t know what tragedy I was pushing them toward. Only I did.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to play Rebirth for work which meant that when it came out at the end of February there was no time pressure on how quickly I had to play it, and so I took my time with it. I now sit here in early December having just finished it and I can’t remember the last time I played a massive JRPG this way. I’d forgotten just how heavy ending an experience feels after taking this long.
I often joke to my friends that I get a sense of “post-JRPG depression” when I finish one of these games, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. When I’ve spent dozens – sometimes hundreds – of hours in a world I’ve become familiar with and characters that I’ve grown to love, ending that experience and knowing there’s nothing new to see can weigh heavily on me. Granted, it only lasts as long as it takes for me to start the next one, but I can remember where I was and how I felt when the credits started rolling on just about every JRPG I’ve ever played for that reason.
With Rebirth, it hit me on a whole other level because the game had defined my entire year. When I think about other events throughout the year I use my progress through Rebirth as a point of comparison because each little moment sticks out in my head so much more, as it often has weeks on either side of it where I didn’t play for one reason or another.
Fall is a great example of this. I had a week off work and I was rocketing through Cosmo Canyon, getting ready to finally finish the game in a week-long binge, but then halfway through that week review codes for Metaphor: ReFantazio came in. So, I once again set Rebirth aside, disappointed I wouldn’t yet be finishing it, but also somewhat comforted by the knowledge that it would still be there when I was ready to return.
I proceeded to finish Metaphor in just nine days, only to immediately have to move on to Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which I completed in just eight days. It does make me stop and wonder that if I can complete such massive games that quickly – and do so in such a thorough way as to be able to write extensive guides on the topic – why did Rebirth take me almost the entire year?
I honestly don’t know why, but I do know that I’m glad it happened, because it meant that when I did start approaching the finale, I was already feeling the weight of just how long the adventure had taken. Suddenly both I and the characters were sharing a similar mindset as we approached the end of what had been such a long odyssey for us – for them, a grand adventure of life and death, and for me, occasionally playing a video game.
This game’s presence had become a comfort to me in 2024, no matter what was going on in my life the one constant thought of, “Oh, I need to get back to Rebirth at some point,” was nice to have, and as soon as I knew I was about to witness the end that human impulse to stick with what’s safe and comforting kicked in and I didn’t want to say goodbye.
It made that “post-JRPG depression” I talked about hit all the harder when the credits rolled – admittedly aided by the fact that Rebirth’s ending isn’t even really an ending – as I was forced to reflect not only on the game I had just played but my entire year and everything that happened during it.
It means that I will forever have a unique feeling when it comes to Rebirth. While Metaphor: ReFantazio may be the best game I played this year, I think in a few years’ time Rebirth will be the game I treasure more, entirely thanks to the fact that I let time become a factor in my experience.
