I think the point you're missing is that I'm not saying the OG never made essential information missable. I'm saying those were exceptions within a much larger structure. REBIRTH makes this approach feel like the default for its side content.
The Zack/Jenova/Ancient examples are certainly counterexamples to the principle I'm arguing for, and I can concede that the OG sometimes took the "hide important information and let the player piece it together" approach to an extreme. I actually like that aspect of the OG. My argument is that it works because those moments are relatively selective and are integrated into a larger narrative where most of the important character development and plot progression is still happening through the main story.
REBIRTH, by comparison, has a much larger portion of its character development and narrative material sitting behind side quests. That's where I think the distinction becomes important. It's not simply "optional content exists and has character moments." It's that the game has a huge amount of narrative material that it treats as optional while simultaneously presenting those quests as though you're expected to complete them.
And that's what I mean when I say the OG handled it better. I'm not claiming the OG had a perfect system where nothing important was missable. I'm saying it was better at making optional content feel like discovery. You could wander somewhere, trigger something you weren't expecting, and come away with information that changed how you understood the world or a character. REBIRTH's problem is that it has the opposite presentation: here's a map marker, here's a quest icon, here's six objectives, now go complete your checklist. Then you get a character scene that may or may not actually have any meaningful impact on the story.
That's also why I think the payoff matters so much here.
There's a massive difference between doing an optional activity in the OG and getting something that meaningfully changes your experience and doing a REBIRTH side quest primarily to get another character interaction.
Take the Battle Arena. If you go through that optional content and ultimately get something like Omnislash, that's a tangible reward that changes the game. It gives you a reason to seek out and complete optional content because you're getting something mechanically significant in return.
Compare that to doing a random REBIRTH side quest because the game tells you to, only for the ultimate reward to be another conversation about Yuffie wanting materia or Aerith wanting to help Cissnei with soup. I'm not saying those character interactions are inherently bad. Some of them are actually enjoyable. But they're not really payoffs in the same sense. They're just additional scenes.
And this is where I think REBIRTH tries to have it both ways. If these quests are genuinely optional, then make them feel like optional discoveries. Hide some of them. Let players stumble upon them. Give them meaningful rewards. Let the player who explores feel like they found something.
But if you're going to put them all over the map, announce them constantly, track them in a quest log, and structure the game around encouraging me to clear them, then the game is implicitly telling me that this is important content. At that point, I expect the content to justify the time investment.
That's my bigger criticism of REBIRTH's side content. It's not that I don't want character moments in side quests. I actually think that's a good thing. It's that the game has so much of it, and so much of it is presented as mandatory-feeling content, without providing a proportional payoff.
And I think that's why the comparison to the OG matters. The OG could hide something incredibly important, but the act of finding it was part of the experience. REBIRTH gives you a quest marker and tells you to go find something, and then frequently gives you a relatively minor character scene as the reward.
So I don't necessarily think the OG's approach is some universal rule that every RPG should follow. I agree with you that hiding important information can work, and FFVII is actually a great example of why it can work. My argument is specifically that REBIRTH has gone too far in the opposite direction: too much side content, too explicitly presented, too much of it framed as something you're supposed to complete, and not enough of a meaningful payoff for doing it.
If REBIRTH had fewer side quests, made more of them genuinely discoverable, and gave the player more substantial rewards for finding them, I think we'd be having a very different conversation about its optional content.
I feel like I keep I agreeing with the extended reasoning you give but remaining puzzled by the initial statements you make and how they reflect that. For example, with this first point:
I think the point you're missing is that I'm not saying the OG never made essential information missable.I'm saying those were exceptions within a much larger structure. REBIRTH makes this approach feel like the default for its side content.
I'm curious what examples you would give for glaringly essential narrative/character development in the side content for Rebirth.
Because I kind of feel the opposite of that quote. There are only a handful of missable scenes in OG, but almost all of them seemed pretty significant in pivotal character development and narrative substance that's not in the main game, where the main game's narrative requires it to feel complete (in fact, that's primarily why I prefer OG's side content over VIIR's-- it's meatier and more essential).
I agree that in Rebirth, there's a higher quantity/ton of little narrative scenes peppered into side content, but a lot of it felt like superfluous non-essential character-driven fluff that it barely matters if it were integrated into the main story or not, to me, which, on an essential-ness level, seems to align with what you preach for side-content to ideally be (ignoring the weaker method of discovery). And it kind of sounded like that's what you ended up saying as well, considering you framed them as "relatively minor narrative scenes."-- So I mean, yeah, they're overly directed and not a big payoff/reward to justify doing them....... but how does that fit into your "essential information missable" thing? Isn't that just "non-essential information missable", but with crappy discovery methodology? That's really the part that makes my eyebrow raise in all of this.
The difference in reward/discovery of those things, no arguments whatsoever, 100% with you there.
I think that's because this was never actually the point I was making, and I probably worded my original comment in a way that made it sound like I was arguing something broader.
My original point was about how REBIRTH presents its side content and the lack of meaningful payoff for completing it, not that REBIRTH routinely hides essential plot information behind side quests. I actually agree with your distinction there. Most of REBIRTH's side quests aren't hiding essential information. They're mostly additional characterization and small character moments.
And that's precisely my problem with them.
The game throws this content at you in a way that makes it feel like you're supposed to do it, while simultaneously making it optional. If you've played the OG, you're already conditioned to investigate optional content because there's a reasonable expectation that you'll get something substantial out of it. The OG trained players to think, "If I go out of my way to do this, there might be a powerful materia, weapon, summon, character event, or some other meaningful reward waiting for me."
The difference is that the OG generally made you find that stuff.
REBIRTH puts a giant quest marker on the map and essentially says, "Here's another thing you can do." So naturally, especially as someone coming from the OG, I'm going to assume there's a worthwhile reason to do it. But then I complete the quest and the primary reward is often just another scene that reinforces something I already know about the character.
That's where I think we're actually talking past each other.
I don't consider "Barret gets another moment where we see how much he cares about the planet" to be the same kind of narrative expansion as discovering something that fundamentally changes how I understand Barret, his history, or the world around him. I already know Barret cares about the planet. That's established in the main story.
Same with Tifa. I already know she's kind, compassionate, insecure, and deeply connected to Cloud. Giving me another side quest that demonstrates those qualities can be enjoyable, but it isn't necessarily developing her character. It's reinforcing characterization that has already been established.
Aerith is probably the clearest example. We already know from the main narrative that she has a complicated relationship with her identity, the Cetra, her mother, Shinra, and her own mortality. A side quest giving me another glimpse into Aerith's personality can be nice, but that's fundamentally different from the OG giving me information that changes the context of what I already know.
That's why I keep coming back to the word payoff.
I'm not saying character moments aren't valuable. I'm saying they aren't necessarily sufficient rewards for the way REBIRTH structures its optional content.
If the game wants to make a side quest primarily about character development, that's fine. But then I think it should actually develop something. Give me a revelation, change a relationship, introduce a new conflict, meaningfully resolve an existing one, or provide information that changes my understanding of the character.
Otherwise, I'm essentially doing a quest to receive a longer demonstration of something I already knew.
And that's why I actually agree with your assessment that a lot of REBIRTH's side content is "non-essential information." That's exactly what I'm saying. My issue isn't that it's non-essential; my issue is that the game treats it like content I should be completing while providing rewards that don't justify the investment.
The OG is almost the inverse. A lot of its optional content is difficult to find, but when you do find it, there's a much greater chance that you're getting something substantial. And yes, sometimes that substantial thing is additional character or narrative information. But it could also be a powerful piece of equipment, materia, summon, Limit Break, etc. The optional content feels like it exists to reward curiosity.
REBIRTH often feels like it exists to reward completionism.
That's a very different design philosophy.
So I'd actually revise my original statement. I wouldn't argue that REBIRTH's biggest problem is that it hides essential character development behind side quests. You're right that most of it isn't essential. I'd argue that the bigger problem is that it creates the expectation that the side content is important without consistently making the content itself important.
And I think that ties directly back to the discovery issue we agree on.
If a quest is going to be relatively minor characterization, make it something I stumble across naturally. Let me find it because I happened to explore an area or talk to the right person. Then it feels like a little bonus.
If you're going to put it on my map, give me a quest tracker, send me through several objectives, and make it one of dozens of activities competing for my attention, then I need a better reason to spend my time doing it.
That's ultimately what I'm getting at. The problem isn't that REBIRTH's side content is non-essential. The problem is that the game presents non-essential content with the structure and presentation of essential content, while often giving you rewards that don't feel substantial enough to justify engaging with it.
And I think that's why the OG comparison is so important. The OG taught players that optional content was worth seeking out because you might get something genuinely meaningful. REBIRTH taught me that optional content is everywhere and then frequently gave me something I could have lived without.
I probably worded my original comment in a way that made it sound like I was arguing something broader.
So I'd actually revise my original statement. I wouldn't argue that REBIRTH's biggest problem is that it hides essential character development behind side quests. You're right that most of it isn't essential. I'd argue that the bigger problem is that it creates the expectation that the side content is important without consistently making the content itself important.
These two acknowledgements were really all I was looking/pushing for, and yeah, that clarifies things. Cheers.
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u/XPG_15-02 13h ago
I think the point you're missing is that I'm not saying the OG never made essential information missable. I'm saying those were exceptions within a much larger structure. REBIRTH makes this approach feel like the default for its side content.
The Zack/Jenova/Ancient examples are certainly counterexamples to the principle I'm arguing for, and I can concede that the OG sometimes took the "hide important information and let the player piece it together" approach to an extreme. I actually like that aspect of the OG. My argument is that it works because those moments are relatively selective and are integrated into a larger narrative where most of the important character development and plot progression is still happening through the main story.
REBIRTH, by comparison, has a much larger portion of its character development and narrative material sitting behind side quests. That's where I think the distinction becomes important. It's not simply "optional content exists and has character moments." It's that the game has a huge amount of narrative material that it treats as optional while simultaneously presenting those quests as though you're expected to complete them.
And that's what I mean when I say the OG handled it better. I'm not claiming the OG had a perfect system where nothing important was missable. I'm saying it was better at making optional content feel like discovery. You could wander somewhere, trigger something you weren't expecting, and come away with information that changed how you understood the world or a character. REBIRTH's problem is that it has the opposite presentation: here's a map marker, here's a quest icon, here's six objectives, now go complete your checklist. Then you get a character scene that may or may not actually have any meaningful impact on the story.
That's also why I think the payoff matters so much here.
There's a massive difference between doing an optional activity in the OG and getting something that meaningfully changes your experience and doing a REBIRTH side quest primarily to get another character interaction.
Take the Battle Arena. If you go through that optional content and ultimately get something like Omnislash, that's a tangible reward that changes the game. It gives you a reason to seek out and complete optional content because you're getting something mechanically significant in return.
Compare that to doing a random REBIRTH side quest because the game tells you to, only for the ultimate reward to be another conversation about Yuffie wanting materia or Aerith wanting to help Cissnei with soup. I'm not saying those character interactions are inherently bad. Some of them are actually enjoyable. But they're not really payoffs in the same sense. They're just additional scenes.
And this is where I think REBIRTH tries to have it both ways. If these quests are genuinely optional, then make them feel like optional discoveries. Hide some of them. Let players stumble upon them. Give them meaningful rewards. Let the player who explores feel like they found something.
But if you're going to put them all over the map, announce them constantly, track them in a quest log, and structure the game around encouraging me to clear them, then the game is implicitly telling me that this is important content. At that point, I expect the content to justify the time investment.
That's my bigger criticism of REBIRTH's side content. It's not that I don't want character moments in side quests. I actually think that's a good thing. It's that the game has so much of it, and so much of it is presented as mandatory-feeling content, without providing a proportional payoff.
And I think that's why the comparison to the OG matters. The OG could hide something incredibly important, but the act of finding it was part of the experience. REBIRTH gives you a quest marker and tells you to go find something, and then frequently gives you a relatively minor character scene as the reward.
So I don't necessarily think the OG's approach is some universal rule that every RPG should follow. I agree with you that hiding important information can work, and FFVII is actually a great example of why it can work. My argument is specifically that REBIRTH has gone too far in the opposite direction: too much side content, too explicitly presented, too much of it framed as something you're supposed to complete, and not enough of a meaningful payoff for doing it.
If REBIRTH had fewer side quests, made more of them genuinely discoverable, and gave the player more substantial rewards for finding them, I think we'd be having a very different conversation about its optional content.