Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth review: imperfect, uneven, unfocused, unmissable

No gettin’ off of this train we’re on

Image credit:Square Enix/Rock Paper Shotgun

• Developer: Square Enix
• Publisher: Square Enix
• Release: January 23rd 2025
• On: Windows
• From: Steam / Epic Games Store
• Price: £65/€70/$70
• Reviewed on: Intel Core i5-12600K, 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti, Windows 10

I argued with myself for several weeks in university about whether to go to a seminar discussing T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock . The poem meant enough to me that I didn’t want to dissect it with a class. I wanted to keep for myself. I went in the end, and though I hesitated, I talked because I had things to say. It didn’t kill the poem for me, but it does have a slightly awkward gait now, having never quite recovered from the incisions.

I now have to etherise Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth . Cait Sith is splayed upon a table. It’s all scalpels, forceps, and oversized novelty dice. It’s a strange way to treat art you love. The feeling I remember most from Rebirth on release is how grateful I felt to be alive to play it. Acute, active awareness of my own mortality with thoughts like “it would be properly shit if I died right now because I’d really like to see how this pans out”. A personal ’ never kill yourself ’ moment months before the meme gave voice, as the best often do, to an obscure and precious feeling.

An RPG where your character sometimes knocks on doors before opening them? What a time to be alive.

Also nice: a huge world split into story-heavy towns and explorable open zones where you play as a group of plucky friends brought together in a fight against a world threatening megacorp through the medium of hybrid real-time turn-based combat. I called it “one of the most lavish and charming RPGs I’ve ever played” in our annual roundups. I’m still confident that’s the feeling most people are going to walk away from their first playthrough with. Like Remake before it, Rebirth captures so much that is wonderful and specific and anomalous about its impossible source material. The how-will-theys and how-can-theys answered with shimmering, stagy confidence and surprise wit. Cloud’s perfume and dress!

But I digress: Rebirth shines beyond the callbacks. Final Fantasy’s best card game and best combat? In this Kupoconomy? Builds are planned and team-plays executed in flurries of giddy spectacle. Moments are brought in line with memory, decades of building adoration and mythmaking accounted for. The gang’s all here, and they are all fiercely lovable and massive dorks.

Ultrawide did not work for me, so I settled on a very solid 60 frames at 1080p on max settings, with some noticeable texture pop-in. |Image credit:Square Enix/Rock Paper Shotgun.

Playing Rebirth again has been a more muted experience, and I can hear the elevated pulses of those who made it beating through more clearly. Excited. Reverent. Overeager. Pulled akimbo by priorities not so much split as omnislashed: the expectations of the market. The tyrant spectres of legacy (made text in Remake and backgrounded here, left to linger mainly around Aerith’s fate). The sheer brass saucers required to follow the artist’s instinct to leave their own mark on a work so vaunted that every diversion runs risk of derailment. Unbelievably talented. Unbelievably outmatched. Unbelievably brave about it. Star-struck by fictional characters and leitmotifs. Toiling in awe. In short, afraid.

Eyes up, SOLDIER. There are men in black robes to track across huge regions filled with promise and prehistory and pinnable activity icons. Enter teenage android side character Chadley, a grotesque Satnav of a pimple of a productivity app, a creature spawned from fear of Not Enough Game, to squeeze the universe into a ball and wrap checklists around it. All exploration is fed back through him. He gilds every crested hill or vista with a completion percentage reward and sucks the land dry of mystery, little stripmining enthusiast that he is. You can take the boy out of the Shinra building I suppose. What fuels the towers I have to climb to reveal more icons, Chadley? (I’m grasping him by the collar. Barret is poking him in the ribs with a gun the size of a country) It’s Mako, isn’t it Chadley? You little mole rat shrew gopher android fuck. You will hit the Gold Saucer mini-game stuffed amusement park after either fifteen hours or several dozen depending on how much you let him boss you about, and it’ll click: Chadley must have loved this place so dearly he decided to terraform the planet in its image.

(Avoid all of Rebirth’s green marked sidequests until you absolutely feel like it. Do the open world activities that look interesting to you but don’t feel compelled to clean up. Get your chocobos. Definitely do the protorelic quest. Absolutely play Queen’s Blood. Otherwise, just follow the story. You can come back and do everything else later. Do not let this little bastard run the show and kill the pacing.)

But theme parks suggest safety. A simulation of danger. And that would be true if it wasn’t for Aerith, whose fate remains uncertain thanks the multiverse ideas introduced in Remake. And so the Masamune of Damocles hangs over the entire journey from Kalm (with its intricate clockwork skyline seemingly a response to Elevatorgate ) to the Temple Of The Ancients (with its single, unbelievably dull puzzle type an example of that elevator’s same flattening homogeneity). Then, to the City Of The Ancients for a denouement so emotionally satisfying and chronologically obtuse I’m still reeling from it.

Image credit:Square Enix/Rock Paper Shotgun

In between, everything. A hundred visions and revisions. Sidequests that all feel like slightly different flavours of that one goat hunt from The Witcher 3. Moogle wranglin’. Stray NPCs to play at cards with personality quirks that feel as deliberately weird as the most accidentally weird parts from the original. The yellow paint that rubs its nose upon the cliff edges. More Moogle wranglin’. Barret’s concern for the planet expressed through sections in which he mostly blasts the shit out of beautiful and impossibly ancient crystal formations. On Junon’s wharf, an old man sits and tells tales of a republic fallen to Shinra’s greed as gathered children sit enraptured. Down some stairs, there’s a minigame that casts toad on your whole party and makes you play Fall Guys .

Nibelheim’s fossilised tiger-teeth mountains. Nibelheim’s potato tuber mako springs. Nibelheim’s unbelievably boring background NPCs. Were they real, they’d have run Tifa’s martial arts trainer Zangan out of town because the way he moves like he did in ‘97 unnerves them, a man fallen through time to make everyone around him look like a remarkably polite and reserved plank of balsa wood in casual wear by comparison. What a &^#$# pizza-fried conundrum: how to deliver the expected perfection of a mid 2020’s giga-budget with source material from which every janky, characterful oddity has settled long enough in memory to become iconic? Junon is so charming and so lively but all the rusty, dusky, proto-fascist foreboding of the original is gone. I feel like a culture blogger and a conservative grandad occupying the same body and looking at a street mural, alternately shouting “art! Art!” and “vandalism! Vandalism!”.

Moments that are pitch perfect Final Fantasy 7 . An orb of materia falling from the blades of a repaired windmill. M.C. Escher-esque tangles of switches and ladders. Screw it, some Final Fantasy 8 and 9, too. Chocobo-pecking treasure hunts. Monster hunts that offer up secret region bosses. Queen’s Blood, a card game with such powerful draw and aura that it not only has its own sidestory about how dangerously compelling it is, but leaks into the main story as well. Moments that are better than the original; foregrounded and fairgrounded fan favourites. The Junon Parade. The Gold Saucer play. Moments that are Rebirth’s alone, but just feel right. A showdown at Gongaga. A far more intriguing role for the Weapon creatures. Everything Barret or Yuffie says or does.

Image credit:Square Enix/Rock Paper Shotgun

Feeling cosy next to an ecologically disastrous pipeline under an infinite sky. I want to listen to Barret complain about Shinra not because I need another reason to dislike Shinra, but because I know Barret’s happy when he’s complaining about Shinra. Feeling forlorn and hopeless beside a motorcycle minigame near a stand selling tonberry ice cream. Rare unmarked paths that lead to an overwhelming question: Not “will it end?”, but whether you’d let yourself enjoy what little time you have together, if you knew that it had to. And would it have been worth it, after all?

Like Remake, Rebirth can’t do horror. The same dab hand that replaced the Shinra Tower blood trail with a spilled Grimace shake returns to turn Shinra Mansion’s desolate melancholy into a series of DualShock gyro box-chucking minigames. You start losing faith in the whole project until Vincent turns up, all black-pilled mall goth, and he’s everything you could have asked for and more. Cid’s here too, although neither are playable, which is totally fair when you realise the absurd amount of work that went into every single character’s combat presence. This is the best Final Fantasy combat. It is. It’s the best.

It’s the best because in the time it takes for Barret to toss Tifa whirling into the sky to knuckle baguette a spindly drake into a thousand pieces, before falling to earth to brush the fragments from her skirt, you’ve already whizzed around the whole party building up ATB gauges with dodges and parries and slashes and planned out which abilities to spend them on. Many games are equally breathless but lack Rebirth’s sheer lung capacity in the getting there. Rebirth is big lung breathless. Bottomless, even. A linked materia slot housing glinting strategy and shining spectacle, each single minute brimming with decisions and revisions. It’s the best because it’s a joyous covenant between Final Fantasy’s past and future, bringing all that nostalgia up to speed with the perhaps destructive ambition that these games always be more than . Christmas morning captured in a ward that turns Aerith’s plinky staff sprites into a quad-barreled laser cannon.

Image credit:Square Enix/Rock Paper Shotgun

Chiefly, it’s the best because it doesn’t lose the essence of back-and-forth decision duels or Final Fantasy 7’s sheer breadth of silly or niche approaches. In a game where most non-combat sections have some sort of novel twist or their own minigame baked in, combat remains the glue that holds it all together. You’re always building on it, always excited to get a new weapon or piece of materia all the way through to NG+ where it truly comes alive, passing the stress test of harder difficulty with aplomb.

Right, so: there’s a sidequest quite early where you have to escort a dog carrying some money to the mayor of Junon’s son. He wants to start a new life and his mum wants to help him out. You have to protect the dog, who has more HP than Barret for some reason, from periodic monster attacks. A song plays which I assume was not a contributor to the Best Score Game Award: a chirpy, sugary Soundcloud beat with lyrics about Stamp, the Shinra mascot dog. It’s all very cute, but in a “what the hell even is Final Fantasy anymore, man?” way. It feels thin. Brainstormed under duress. Tonally jarring for a project based on a game where you pop balloons on a snowboard moments after a tragic bereavement.

But then, Barret talks about his adopted daughter Marlene the whole time and it’s just touching as all hell. Classic Barret. So, sure: some of Rebirth is dull. Much of it is tedious. Some of it is disappointing. A lot of it is Chadley. All of it did not run in ultrawide for me. I wanted to see Barret’s sailor suit in ultrawide, Rebirth. But every time I want to get mired in complaint and confusion that one of my favourite parts from a game made of favourite parts is all wrong, actually, something else happens that makes me grin a waxing crescent, woken by the voices of the humans that made this thing speaking loud and excited through an impossible work. Final Fantasy Rebirth is imperfect, incautious, uneven, and gloriously, fearlessly unfocused. Final Fantasy Rebirth is unmissable.

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Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC , Nintendo Switch 2

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All 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints and where to get them

These areas have the highest chance of giving you Blueprints

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Looking for more Arc Raiders Blueprints? It’s a special day when you find a Blueprint, as they’re among the most valuable items in Arc Raiders. If you find a Blueprint that you haven’t already found, then you must make sure you hold onto it at all costs, because Blueprints are the key to one of the most important and powerful systems of meta-progression in the game.

This guide aims to be the very best guide on Blueprints you can find, starting with a primer on what exactly they are and how they work in Arc Raiders, before delving into exactly where to get Blueprints and the very best farming spots for you to take in your search.

We’ll also go over how to get Blueprints from other unlikely activities, such as destroying Surveyors and completing specific quests. And you’ll also find the full list of all 75 Blueprints in Arc Raiders on this page (including the newest Blueprints added with the Cold Snap update , such as the Deadline Blueprint and Firework Box Blueprint), giving you all the information you need to expand your own crafting repertoire.

In this guide:

• What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?
• Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes
• Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders Blueprints obtained from quests Blueprints obtained from Trials Best Blueprint farming locations

What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?

Blueprints in Arc Raiders are special items which, if you manage to extract with them, you can expend to permanently unlock a new crafting recipe in your Workshop. If you manage to extract from a raid with an Anvil Blueprint, for example, you can unlock the ability to craft your very own Anvil Pistol, as many times as you like (as long as you have the crafting materials).

To use a Blueprint, simply open your Inventory while in the lobby, then right-click on the Blueprint and click “Learn And Consume” . This will permanently unlock the recipe for that item in your Workshop. As of the Stella Montis update, there are allegedly 75 different Blueprints to unlock - although only 68 are confirmed to be in the game so far. You can see all the Blueprints you’ve found and unlocked by going to the Workshop menu, and hitting “R” to bring up the Blueprint screen.

It’s possible to find duplicates of past Blueprints you’ve already unlocked. If you find these, then you can either sell them, or - if you like to play with friends - you can take it into a match and gift it to your friend so they can unlock that recipe for themselves. Another option is to keep hold of them until the time comes to donate them to the Expedition.

Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes

Below is the full list of all the Blueprints that are currently available to find in Arc Raiders, and the crafting recipe required for each item:

Note: The missing Blueprints in this list likely have not actually been added to the game at the time of writing, because none of the playerbase has managed to find any of them. As they are added to the game, I will update this page with the most relevant information so you know exactly how to get all 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints.

Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders

Below is a list of all containers, modifiers, and events which maximise your chances of finding Blueprints:

• Certain quests reward you with specific Blueprints .
• Completing Trials has a high chance of offering Blueprints as rewards.
• Surveyors have a decent chance of dropping Blueprints on death.
• High loot value areas tend to have a greater chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Night Raids and Storms may increase rare Blueprint spawn chances in containers.
• Containers with higher numbers of items may have a higher tendency to spawn Blueprints. As a result, Blue Gate (which has many “large” containers containing multiple items) may give you a higher chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Raider containers (Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, Medical Bags, Grenade Tubes) have increased Blueprint drop rates. As a result, the Uncovered Caches event gives you a high chance of finding Blueprints.
• Security Lockers have a higher than average chance of containing Blueprints.
• Certain Blueprints only seem to spawn under specific circumstances: Tempest Blueprint only spawns during Night Raid events. Vulcano Blueprint only spawns during Hidden Bunker events. Jupiter and Equaliser Blueprints only spawn during Harvester events.

Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, and other raider-oriented container types have a good chance of offering Blueprints. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints have a very low chance of spawning in any container in Arc Raiders, around 1-2% on average. However, there is a higher chance of finding Blueprints in particular container types. Specifically, you can find more Blueprints in Raider containers and security lockers.

Beyond this, if you’re looking for Blueprints you should focus on regions of the map which are marked as having particularly high-value loot. Areas such as the Control Tower in Dam Battlegrounds, the Arrival and Departure Buildings in Spaceport, and Pilgrim’s Peak in Blue Gate all have a better-than-average chance of spawning Blueprints somewhere amongst all their containers. Night Raids and Electromagnetic Storm events also increase the drop chances of certain Blueprints .

In addition to these containers, you can often loot Blueprints from destroyed Surveyors - the largest of the rolling ball ARC. Surveyors are more commonly found on the later maps - Spaceport and Blue Gate - and if one spawns in your match, you’ll likely see it by the blue laser beam that it casts into the sky while “surveying”.

Surveyors are quite well-armoured and will very speedily run away from you once it notices you, but if you can take one down then make sure you loot all its parts for a chance of obtaining certain unusual Blueprints.

Blueprints obtained from quests

One way in which you can get Blueprints is by completing certain quests for the vendors in Speranza. Some quests will reward you with a specific item Blueprint upon completion, so as long as you work through all the quests in Arc Raiders, you are guaranteed those Blueprints.

Here is the full list of all Blueprints you can get from quest rewards:

• Trigger Nade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Sparks Fly”.
• Lure Grenade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Greasing Her Palms”.
• Burletta Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Industrial Espionage”.
• Hullcracker Blueprint (and Launcher Ammo Blueprint): Rewarded after completing “The Major’s Footlocker”.

Alas, that’s only 4 Blueprints out of a total of 75 to unlock, so for the vast majority you will need to find them yourself during a raid. If you’re intent on farming Blueprints, then it’s best to equip yourself with cheap gear in case you lose it, but don’t use a free loadout because then you won’t get a safe pocket to stash any new Blueprint you find. No pain in Arc Raiders is sharper than failing to extract with a new Blueprint you’ve been after for a dozen hours already.

One of the best ways to get Blueprints is by hitting three stars on all five Trials every week. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints obtained from Trials

One of the very best ways to get Blueprints is as rewards for completing Trials in Arc Raiders. Trials are unlocked from Level 15 onwards, and allow you to earn rewards by focusing on certain tasks over the course of several raids. For example, one Trial might task you with dealing damage to Hornets, while another might challenge you to loot Supply Drops.

Trials refresh on a weekly basis, with a new week bringing five new Trials. Each Trial can offer up to three rewards after passing certain score milestones, and it’s possible to receive very high level loot from these reward crates - including Blueprints. So if you want to unlock as many Blueprints as possible, you should make a point of completing as many Trials as possible each week.

Best Blueprint farming locations

The very best way to get Blueprints is to frequent specific areas of the maps which combine high-tier loot pools with the right types of containers to search. Here are my recommendations for where to find Blueprints on every map, so you can always keep the search going for new crafting recipes to unlock.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Dam Battlegrounds

The best places to farm Blueprints on Dam Battlegrounds are the Control Tower, Power Generation Complex, Ruby Residence, and Pale Apartments . The first two regions, despite only being marked on the map as mid-tier loot, contain a phenomenal number of containers to loot. The Control Tower can also contain a couple of high-tier Security Lockers - though of course, you’ll need to have unlocked the Security Breach skill at the end of the Survival tree.

There’s also a lot of reporting amongst the playerbase that the Residential areas in the top-left of the map - Pale Apartments and Ruby Residence - give you a comparatively strong chance of finding Blueprints. Considering their size, there’s a high density of containers to loot in both locations, and they also have the benefit of being fairly out of the way. So you’re more likely to have all the containers to yourself.

Buried City

The best Blueprint farming locations on Buried City are the Santa Maria Houses, Grandioso Apartments, Town Hall, and the various buildings of the New District . Grandioso Apartments has a lower number of containers than the rest, but a high chance of spawning weapon cases - which have good Blueprint drop rates. The others are high-tier loot areas, with plenty of lootable containers - including Security Lockers.

Spaceport

The best places to find Blueprints on Spaceport are the Arrival and Departure Buildings, as well as Control Tower A6 and the Launch Towers . All these areas are labelled as high-value loot regions, and many of them are also very handily connected to one another by the Spaceport wall, which you can use to quickly run from one area to the next. At the tops of most of these buildings you’ll find at least one Security Locker, so this is an excellent farming route for players looking to find Blueprints.

The downside to looting Blueprints on Spaceport is that all these areas are hotly contested, particularly in Duos and Squads. You’ll need to be very focused and fast in order to complete the full farming route.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blue Gate

Blue Gate tends to have a good chance of dropping Blueprints, potentially because it generally has a high number of containers which can hold lots of items; so there’s a higher chance of a Blueprint spawning in each container. In my experience, the best Blueprint farming spots on Blue Gate are Pilgrim’s Peak, Raider’s Refuge, the Ancient Fort, and the Underground Complex beneath the Warehouse .

All of these areas contain a wealth of containers to loot. Raider’s Refuge has less to loot, but the majority of the containers in and around the Refuge are raider containers, which have a high chance of containing Blueprints - particularly during major events.

Stella Montis

On the whole, Stella Montis seems to have a very low drop rate for Blueprints (though a high chance of dropping other high-tier loot). If you do want to try farming Blueprints on this map, the best places to find Blueprints in Stella Montis are Medical Research, Assembly Workshop, and the Business Center . These areas have the highest density of containers to loot on the map.

In addition to this, the Western Tunnel has a few different Security Lockers to loot, so while there’s very little to loot elsewhere in this area of the map, it’s worth hitting those Security Lockers if you spawn there at the start of a match.

That wraps up this primer on how to get all the Blueprints in Arc Raiders as quickly as possible. With the Expedition system constantly resetting a large number of players’ Blueprints, it’s more important than ever to have the most up-to-date information on where to find all these Blueprints.

While you’re here, be sure to check out our Arc Raiders best guns tier list , as well as our primers on the best skills to unlock and all the different Field Depot locations on every map.

ARC Raiders

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

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