When Final Fantasy 7 Remake launched in 2020, it was surprising to see how much Square Enix had looked to Uncharted for inspiration. Cloud was climbing cliffs, squeezing through cracks, barely surviving huge action set pieces, and having quiet, cinematic shot-reverse shot conversations with Aerith, Tifa, and Barret. Though the series has been a graphical showcase for decades, Remake showed Square Enix more directly aping the third-person action adventures that came to dominate triple-A gaming in the 2010s.
It isn’t surprising that Square Enix returned to that well for Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth – after all, it’s a direct sequel. It is surprising, though, how granular some of its similarities to Naughty Dog‘s work are. One small moment from The Last of Us Part 2 becomes a recurring puzzle that players will return to several times throughout Rebirth.
How The Last Of Us Part 2 Set A Puzzle Template For Rebirth
When you first arrive in Seattle in The Last of Us Part 2, Ellie and Dina need to figure out how to get power to a gate so they can gain access to the city. There are several trailers set up in front of the gate, and if you search behind one, you’ll find a generator with an electrical cord attached. In order to get the power on, you need to plug this cord into a power box on another trailer. That sounds simple enough, but there are two fences in your way, and the cord isn’t long enough to stretch around. So, what do you do? After some experimentation, you find that you can go as the crow flies, chucking the cord over both gates for a straight path to the box.
When the game came out, this section got a good deal of attention from players and developers alike. As with Naughty Dog managing to realistically portray Ellie taking her shirt off or providing the ability to take a hammer to any pane of glass in the Seattle streets and watch as it believably splintered and shattered, this was a tiny thing that most players wouldn’t know enough about to be impressed by. They’d just do the thing, move on, and not think twice about the technical wizardry they just witnessed.
Rebirth Took The Cord And Ran With It
But Square Enix seems to have been paying attention. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is one of the only games I’ve seen actually meaningfully borrow from The Last of Us Part 2 in the nearly five years since its release, expanding the cord bit into a recurring mechanic In Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, you repeatedly come to machines that are missing a power cord. Like in TLOU2, if you want to get this door open, you need a little juice. So, you need to look around the immediate area, and can find one pretty quickly. The question is: how do you get around the obstacles in your way to get the juice a-flowin’?
Dying Light 2 is one other game that’s notable for incorporating a similar mechanic.
In one puzzle I found recently, the cord was hanging from a platform above me, but it was too far away to connect to the machine. So, I took a circuitous route up to the platform, moved the generator over a few feet, then dropped down and plugged the cord in. These puzzles aren’t especially deep, but they do give the FF7 team a chance to mess around with physics in a way these games rarely demand.
More importantly, it brings a little variety to the game. Video games are often built on his kind of repeatable activity. In the first TLOU game, it was Joel pushing Ellie along on a raft or searching for a lengthy wooden board he could place across a gap for an impromptu bridge. Games need to give you little tasks to do so you don’t get bored and it’s nice to see Rebirth taking Part 2’s solution and running (dangling?) with it.
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