You can get a lot of playtime out of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, with a 100% playthrough likely taking around 100 hours or so. The question then, is: can you play the game after beating the story via a new game plus or some other system?
Massive Spoiler Alert: This article either discusses or shows content from after the main story of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Read on at your own risk.
How to Play Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth After Beating the Story
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth doesn’t have a traditional new game plus mode or any significant post-campaign content. Once the final cutscene plays and the credits roll, your playthrough is over. However, you do unlock a separate system that gives you more control over how you finish off any tasks otherwise left unfinished.
After the credits in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, you’ll be kicked back to a new type of main menu, nearly identical to the start menu during play. You’ll have access to all your characters, Materia, and unlocks, plus a new set of options hidden behind the System submenu. The most important of these, Chapter Select is how you keep playing once the story’s over.
The system is simple: you can select any chapter in the game and play it from the beginning. Once you do, you select the difficulty you want and choose from one of three options:
- Retain Current Quest Completion Data
- Restore Previously Completed Quest Data
- Reset All Quest Data
Retain means you’ll continue with any story progression based on your current saved playthrough data. The game won’t overwrite anything, and you can finish off any additional quest content you missed. Restore means you can load up other playthrough saves, should you start a new game at any time. Reset means exactly what it sounds like: not only will the main quest be returned to its original state when you select a chapter, but odd job and other content will, as well.
The last major change after beating Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is the addition of Hard difficulty. Hard mode offers a few additional challenges, including increased enemy damage and health, no restoring of MP at rest spots, and several other modifiers that augment how tough the game is to complete. If you want to 100% the game, you must play Hard Mode for every chapter, as there are some Manuscripts, and character skill point books, that you can only find there.
Playing the game again, even chapter by chapter, lets you make new decisions with your party members, discover any rewards you missed, and even find a new date partner. Note that any character that appears later in the game won’t be available until you obtain them normally. There will be no Yuffie in Kalm, for instance.
Those are the basics of how you play Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth after beating the story for the first time. No news on whether there will be a proper New Game Plus mode coming in the future, but there’s plenty to do in the game we already have.
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