Does FF7 Rebirth have a world map?

With Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Cloud and the rest are finally out of Midgard, which means it’s time to explore the wider world. You might be wondering if, like the original Final Fantasy VII, it has a world map.

It really depends on your definition of “world map,” but by a lot of metrics, no, it doesn’t.

Don’t get me wrong, you do explore the world beyond Midgard, which takes you across large swaths of land that was once featured in 1997’s Final Fantasy VII. You are free to go back and forth, and a lot of the regions are very open, allowing you to explore. However, the key indicator there is “regions.”

The classic definition of a “world map” when it comes to JRPGs is the zoomed-out, abstract view of massive landscapes that you travel. This has been standard since Ultima in 1981. You would move about the world map, and when you reach a dungeon or town, it would zoom in and you’d explore in greater detail. When you encounter an enemy, it would then move further in to depict the fight in the closest detail.

By contrast, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is closer to an open-world game like Grand Theft Auto III or, to use a more recent example, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The camera never leaves your party.

To move further from the classic definition of “world map,” the environments in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth are not continuous. They’re broken into regions, and they’ve got a pretty hard separation beyond them, which allows each to provide their own set of goals and subquests. It kind of works with the way that Final Fantasy VII’s world was set up progression-wise. It’s not as big of a departure as it sounds, though, in my opinion, it feels a lot more artificial.

So, to summarize, if you consider a “world map” in a JRPG to be a zoomed-out transitional map, then Final Fantasy VII Rebirth does not have one. If you consider a contiguous, loading screen-less open world to be a “world map,” that isn’t here either. However, if your definition is landscapes with towns that you travel between, then yeah, that’s what you get. You can also hit a button and get an overview of the region you’re in, then zoom out to see how it relates to the other regions. Which is a map. And technically, that’s a world map. It just probably isn’t what you think of when someone mentions a world map in a JRPG.