When first playing Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, you are almost immediately introduced to one of many minigames, Queen’s Blood. This card game has captured many a player the same way Triple Triad and Gwent did a long time ago. So if all of the minigames here were the classic Little Rascals trench coat bit, Queen’s Blood would be the head, the Gold Saucer will be the body, and everything else are its legs.
In other words, if you think that’s the only minigame here, buckle up for the best joyride of your life.
Writer’s note: Early sidequest spoilers below.
Queen’s Blood Heads a Mighty Roster
Anyone who enjoyed (or enjoys) Marvel Snap or Gwent should check out Queen’s Blood. Like both of those well-known games, Queen’s Blood uses lane-based gameplay, where players need to score more points than their opponent in each row. The catch is that if you lose a row, that row’s points don’t count towards the final score.
Like Gwent, players find cards throughout their travels, and can mix and match them to their desires or needs. There’s even some story beats and side missions dedicated to Queen’s Blood. Throw in point boosting and reducing mechanics and a spawn placement system, and you have a thoughtfully addicting game to distract you from saving the world from Sephiroth.
Yet, that’s not the only things keeping you from fighting fiends with your friends. Square Enix dug through the original for nostalgic ideas.
Fort Condor Returns from Intermission
The original Final Fantasy 7 featured a tower defense minigame at Fort Condor, where players needs to place troops to protect the Phoenix egg. Remake’s DLC, Intermission, brought it back as a board game for Yuffie to play around Sector Seven.
Players must destroy their opponent’s Condor base with three classes of pieces that function like rock-paper-scissors. Rebirth adds new, stronger, non-class based pieces and hero pieces (Cloud, Tifa, and Barret).
While not as prevalent as Queen’s Blood, Fort Condor gets a bright spotlight early on. It can thank a region-specific side questline for that. As you may have guess by the cover photo, the true charm comes from that questline. Our heroes get sucked in enchanted Fort Condor boards, and transform into high-res versions of their original, overworld, polygonal designs from the original release.
Not only does it look great, it’s an excellent homage to the source material. Anyone who played the original would pick those sprites out a mile away, reminding them of times long past.
As someone with 25 hours in already, there’s one, underlying thing that’s shocking me:
We Haven’t Even Touched the Gold Saucer Yet
The true minigame kingdom in Cloud’s journey is the Gold Saucer. Borrowing near entirely from Las Vegas, the Gold Saucer is a massive entertainment resort in the middle of the desert.
Based on the launch date reveal trailer, we know there’s many more mini games to play. We’ve even gotten to play some one-off minigames already in Under Junon.
This is a massive game that takes a long while to get through, and many of these charming side missions give ample reasons to tack on more hours than necessary.
