Every prestige blockbuster game should have Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s fast-forward option

I don’t trust Square Enix to program worthwhile mouse-and-keyboard controls so I don’t know which key fast-forward is assigned to, but I can tell you it’s the right trigger on my controller, and that finishing Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has probably halved the lifespan of that trigger.

Obviously I keep it held in whenever Chadley is talking, or whenever the animation plays because you’ve activated another Ubisoft tower, but as the game went on I found myself using it even in cutscenes I was paying attention to just to keep the pace up. I didn’t want to skip them entirely, because I spent my dozens of hours with FF7 Rebirth suffering from the delusion it would live up to the storytelling possibilities suggested by FF7 Remake—with its promise of an “unknown journey” where anything could happen—but Rebirth is weirdly tame in how often it hits narrative beats from the original game, some of them multiple times, usually while you walk slowly forward.