The FFVII Rebirth hate towards its “ubisoft style” open world drowned out what it did right.

Yes, the towers and checklist style of the game in the open parts clearly isn't the best part of it, most people actually understand that, I also don't think it was nearly as bad as people made it out to be although it did start to get repetitive after a while.

This whole discussion actually drowned out what the game got right about its world though, which is how they basically managed to take the overworld style of the old FF games and make it open world instead. The towns all feel surreal to literally just enter and exit without loading screens and the fact that even the dungeons are all seamlessly connected too is wild, I also love how diverse the reigions are and how well they designed the map especially its verticality. This is a massive accomplishment as the FF Series been struggling with this for a while.

The way the story is connected with the actual level design of the game in that each area is essentially blocked off through certain unavialable mechanics e.g. Chocobo swamp, buggy and tiny bronco etc allows you to feel progession from not just a story perspective but a actual level perspective too as everything gets bigger, this greatly enhances immersion too imo, another aspect to this immersion that we got is that with the world map, you essentially have a good bareing in what the world is like and where everything is in relation to each other, this allows you to get the feeling of actually travelling to these locations, when was the last time we had that? This is pure classic FF imo.

I hope future mainline FF titles and potentially even spin-offs learn from this games design and build upon it, that doesn't mean towers and checklists but instead the actual design of the world and its progression, potentially even having a actual airship in the end of these hypothetical games and instead of towers and checklists we can get optional secrets hidden throught the open world parts, maybe hidden dungeons, boss fights, interesting NPCs that can guide us to other locations, maybe even NPCs in towns talking to each other can give clues to stuff etc, there's so much potential to change and improve upon the checklist style in the open parts of the game.