Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has a reference that’s such a deepcut not even its devs get it

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is full of easter eggs and references, but there’s one in particular that its devs included despite not knowing its origin.

Some very light spoilers for the game ahead!

When you, Cloud, and co eventually find yourselves in Corel Prison, there’s a well you can go down where you can fight various enemies in a tournament-style battle, similar to the Corneo Colosseum Battle in the first game. You don’t technically have to visit it, though there is one questline where you can get an item you need to progress. If you do so, or just visit it later, you can fight a mutated dog enemy called Test 0, which does appear in the original game. However, by original, I mean very original – it could only spawn in the first print of Japanese copies of Final Fantasy 7. It wouldn’t even attack you, and it had a very low spawn rate anyway, making it overall a bit of a mystery.

Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi recently sat down with Easy Allies, where he touched on the Easter egg, sharing that it’s there for those who remembered the fight from the original – even though both he and other members of the team don’t actually know why it was there in the first place.

“I don’t know exactly if it was a bug or something of like an Easter egg that was kind of snuck in there from people who worked on the original, but out of our team there was nobody that actually worked on the original Test 0, so we don’t quite know what the original intention of it is,” Hamaguchi said. “But, I thought that people who know the original would remember this, and so I definitely wanted to incorporate it into Rebirth.”

It’s cool to know the origin of this particular enemy, I honestly thought it was just an enemy that had been stolen by Shinra that just had the name Test 0, which felt like it made sense in canon (and still does if you ask me). Knowing it’s such a deepcut, though, highlights just how much has been put into this game – and really proves why most other remakes are pointless.