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BEL2026 Video Game Madness - East Region 2nd Round: 1 Final Fantasy VII Rebirth vs. 8 Slay the Spire
2026 Video Game Madness - East Region 2nd Round
East Region Round of 32 Matchup Preview: 1 Final Fantasy VII Rebirth vs. 8 Slay the Spire
The Most Reviewed Game of 2024 Meets the Game That Invented a Genre
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth survived a closer fight than its seeding suggested it should have.
Its Round of 64 matchup against Hi-Fi Rush went to overtime. The Four First survivor that had shadow-dropped its way into the East bracket, beat Cocoon to earn its shot, and then pushed the 1 seed to extra time before falling 3-2. Rebirth survived, but it did not survive easily, and that matters as the bracket tightens and the games left standing get harder to beat.
The game itself is the second chapter of Square Enix's ambitious multi-part reimagining of one of the most beloved games in history. The first part, Final Fantasy VII Remake, had come out in 2020 and earned an 87 on Metacritic while splitting opinion on how faithfully it honored the source material versus how boldly it departed from it. Rebirth had to answer those questions and then some. It had to be a great game in its own right, a worthy continuation of the new story, and a satisfying expansion of a world that millions of people had carried in their memories for nearly thirty years.
It delivered on all of it. Rebirth scored a 92 on Metacritic and accumulated 151 critic reviews, more than any other game released in 2024. That number matters beyond what it says about quality. It is a measure of reach, of cultural weight, of the degree to which a game commanded the attention of the people whose job it is to pay attention. When 151 critics sit down and write about a game, that game has done something. Rebirth did something.
The game sends Cloud, Tifa, Aerith, Barret, and the rest of the party out of Midgar and into the wider world of Gaia for the first time. What follows is one of the most expansive JRPGs of the modern era, stretching across multiple enormous regions each with its own ecosystems and sidequests and secrets, all of it tied together by a combat system that builds on Remake's hybrid real-time and command-based framework and deepens it in almost every direction.
The story is where Rebirth becomes genuinely remarkable. The original Final Fantasy VII is famous for a moment that shocked an entire generation of players, a moment that no one who experienced it in 1997 has ever forgotten. Rebirth approaches that moment with a complexity and an emotional intelligence that the original, for all its greatness, could not have managed. It honors the memory of what that moment meant while interrogating what it means to retell a story that people have already lived. It is a game about nostalgia and loss and the impossibility of recreating something that only existed once.
All of that is what the 1 seed brings to this matchup. What the 8 seed brings is something entirely different, and in some ways more interesting to think about.
Slay the Spire came out of Early Access in January 2019 from MegaCrit, a two-person studio based in Seattle, and it did something that no deckbuilder before it had quite managed. It made the construction of the deck feel as compelling as the combat itself. You choose one of several characters, each with a unique starting deck and a unique set of cards they can acquire, and attempt to fight your way up a branching map to a final boss at the top of the Spire. Every run is different. Cards are offered randomly from a large pool. Relics that modify your character's abilities appear unexpectedly. The enemies you face and the events you encounter shift with every attempt.
What makes Slay the Spire extraordinary is the depth of the decision-making it demands. Choosing which cards to add, which to ignore, which synergies to pursue and which to abandon based on what the run has offered so far is a puzzle of remarkable sophistication. The game scored an 89 on Metacritic and went on to sell over three million copies, inspiring a wave of deckbuilder roguelikes that continues to this day. Balatro, still alive in this bracket as the East's 2 seed, exists in a direct line of creative influence from Slay the Spire. The genre it helped define generates hundreds of millions in revenue across platforms annually.
For a game made by two people, its cultural and commercial footprint is extraordinary. And the people who love it love it with the particular intensity of players who have spent hundreds of hours inside a system they understand deeply and want other people to understand.
Slay the Spire beat Deep Rock Galactic 3-1 in the Round of 64, a result that confirmed its fanbase is organized and motivated. Deep Rock Galactic is one of the most beloved cooperative games of the era, with one of the most positive gaming communities anywhere online, and Slay the Spire beat it by two votes. That is not luck. That is a fanbase that came to this tournament with intentions.
The gap between these two games in terms of mainstream name recognition is real and significant. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is one of the most recognized franchise names in gaming. Slay the Spire is beloved by people who play a specific kind of game with a specific kind of patience. That gap may prove decisive. But gaps have been closing throughout this tournament, and the Round of 32 is where surprises stop being surprises and start being patterns.
The East bracket continues March 22. 12PM.
