Square Enix tried really hard to make Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth's mako vacuuming minigame more enjoyable than the painfully tedious practice in masochism that it is by all measures. In fact, it was originally a lot worse.
Fortunately, and very light spoilers here, you only have to do it a couple of times in the early part of the game before you leave Midgar, but the sequences where you're forced to lumber around with an unwieldy giant vacuum and suck up mako gas are the only times I earnestly considered throwing in the towel entirely.
Granted, I have the attention span of caffeinated Chocobo, but a quick Google search proves I'm far from the only one who would rather vacuum out the wilted Taco Bell lettuce from under the seat of my car on a hot Summer day in Phoenix, Arizona than spend another agonizing minute sucking up mako gas in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.
- The Making of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth: "I thought: if we just reproduce the original game with no changes, it will feel nostalgic, but not exciting"
- During the original Final Fantasy 7's development, the devs considered Tetsuya Nomura "the Demon King of retakes" - "He was always making the designers re-do things"
Naturally, the developers who very intentionally added this to the game don't see it the same way, bless their hearts. In a Square Enix news article, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi said the minigame is designed to turn mako into a more tangible thing that players can actually interact with.
"By letting players suck up the gas themselves, it directly shows what kind of substance mako is and what Shinra is like," he said. "It throws them into the world much deeper than if we just told them about it because they get to touch and experience it themselves."
Not content with letting a necessary piece of worldbuilding feel mechanically boring - they'd never - the developers spent plenty of time testing out the feature to make sure it didn't elicit the exact reaction it has.
"We put in a lot of work to make the act of sucking up the gas feel satisfying," Hamaguchi added. "We had lots of different tests in terms of the visual effects, the sound, the level of vibration and so on. It took a lot of polishing in order to get right."
I've obviously been exaggerating what is actually just a mildly cumbersome minigame that appears precisely twice in the beginning of the game, but as it turns out, there was once a version of the game where it was a lot worse. Hot damn, it sounds like it was a bonafide mako sucking bonanza in there!
"In fact, this section originally had a lot more gas coming out than the final game," Hamaguchi said. "There were six points on the ground that you had to clean up - and it was this way for most of development. Then, about two weeks from final master, I was looking at it and thought, 'it might be stressful if the player had to such up so many,' so I knocked it down to three!"
Knowing now that the situation could've been a lot worse, I'd just like to now say: Thank you, Hamaguchi and the rest of the Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth development team. Thank you for your mercy.
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