The saga surrounding the announcement and eventual release of Final Fantasy Remake meant
that receiving code from Square Enix and seeing it on my PS4 homebar was a bit of a surreal
experience. It’s easy to forget that this thing was announced almost half a decade ago
at Sony’s now legendary 2015 E3 press conference, and over those years the news surrounding
it saw fan excitement briefly turn to fury when they found out that this reimagining
of their beloved classic would be released episodically; it saw worry set in as people
wondered whether it would ever actually see release given its turbulent development; involving,
As time went on and very little concrete information
about it came out, the monumental nature of that task—of rebuilding Final Fantasy VII
from the ground up—began to become a little clearer. At points it looked like it was developing
the same kind of mythical quality as the other games revealed at that same press conference.
And then came that demo. Completely atypical of titles suffering major issues during their
creation, this didn’t seem like a troubled project Square wanted to slip under the radar—this
was a fierce show of confidence from a developer resolute in giving fans the experience they
truly wanted. Final Fantasy VII was always something of a cultural touchstone to me,
I recognised its importance, but I never gained the truly die-hard appreciation for it of
my peers. This, on the other hand, had me completely hooked.
As someone who grew up thinking the intro cutscenes of these older titles were the peak
of graphical fidelity in games, seamlessly transitioning from that glorious shot of Midgar,
triumphant orchestral swells and all, right into gameplay that looked as good as what
I had just watched… I have to admit, it totally set off that childlike pang of “holy
moly, you’re saying I can play one of these things now?” The visual fireworks, the technical
prowess dripping from every frame of this thing ws tantalising as I realised I was in
for a delightfully excessive AAA experience and what’s more, that cinematic flare didn’t
get in the way of the battles I encountered here—it actually served to elevate one of
the most exhilerating combat systems I’ve come across in an RPG. Needless to say, all
of this had me super excited—this was set to be my game of the goddamn year.
And now, after thirty hours with the full thing, was that excitement warranted? Honestly?
I… don’t know. Maybe? To talk about this thing in those kind of terms doesn’t really
do justice to how… confused it left me as those credits rolled. Not in terms of following
the narrative (I mean, it seems impossible not to have a cursory knowledge of this stuff
by now) or the broader idea of whether I liked it or not—to be clear there’s plenty I
liked and plenty I didn’t—but the issue is that, even after having played this very
full game to completion, I’m still no more confident in its future; there are still so
many questions fresh in my mind about if we will ever get to play a full Final Fantasy
VII Remake. Because make no mistake, this is a starting
point—one of the most exhaustedly fleshed out starting points one could imagine, but
a starting point nonetheless. Frankly, to call this the Remake with zero qualifiers
attached is absolutely nuts in my opinion. I was aware the game would be episodic but
I don’t think I was ready for just how little of the VII storyline this thing would cover;
events that happen hour one in the original take ten hours to appear here. I’ve seen
people theorise that this would be a trilogy but I really think that’s vastly underestimating
things here. Put it this way—if Square continues this pace, stretching things out; elaborating
on events and scenes and characters the way they do here; to the level of excruciating
technical detail on show, it will be years, potentially spanning multiple console generations
beyond this one, before this Remake is complete. But I’m getting ahead of myself. In more
immediate terms, I know a lot of people are praising the hell out of this game right now
but for me, it was slightly more of a mixed bag; with emotions ranging from “I can’t
believe I get to play this in a game” to “I can’t believe the game is making me
play this.” That intro remains as explosive as ever for sure, but I don’t think it’s
a momentum the game can maintain. Nor would you particularly want it to, mind—a thirty
hour game as full-on as that would become exhausting, but I’m not sure the alternative
on offer here is necessarily preferable. That alternative, while utilising scenarios
and characters people have built up an incredible affection for, still succumbs to a lot of
the design choices people severely disliked about other, less typical Final Fantasies.
Obviously you’ll have that wild initial reaction people have to seeing this stuff
in such glorious fidelity (and I feel the need to reiterate how astounding a technical
feat this game actually is, it might be one of the best looking games I’ve ever played),
but at this stage I’m way more interested to see what fans and newcomers alike actually
think of all of this once that hype settles a little bit.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot to like here. That combat system, my god. For context,
I don’t tend to enjoy turn-based battle systems—I think they can often appear as
silly and plodding as they are tactical, but simply by injecting a little immediacy into
proceedings, Remake solves all of those problems and then some; maintaining a fluid, balletic
quality that rivals the combat of XV, for example—except, you know, you actually get
full control over that ballet. There is a lot to manage at any given moment;
not simply the immediate concerns posed to you and your buddies in terms of attacking,
dodging and blocking, but thanks to the ATB gauge and the ability to switch characters
at any point, your brain is constantly engaged trying to figure out the best path forward.
You might not literally be moving in set turns but you are very often trying to think a few
moves ahead of your opponents. You can’t simply spam healing items like
you could in XV because to do so requires that ATB gauge which also costs you the chance
to unleash a more powerful attack which could very well turn the tide of a battle. Given
how quickly your health can drain, you’re forced to consider whether it’s even a good
idea to heal or simply to maneouvre yourself more effectively to avoid damage in the first
place. These are all tactical decisions you’d make in a turn based scenario, but crucially
they ensure that fights retain the urgency of an actual fight here—a test of your own
skill. If you miss a sword swing, it’s not because
some random dice roll deemed it so—it’s because you didn’t position yourself correctly.
This isn’t a scenario where a hugely tense scene devolves into a bunch of characters
awkwardly standing around waiting for someone to attack—it’s an explosion of flying
swords and fists and bullets, of particles and numbers, all of which you have to very
quickly make sense of and act on. It can feel overwhelming a lot of the time, but this also
means that when you get into a good flow and you successfully manage that chaos… man,
there really is so little like it. Some OG fans may dislike the changes here but for
me, with my aforementioned bias, this is unquestionably a vast improvement on the original. I just
found myself, at multiple points wishing that this system was more of a focus during my
otherwise lengthy, remarkably linear travels. See, for all the agency you’re afforded
during combat, when it comes to the majority of the rest of your time with Remake, you’re,
uh, navigating a lot of straight, narrow corridors. Someone will be walking ahead with you following
very slowly behind. There are instances where your control will last mere seconds between
long cutscenes. Finnicky, lengthy animations mean that minigames, setpieces, hell the act
of pulling a lever or moving through the game’s multiple narrow passageways that Cloud could
totally walk through normally, quickly become tiresome. This is often a technically masterful
AAA experience, but with that does come a lot of the same “follow the dotted line”
mentality that plagues a lot of similarly big budget titles; you know, the idea that
“what we made is more important than what you do within it”. It’s a heavily guided
tour of Final Fantasy VII, but it often feels very much like a look but don’t touch affair.
Not only do these scenarios feel uncomfortably padded at times, they draw some unquestionable
similarities to games like XIII and XV; far more than they do a more traditional Final
Fantasy experience. This is stuff many fans of older Final Fantasies outright hated about
those titles and I am genuinely interested to know how they react to these things—why
it was terrible in those games but fine here—once they actually get their hands on it. You know,
at least XV let you stop the car to go explore if you wanted.
But this is partially why I’m so torn, because even in those long stretches where it felt
like I was watching a particularly slow anime rather than playing a game, it’s not like
I didn’t feel a sense of purpose within that; like there wasn’t method to that madness.
I’ve seen a lot of talk of how alive this world feels
and I get it—these environments that were originally backdrops essentially
are now fully rendered; you can physically interact with them now. But what actually
stuck out to me during my playtime, and where I believe these lengthy corridor crawls actually
contribute to the game’s themes of enviornmentalism, activism and the moral spectrum that encompasses,
is how they force you to fully confront the decay of this world. Any vitality this world
has is completely artificial—the cogs turning to keep this life-sucking machine going, while
everyone else in the world remains in a kind of stasis in the slums below.
The long travels you take force you to witness first hand this desolation that has swept
not only the land, but its denizens. The often panicked NPC dialogue you hear as you run
past these people, whether they’re trying to survive a catastrophe or pick up the pieces
in its aftermath, become so cacophonous at times that it can be hard to focus on the
conversation you’re having with the character ahead of you. These are all people, all with
their own lives, all directly affected by your actions. They all come to different conclusions
about how they should deal with the oppression that befalls them, but they remain paralysed
under it nonetheless; their inability to come to a consensus stopping everyone dead in their
tracks while the corporation keeps on… corporating. Despite the corny nature of both the dialogue
and voice acting, this is how you construct a world with character, even if the walls
guiding your way through it are narrow and distinct.
And you know, despite the original game’s cartoonish demeanour, it’s really that bleakness
that forms a large part of that game’s character in my head—my childhood brain remembers
an industrial sheen awash with bright lights, but it’s also a world defined by its grime,
its decay. The Remake does a fantastic job of capturing this duality, of making you realise
that one is the direct result of the other; even if the line between the more thematically
relevant corridor crawls, and the ones intended purely to pad out the remake’s fractional
story relative to the original can be a blurry one.
But within that story, a lot of the moves the developers made to flesh out the events
covered read as incredibly intentional; they add nuance to these characters (some of which
previously had very little) and the time you get to spend with people like Barret see your
perception of them alter in slight ways over time. His speeches about the righteousness
of your cause come across as brash and melodramatic at the start but there’s a moment where
things change slightly. He’s saying largely the same things, but the gravity of his words
intensifies the more you experience the evils of this world first hand—after everything
you’ve been forced to see, how could you not believe what he’s saying?
That said, a lot of the other ways they stretch the game out go completely against that confidence
I talked about earlier. It’s in things like the crazy backtracking you’re forced to
do through the game’s less remarkable environments, it’s the chapters focused mainly on the
game’s nothingy side quests; it’s in the length of those animations I mentioned previously—all
fat that could be trimmed to streamline this experience, and all contributing to that feeling
that the devs were worried about leaving things on too much of an anti-climax given that there
is so much story left to remake here. And the conclusion that results from that… I
can’t say anything about it, and I won’t but take what you will from the tone of my
voice right now and, again, I’m fascinated to see how fans of the original react to this.
Let’s just say the choices this game makes are incredibly hit and miss.
At the end of the day, I think you can see how torn I am on this weird, weird thing.
I’m kind of astounded that it exists, but I am left wondering who it’s really for.
I guess reviews seem to be proving otherwise but it’s hard for me to imagine fans of
the original, sans hype or anything else, coming away from this complete overhaul in
both story and mechanics thinking “this is 100% what I wanted the remake to be.”
I also imagine newcomers to FFVII looking to see what all the fuss is about are going
to be left pretty confused when they get to the end of this thing and have a whole bunch
of dangling threads that, honestly, we have no idea when or if they will ever be tied
up. I enjoyed my time with Remake all told, it sets the scene well enough, but I can’t
shake that feeling that judging the success of the now released Final Fantasy Remake will
be a process that necessarily continues for many, many years to come.
So I hope you enjoyed this review of Final Fantasy VII Remake. Thank you to Square for
providing press code, and I’d also like to thank my patrons for their support during
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go to Mark B Writing, Artjom Vitsjuk, Lea Chinelo, Constantinos Tsikinis, Henry Milek,
Edward Clayton Andrews, Hibiya Mori, Rob, Bryce Snyder, Tommy Carver Chaplin, David
Bjork, Lucas, Dallas Kean, my dad, Timothy Jones, TheNamlessGuy, Ham Migas, Samuel Pickens,
Shardfire, Ana Pimentel, Justins Holderness and Charlie Yang. And with that, this has
been another episode of Writing on Games. Thank you very much for watching, stay at
home and I will see you all next time.