﻿When Square Enix remade Final Fantasy VII, they honestly could have handed me a platter of warm
garbage and I would’ve EATEN IT RIGHT UP and said
“THANK YOU SQUARE ENIX, I’m your little baby and I’ll eat what you give me!”
But they didn’t didn’t serve me garbage.
Instead, FFVII Remake is a translation that’s thoughtful and full of effort.
It's like a love letter to this fictional world. And there’s nowhere that’s more evident
than in the architectural redesign of Midgar, FFVII’s terrible and iconic city of energy.
(jazzy, brassy horns triumphantly announcing the title)
They didn’t just polish up the polygons for this remake. They couldn’t! Instead, the team had
to redesign the whole city. And that’s a big dang deal, because we’re spending 40 hours
here, versus the original game’s 4. To understand why the design of Remade Midgar
is so brilliant, we need a refresher on how the city works in the first place. Midgar is split
into sectors on two levels: Affluent neighborhoods sit on a circle of plates above the slums below.
The underclass is a literal underclass. In the center of the city is this massive
skyscraper that belongs to the Shinra Company, home of beloved bad guys everywhere. Shinra
runs the city, employing people, providing power, draining the planet of natural resources.
The fact that their building is the literal central support column of the whole thing?
*CHEF'S KISS*
Bruh.
That's symbolism.
Midgar is a special mix of cultures and technologies and ARCHITECTURE, and it comes
to life in the Remake. Everything we need to know about the city is channeled through the
developers’ use of materials, light, and space.
So! Let’s take a trip to the rotting pizza,
and dig into the juicy details of Midgar’s incredible world design.
The first urban area we see in FFVII Remake is upper Sector 8. This is a business district
with lively theaters, shops, and cafes.
Of course, we arrive there right after our iconic
main characters destroy Mako Reactor 1 and … pelt the city with flaming debris… but other than that,
this is a great place to live!
Sector 8 is a perfect example of something
we’ll see throughout Midgar: a mix of icons from major cities. These design contradictions are
purposeful, environmental director Takako Miyake said. They give the city a familiar
but dreamlike texture — we might recognize the pieces, but they’re combined in unexpected ways.
So you get Art Nouveau kiosks and bus stops that recall Paris, while the bus signs themselves look
exactly like New York City’s.
There are red U.K. telephone booths, sitting next
to USPS mailboxes, which makes me giggle.
There is a main touchstone for this sector though,
and it’s New York City, BAYBEE!! Square Enix shouts out NYC with a mix of two kinds of architecture:
Beaux-Arts and brick apartments.
Beaux-Arts is verrrrrrrry French, but in the
19th and early 20th centuries, architects all over the world — and especially New York — went
nuts for it. Some of the most enduring American Beaux-Arts structures are built in New York City.
One of them is a slender icon that sits on a triangular lot, much like this building
in Sector 8: the Flatiron Building. Beaux-arts has everything: symmetry.
COLUMNS.
PEDIMENTS????
Statues, and statues, and more statues.
ORNATE STONEWORK.
It’s so French.
If Sector 8 were just Beaux-Arts it would be easy to say
[terrible French accent] “hon hon hon, so it is French I guess??”
But you wouldn't... because that would be offensive to your ancestors.
AND ALSO! It's not just Beaux-Arts. because Sector 8 is also full of these brick apartment buildings with iron fire escapes.
Disastrous fires in the 18th and 19th centuries forced New York to revise its building codes to
stop people using wood because, well, —
KIM, THERE’S PEOPLE THAT ARE DYING.
But brick wasn’t the only fire safety effort here. Landlords didn’t want to take
up valuable renting space by building fire-safe interior stairs — I mean, come on!! Who would!?
So they tacked on these now iconic, kind of useless, actually quite dangerous fire escapes
that you see all over the city.
And they're ALL OVER Sector 8 as well.
Despite the grim origins of this design, Sector 8 is a very nice place to live. The
streets are wide and well-lit. There are well-maintained public gathering spaces,
there is seating, there is PIZZA (deep voice echoing: pizza pizza pizza).
And when I say well-lit? I mean...
BOY. THERE IS A TRULY SILLY AMOUNT OF LIGHTING HERE.
The lights in the game are mainly blueish-white, like here in Sector 8,
or green as we've just seen in Mako Reactor 1. That’s not just for mood; FFVII Remake’s
co-director Naoki Hamaguchi says they’re meant to evoke
LEDS, and mercury vapor bulbs. Lampheads out there will know that the
use of LEDs and mercury vapor makes the lighting resemble Japan! Even though Japan is updating its
lighting to LEDs, there are still enough mercury vapor bulbs out there that NASA photos in 2008
show the country tinted green. Here in Sector 8 where the tech is newer, everyone uses LEDs…
but as we'll see in the more run-down areas later, not everyone has the latest lights.
In Midgar, where there’s light… there’s Mako energy.
Even in a fancy area like this, we see pipes and wires everywhere. The architectural design never
lets us forget about the city’s dependence on the planet’s lifestream for energy.
Now that we’ve seen what quality of life looks like on top of the plate, we can really appreciate
the slums below. Shinra is actively making life worse in Sector 7 by expanding the plate,
and blocking out even more sunlight. Sector 7 is a shanty town full of improvised
housing. Shanty towns are built by residents, for residents, and they are constant works in
progress. Additions are made with
scrap metal and anything else someone could carry. Throughout Sector 7 we see buildings
that have corrugated steel panels, or even some that are built on top of unfinished construction.
Sector 7 looks like it was built because people needed a place to live right now.
But in Sector 5, Aerith’s hometown, we see a slum that’s more established.
The buildings here look like they’ve been used, built on top of, and then abandoned, over and over again.
Shanty towns share architectural DNA with their city centers: For example, in Portugal, houses are
sometimes decorated with tiles that keep buildings cool. You can find them in wealthy city centers
and in shanty towns like Cova da Moura. The same is true of Sector 7, and Sector 5. There are a
few stand-out brick buildings, and even a corner of fancy stonework
that links the slums to Sector 8.
but always with handmade additions from cheaper materials. This is a nod to Midgar’s shared space,
that also highlights the lack of support given to the slums. The people here are doing the
best they can with what they’ve got. Houses are generally small, so people
congregate outside. Throughout Sector 7, people are gathering together to watch TV, drink,
and chat under sparking lights. The lighting in Sector 7 is one of the things
that most separates it from the upper sectors. In real cities, lighting is something that makes us feel
happy and safe. That’s why Sector 8 is full of light — but down here, where Shinra doesn’t give a
shit about people, there are huge swathes of darkness on the roads.
By night, the whole sector is tinted green, which reminds us of that older mercury vapor tech.
It also happens to look a lot like Mako energy. And up in the sky, on the underside of the plate, are huge
lamps filling in for the moon and stars. One of the most thoughtful design choices here
is that a lot of the lighting in Sector 7 comes from the residents. To combat the darkness,
the people have put up fairy lights, and neon signs, and they've even lit up broken
car headlights. We have to enter the Sector through this dark, trash-strewn industrial corridor,
but when we come into the main drag… it feels lively and welcoming, because of the light.
(jazzy music swells)
Then there’s Sector 6, the Wall Market.
(orchestral swelling like the beginning of a classic Hollywood movie)
This is Midgar’s down and dirty entertainment district, a feast of night clubs, massage parlors,
gladiatorial arenas, and delicious-looking food that the game won’t let me eat.
Hamaguchi-san said that this area is based on Kabukicho in Shinjuku, Tokyo.
Kabukicho has all the amenities of Wall Market, but without, as far as I know,
an underground combat arena where I can get vored by a magic house.
For the most part these structures have the low profile of buildings created before
Japan’s economic bubble, in the late 80s. When the economy got good — ever so briefly — high
rises went up. But here the buildings here emulate what we would’ve seen
in the post-war era. In particular, this warren of shops and restaurants resembles a
Kabukicho area called Golden Gai, which is a hot spot for coooooozy little bars. It’s one of the
rare Tokyo areas that retains these older-style two-story buildings and narrow streets.
A lot of Wall Market’s buildings are also covered in media. Much like Kabukicho,
it’s a pedestrian-focused area where you walk around, see a sign for something and think
“oh heck yeah, I’ll eat here,”
“I’ll go see that show,”
“oh cool, WEAPON.”
But like Sector 8, the Wall Market is a global melting pot: This white building here is an example
of a false front. Western frontier towns used false fronts to make buildings look grrrrrrrreat!
... from the street. Which is exactly what we have here: a fancy white brick facade for a bank…
where the back half is corrugated scrap metal, just like the other slum buildings! It’s also the perfect visual
metaphor for Wall Market, which looks shiny and magical… but hides a rotting core.
To me there's a sense of a feeling of heightened fakery in the Wall Market. It reminds me of how there’s an
Eiffel Tower and a Venetian canal in Las Vegas. This is a place where people come to live outside
the real world for a bit. These buildings are all competing with each other for customers and
attention. A couple of them really stand out to me: Madame M’s massage parlour is an example of
classic Japanese architecture: it’s got a hip-and-gable roof,
called irimoya, which is a style that originated in China but came to Japan in the 6th century.
Traditionally, buildings like this would be made of dark timber and plaster,
but here it's painted concrete – a material that we know is readily available in the slums.
Gang boss Don Corneo’s headquarters is a massive Chinese-style castle that looms over the rest of
the slum. It’s a maximalist fantasy, with dragons and gold latticework, and a decorative bridge.
When I talked to Doctor Kit Brooks, they pointed out that this area uses space and architecture to
intimidate us from the moment we start to approach the castle. We have to walk uphill towards this
massive structure. And if what we’re used to is this more casual slum environment…
suddenly stepping into this is overwhelming. But this building is as much of a facade as the
bank is: Corneo is a petty bully with an Italian name and a Chinese palace,
who lives on the edge of a perpetual construction zone. He’s the king of nothing.
But between the extravagance of Sector 8 and the shanty towns of the underworld,
there’s an unhappy medium.
The Sector 7 Upper Residential Zone
is a top-side neighborhood where Shinra employees live. This is a run-of-the-mill commuter suburb,
a neighborhood of single-family houses, well-paved streets, and nice sidewalks. It’s hyperfunctional,
inoffensive,
and monotonous.
Co-director Hamaguchi-san said that
for this neighborhood, they looked at real-life residential areas with a
lot of buildings crammed together. Its prefab profiles would be at home in
suburban Japan, and they're just as recognizable to an American like me. It’s Nowhereville.
Upper Sector 7 has none of the structural insecurity we see in the slum below.
But crucially, it's totally lacking warmth. This is the only neighborhood we visit that
isn’t mixed-use, and it’s also the only one where where we don’t see people gathering.
Everyone is cloistered inside their faceless homes. There’s a bulletin board here that in a normal
Japanese suburb would be used to notify people about local elections and trash pick-up, things like that.
On this one we've got uhhhh let's see
a car ad, and some Shinra propaganda. Yay!
There is one very human detail here that I love, though: the sidewalks don’t have curb cuts.
So people have put down wedges in front of their driveways to smooth the transition from the street.
This is one of the details that makes me lose my mind about the environmental design in this
game. LIKE. YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO GO THIS HARD!! You made a whole asset so that I
wouldn’t question whether people were scraping their cars on the sidewalk!?!? This is so cool.
I love this.
Okay, back to the misery: these houses are all made out of brick, or stone, or wood, and everyone’s
space is clearly delineated by walls or fences. Unlike in the slums, where property lines blur,
these people are literally cut off from each other by architecture.
It makes the neighborhood feel lonely. The Shinra building is, of course, the focal point of
everything: it looms over the neighborhood like an octopus, its pipes criss-cross over the
roofs. The roads radiate from it like the spokes of a wheel. These people work for Shinra,
and there’s essentially no barrier between them and the center of their world.
We can follow these roads right to the Shinra Factory,
the heart of the company that’s wrecking the planet and killing thousands of civilians by
literally dropping cities on their heads. We've been running around it the entire
game. As Hamaguchi-san wrote: “That building is so important to the
climax of the game that we wanted it to always be there as a kind of cinematic foreshadowing,
so we designed each area to ensure players always had an eyeline to it.”
The exterior of the Shinra building is totalitarian, Blade Runner-ass metal
all the way up. Its interior is a revelation. It smacks you in the face with its opulence,
because there’s nowhere else in Midgar that looks like this. The only thing that comes
close is Corneo’s palace, but even there — the decor is colorful and messy. It’s the
wealth of someone who covets and hoards it, not someone who simply has it, and embodies it.
The Shinra building employs a lot of floor-based lighting. According to lighting expert Hiroyasu
Shoji, this is a tactic that shopping malls and fancy hotels also employ, because it makes
customers’ jewelry sparkle. But here it also represents the topsy-turvy state Shinra has put the world in:
we’re used to lights coming from above, like Mr. Sun.
But here, in the Shinra Building, light, like power,
comes from below.
When I REALLY think about it,
most of FFVII Remake's gameplay takes place in tunnels and in factories. But those are NOT the parts that I
remember: I remember seeing Wall Market lit up at night, or running into Aerith outside the theater,
or SEEING THESE FREAKING CURB WEDGES, WHAT. I remember the places where people live,
because the architectural design makes them feel cohesive, and distinct, and lived in. There was
a lot of love put into this design and because of that, I love it too. I can’t wait to see what the
next game will look like, please God, let me see the next game. Give me a release date.
I would love to see it, I would die for it, please give me the next game, I want the next game, I would like the next game,
To have it now? I know there's another installment coming in June, that's not enough for me,
it'll be great, I'll love it, I'll play it, I'll probably make another video about it, BUT I want the next GAME,
I want a game, a full game, 40 more hours, 50 more hours of content, the next game, coming to me, on my PlayStation 5,
playable? photo mode? Oh my god? Please! Yes! I would loooooove to play the next GA