Final Fantasy VII represents RPGs when they were basically a different medium from modern games. Rather than voice acting, you had text. Text lets a writer get away with far more difficult lines because readers are extremely generous towards line delivery in their heads (so long as it isn't clunky to read). It was also a time where you had characters using exaggerated miming instead of facial expressions to communicate (far closer to silent movies than anything). And most importantly, music expressed emotion when the other elements could not. Final Fantasy VII's composer explained it best:
"In the era of the Famicom, when there was blocky animation and only three channels to work with for the audio, melody was the only way to add drama to the proceedings. If the melody was emotional, then that would give the scene drama. In the old days, you had no choice but to make use of melody. [...] But now, the graphics in games are very powerful, there are spoken lines, and there is a lot of ambient background noise. If you try to force a melody into a situation where it’s not called for, it is liable to clash with these other elements. It’s better to leave space by simply playing an ambient chord for a whole note, or semibreve." -Nobuo UematsuSo remaking this game as a high budget modern game was basically less of a remake, and more like adapting a book into a movie. A process that fails more often than not, and the high budget studios of Square-Enix have had uneven results at best lately. I had zero confidence in them pulling it off.
Somehow, they did. I would go so far as to say I fell in love with the main cast more in the remake than the original- partially due to the voice cast delivering nuance text has difficulty with (even if the dub as a whole is wildly uneven from line to line), and partially due to taking more time to detail the world. I'm legitimately shocked. Prior to this game, I would have said properly translating a text RPG's story into a new medium to be a near impossible feat. Now I'm like, screw it: just adapt every old Final Fantasy (IV-IX). If they were all at this level, it'd be incredible.
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Nostalgia
I probably haven't played the original Final Fantasy VII since it was released. It was one of the first games I remember actively looking forward to, since Final Fantasy VI was my first RPG and kind of a transformative experience of getting me to retroactively play a lot of other SNES RPGs after it (but not IV which was impossible to find for whatever reason). As if that wasn't enough reason to be excited for it, VII itself was hyped to heck and back with its cutting edge graphics. But when it came time to actually play it, it wasn't the magical experience for me that a whole lot of other people got out of it. Just a pretty good RPG that was really pretty.
I might even say it was a tad disappointing. Magazine previews of the time heavily emphasized things like the Golden Saucer's generous buffet of 7+ minigames, chocobo breeding with ridiculously detailed instructions for getting rare chocobos, numerous super bosses, etc. SNES RPGs definitely dabbled with this kind of thing and getting to The Casino Town was very much my jam at the time (often ending there in cases like Lufia 2's Ancient Cave, which was a roguelike dungeon I played more of than the actual game). But the scale of side activities VII was offering was mind blowing to me. So when the game actually opens with a 4+ hour long linear story hallway that is Midgar, that a whole lot of people call the best part of the game, my response at the time was just: "WHEN DO I GET TO THE CHOCOBO BREEDING?!". Thematically on point with Midgar being a terrible place the party wants to escape from, but a very different experience from others. And when I did get to those promised minigames? Well, their quality is kind of what you expect from a game with so many of them (even if the scale of it all was still overwhelming at the time).
And then there's the after effects of the game being Squaresoft's defining hit that vastly expanded the genre to a wider audience. Three spin off games, constant character cameos in other games, and a sequel movie. Besides all that, the sheer popularity of it means there was a time its fan base was kind of annoying. It's largely forgotten in 2020, but I would argue that Final Fantasy VII was other pillar of popularizing anime in the west, next to its big brother Dragon Ball Z. What I'm saying is there were as many XxSephirothxXs as there were SSJ420Gokus, with everything that implies.
The over saturation of Final Fantasy VII doesn't even stop there, though. When a lot of key staff left after Final Fantasy XI due to the failure of their movie, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, it left a gaping creative hole. Final Fantasy XIII features a female version of VII's protagonist, has freedom fighters briefly fighting against guys with guns, and starts in a mechanical city before moving to the wild natural world (the actual meat of it is way different, but it sure won't stop evoking VII). Even prior to that, VIII doubled down on the new futuristic setting and made the protagonist even more brooding. New entries kept having protagonist names that played off VII's Cloud: Squall, Tidus, Lightning, etc. There are far more compelling parallels than this, but the point is that VII became an inescapable shadow over the series. And that makes it kind of really annoying for a fan that wasn't completely in love with it.
Basically I just spent numerous paragraphs to say in the most long winded fashion possible that I very much was not looking forward to this remake, and I vaguely resent the popularity of the original game. The remake continuing the trend of turning Final Fantasy into an action RPG made it even less appealing. And yet, when the trailers played those recognizable songs I couldn't help but feel a tinge of something for it. When they re-created the iconic opening scenes of the original, I felt a little tug. And when I finally played the demo and found it to be an actually faithful translation of Final Fantasy into an action RPG, I gave it a chance.
When you take all these factors into account, playing Final Fantasy VII Remake was a real rollercoaster ride of emotion for me. At first it was mostly just really surreal that they did, in fact, make a ultra high budget remake after decades of fans harassing them for one. Then it started playing up the game's villain, Sephiroth, far earlier than the original game with really groan worthy lines of dialog, and my heart started to sink that this was just another cash grab written by people with little grasp of the original. Then Cloud hit his stupidly large sword on a door frame in a comical cutscene, and I was suddenly super onboard. Then Aerith shows up, and I was even more on board. Then the funnest sequence in the game happens with breakneck speed, and I was just straight up enjoying it more than I ever did the original. And it just kept going, with several penultimate sequences also getting me real pumped up. I was even down with the ridiculously over-extended version of the original's bike minigame. Then I hit the questionable ending, and I was right back to where I started.
All along this bumpy ride I was constantly having to ask the question: is this genuinely really good, or are they just hitting me with nostalgia? Normally it's pretty easy to separate this kind of feeling, but I really couldn't here- even with my uneasy relationship with the original. This is maybe the most obvious with the music. Remember like a million paragraphs ago when I was talking about how the original game used melody to express emotion, and how that doesn't really work with voice acting? The composers were well aware of this problem, but they were also faced with an iconic soundtrack that they couldn't just throw out. Their solution was to tease the player by having pieces of those memorable melodies play here and there (sometimes with multiple melodies referenced within the same song), before going back to more generic noise. All this teasing often builds up to playing more and more of the melody, before finally violently climaxing into a full blown remix of the original tune with none of the filler. The effect is often incredible, but I wonder how well it plays to someone unfamiliar with the original. This question permeates through everything else, as I often found myself more excited to see the next familiar scene re-created rather than propelled by the narrative itself per se. I still don't have a firm answer.
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Battles
Single Player Party-based Action RPGs are basically a paradox. There are two extremes that games have to avoid: making the AI so good that players don't have much reason to play at all (since there are usually 2-3 more bots than them), or the more common AI being so bad that they're a burden on the player by running into attacks and wasting resources on healing them. It's honestly a nonsensical genre since the AI add nothing to the game, and only really exist to allow for more characters in the story. The absolute best case is that you just end up with some background noise, which is a pathetic standard for a mechanic.
Squaresoft in particular has been pushing this Sisyphean boulder since 1993's Secret of Mana. In that case they were still trying to figure out how to bridge Action and RPG, resulting in an action game where an awful lot of time is spent pausing it in a menu, picking a spell, and then.. doing that some more until MP is an issue. They quickly evolved more towards the hitting things with sticks part of the spectrum, culminating in Kingdom Hearts where spells are more smoothly integrated as a type of attack rather than necessarily pausing the game with a menu (also, everything I just said about Kingdom Hearts is probably wrong because I can't stand to play any of them longer than a few hours).
When it came time to convert a mainline Final Fantasy into an action RPG (because you can't sell more than a few million copies of a turn based game, please pay no attention to Final Fantasy XIII still selling over 8 million despite its mixed critical reception, action will solve all our problems do not question it), this hitting things with sticks approach had completely dominated the genre (the stray Tales game might still let you pick something from a menu, but rarely forced it). Final Fantasy XV was faced with trying to bridge the gap between the stick hitting audience and the existing menu-based enthusiasts, and ended up with a peculiar system of: hold attack, or hold guard. In its fear of alienating the existing audience it committed the most obvious action RPG balancing crime in the world by allowing players to carry double digits of items, with no way for enemies to interrupt using them. The end result kind of sort of worked, but was fundamentally broken. I beat the game by only using a spell like once or twice.
Final Fantasy VII Remake, shockingly, goes all the way back to Secret of Mana's RPG first approach. While games like Mass Effect answered the question of "why not just constantly spam magic?" with unsatisfying cooldown systems, Remake goes for a better solution: using basic attacks charges ATB, and you need ATB to use magic or items. It's a beautiful system for finally harmonizing Action and RPG: you need the Action to charge the RPG, and you need the RPG to deal serious damage. It's also used to solve the classical Action RPG problem of letting
players carry 99 items, because now players need to take some risk to
use those 99 potions (along with a lengthy, easily interrupted animation for using them). It's blindingly obvious in retrospect.
With the RPG piece actually existing, Remake goes wild with translating the original's gimmick heavy approach to battles into the new system. Using a specific element to damage an enemy, using an element to open up an enemy, targeting parts of an enemy, waiting for an enemy to be in vulnerable state before using an element, guarding when an enemy does its big attack, etc- it's all there. The only major critique I have is that the game's analyze system is extremely detailed in describing exactly how most weaknesses work, which kind of indicates a failure to make those weaknesses readable in an intuitive visual way which robs the player of figuring things out on their own since it heavily promotes using the system.
So how does it deal with the classical AI problem? Once again it draws on the RPG side of things by making many enemy attacks impossible to dodge (even going so far as to make the dodge roll have no invincibility frames), instead expecting players to hold the guard button to minimize damage. It ultimately makes it so you have to take some damage like a normal turn based RPG. This coincidentally makes it far easier for the game to have reasonable AI since all it really has to do is guard attacks it knows are coming, rather than having to decide whether or not they have supernatural dodging.
On the offensive side of things it goes for the other side of the spectrum: AI hardly attacks at all. It tries to fix the classic Party-based action RPG problem by flat out forcing the player to have to frequently switch between characters, hence controlling the entire party like a turn based RPG. It's an approach that is so counter to the genre standard that a lot of players interpret it more as a bug than a feature. In a system that is already rife with breaking genre expectations with things like forcing players to take damage, this is the one that people just cannot deal with. You can tell they saw as much in testing, because the game is absolutely dripping with the designers trying to force players into this line of thinking: monsters that grab characters and force the player to pick someone else to free them, bosses that focus the active player and require switching to the other character to go behind them and attack, the ATB system itself promoting "saving up" charges across characters manually and then strategically unloading spells at once, and even the fundamental monster AI system for the entire game basically focus fires the active character after 10-15 seconds of playing- requiring the player to either switch or do something to mitigate the incoming damage. All this, and people still just can't deal with the fact that the game doesn't want them to just play Cloud for the entire game like a normal action RPG. It's depressing. Doubly so because it means the sequel is almost certainly going to give up and become more traditional due to the feedback. It's 2020's version of people complaining about Wind Waker's sailing being too slow. You're wrong, and people like you are why we can't have nice things (Yes, AI standing around doing nothing is immersion breaking, but it's a small price to pay. And yes, exclusively commanding party members via the menu is still technically using them. But it weakens the balance between Action and RPG, and it reduces the strategy of managing ATB and focus fire).
That said, it still feels a bit like a first step. The targeting system is abysmal, especially for flying or fast enemies. The puzzle elements often don't feel especially satisfying with the analyze descriptions reading more like a strategy guide than a hint (but also possibly being necessary because missing cues is more frustrating in an action game, and some enemies have complicated patterns that are more about execution than understanding). The way the damage system works often translates to "if you're good this battle will be over in 5mins, if you're bad it's going to be 25mins" rather than just killing the player for failure which can feel kind of tedious in practice. In general the game feels almost artificially rigged: while I came close to death rather frequently, I rarely actually died since bosses usually go into a slower mode after unleashing their big attacks- giving me plenty of time to get enough ATB to start pumping out recovery. Creates an illusion of death as a possibility, but it's unlikely to actually happen (to be fair if you waltz around with everyone at half health, those high damage attacks absolutely will wipe your party so it isn't completely toothless). These are all fine for a first game, but there are plenty of things to clean up.
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Sinking FeelingSo by all means they achieved two impossible things with this game: successfully adapting a silent RPG, and bridging the gap between RPG and action more successfully than anyone prior. That means, logically, that this game is incredible? And indeed I had a really great time with most of it. It even pulls off humor in ways I never expected Square-Enix to be capable of anymore. But I also have an inescapable sinking feeling about it. You know how some games are really good when they first come out, but a few years later the opinions on them dramatically crater for whatever reason? That when the latest graphics, excitement created by marketing and the zeitgeist, and novelty fade away you realize there was nothing underneath it all? I have that feeling about this game.
Today it's pretty easy to forgive the dopey (but technically ballsy) story additions they made to it when everything else is of shockingly high quality, but I feel like years later they're going to grow into blemishes that ruin it as a whole. If the sequels end up awful due to the groundwork this game sets up, they'll become even bigger sores than they are today. It's also easy to forgive the molasses pacing created by stretching out the original forty hour game into multiple forty hour games, since they use the extra detail in a lot of really good ways. But I feel like the novelty of smoothly integrating party chat into the dungeons is definitely going to fade with time, in the same way as the original's bombastic summons that forced you to watch minute long cutscenes are dreadful today. Honestly I think it already has, since most of these interactions are literal filler that didn't exist in the original story, and I was basically sick of its structure towards the end of the game where it felt like I had been in mostly dungeons for over eight consecutive hours. Same deal with the "being bad just makes combat longer" approach to failure. Right now my nostalgia-addled brain is too busy tripping that they totally nailed re-creating 1/8th of a 1997 RPG, but I'm not so sure it holds up over time.
So should you play Final Fantasy VII Remake? Yeah, almost certainly. Outside of the absurdly lengthy dungeons and a mixed bag ending, this is a damn good video game. Until it ages, anyway.
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Bonus Notes
This is actually my sixth attempt at writing a review for this game. It has a multitude of topics to talk about, but I quickly realized I had very little to say about most of them when going into detail. So let's just summarize them as thoughts instead:
- Final Fantasy VII is a foundational pillar of the spectacle video game, by taking pre-rendered graphics to a much higher budget and total package than its predecesors (Myst, Donkey Kong Country, etc). This makes it a really interesting comparison point to modern spectacle games, that have largely moved on to making the spectacle slightly more interactive and seamless. For example, Uncharted 2 has a sequence where you have to climb up a train that's hanging off a cliff and slowly falling down, but it takes care to still use the existing climbing mechanics from the rest of the game. When the original Final Fantasy VII needed a spectacle sequence, it just threw in a minigame or uninteractive cutscene and called it a day. Remake pretty much ignores all modern standards (outside of tighter pacing) in favor of following the original's style. They certainly could have tried to turn Midgar into an open world where Cloud rides around a motorbike to make such a sequence more natural, but they didn't. And frankly, the older style still works fine today- maybe even refreshingly honest about its spectacle.
- While the SNES entries started the trend, the original Final Fantasy VII was deeply into hiding permanently missable stuff in obscure areas. Want to see a secret cutscene that explains who a character is? Well I guess you should have went back to some random town unprompted and investigated everything twice, sucker. Whether to sell more guides, or to create an aura of infinite mystery is unclear (probably the latter- Japan has a whole fascinating history with Tower of Druaga being a massive hit in arcades even though it was filled entirely with arcane bullshit. But it succeeded because arcade operators would leave guide books for players to write down things they figured out about the game to share with others. It's a gaming cultural missing link that can still be felt to this day with things like Demon's Souls allowing players to leave hint messages to others online). But regardless, VII's position as being many people's first RPG also meant it scarred a whole generation of children into being afraid of missing arcane secrets. Modern games have steered far away from this, so it's pretty interesting to see Remake also discard it by making all hidden items visually hinted at from multiple vantage points, and even opening a menu warning players they're about to miss something at one point. I sure didn't mind not having to stress out about missing things, but it also really does make the world feel smaller and more artificial than the original despite being several times bigger.
- Similarly, the original dabbled in adventure game styled puzzles that required the player to talk to everyone numerous times, find key items to bring to them, etc. with a variety of different final outcomes. The remake jettisons that in favor of being the same "follow the quest pointer" as the rest of the game. This type of streamlining is sort of a mixed bag. While I never really loved Squaresoft's attempts at adventure games, it sometimes helped give things better pacing and variety than simply alternating between following arrows to the next cutscene and battling. The remake takes a reasonable approach, but modern big budget games sure are missing something by streamlining themselves into vapidity (this hurts the sidequests hardest- the modern style falls flat when you don't have strong writing filling the void).
- Looking up at the metal sky from the slums in a real 3d space is one of the things that really justifies this remake. It presents how cool the setting is in a way that the original game's technology simply could not.
- Sometimes when you play a game, you can just feel how much the developers loved making it regardless of the objective quality of the result. Final Fantasy VII Remake gives off an entirely different vibe, of being mostly made by people who just really loved Final Fantasy VII? It's a weird feeling, especially considering even most movie remakes created by fans of the original movie usually go for a different take on the material rather than shot-by-shot recreations.
- (Spoilers about the remake's bigger changes are next, if you care about that kind of thing)
- Despite not actually being a huge Final Fantasy VII fan, this game kind of turned me into one? By which I mean I didn't give a crap whether they made radical changes before it came out (sure whatever make it more interesting if you're going to make this stupid thing instead of Final Fantasy XVI). After actually playing it and finding out the big changes are pretty much universally worse than the adapted or expanded material, I kind of wish they just didn't bother with the changes at all? Some of the ideas are conceptually cool, but the execution is just awful. And even if they were actually done perfectly, I still think playing it straight might have been better? They just adapted the original so damn well.
- While everyone seems to be blaming Tetsuya Nomura for the extremely dumb twist (since he's known for them with Kingdom Hearts), I actually think he was probably more of a figurehead director due to working on the original (especially considering he was also working on Kingdom Hearts III for most of Remake's development). I think the actual person to blame is co-director Motomu Toriyama, mostly known for working on the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy. Everything about the game is stylistically much more up his alley than Nomura's: extreme linearity (but he learned how to disguise it with maps that loop on themselves so fewer people complain about tubes), incredibly pretty progression menus that are also functionally painful, a stagger system ripped straight out of XIII, cutscenes that don't feature stiff robots, etc. And most importantly, the final twist's themes of fighting against fate are incredibly similar to those that ran through XIII and Lightning Returns. It also doesn't, you know, monologue for an hour explaining the exact details. This doesn't really change anything, and maybe the core idea was still Nomura's because he was sick of being harassed to remake the game but hey maybe cut him some slack this time.
- My initial, surface level take of the new ending was just that I hated how unearned it is with the characters magically gaining knowledge of a situation and then instantly resolving it (well that and being a big modern game spectacle of random floating shit, and buildings flying around and exploding and just generally being a dumb spectacle in ways the original was never trying to be which creates a tonally dissonant nightmare). On further thought, by taking the original game's story into consideration, I had to admit that there were at least a few logical ways understand why these specific characters get this knowledge (even if it's totally nonsensical to newcomers).
- Then I started thinking about how the game reads the player's expectations based on the original game. The first time you meet Aerith, it plays a snippet of That Spoiler to wink and say: yeah we know you know what's going to happen. At first I found this to be really clever. But on further thought, I think this is also what really makes the new ending suck. The writers have gone all the way down the modern thought process that knowing spoilers can ruin a work to its logical conclusion: for a remake to be good again, we need to change the spoilers (or imply that we might, anyway). This is, quite frankly, a sick thought process. Stories have value beyond what they can surprise us with. Sometimes they're even more interesting when you know them ahead of time. So for them to do an entire remake around the premise that surprises are the only thing that matter is kind of terrible, and makes me question their judgment on everything else.
- I deeply regret how long this review is. I stopped proof reading it half way through because I am sick of it. Sorry.
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