So... I finished the game last night and posted here saying that I would try to piece my thoughts together on the ending.
As I played the game, I had already theorized that the remake was operating on some kind of "New Game +" timeline from the original game and that Aerith and Sephirot were their PS1 counterparts. The scenes with Sephiroth at the beginning alluding to a reunion would make the player think he's talking about the Nibelheim incident, but when the Whispers started appearing and were always trying to keep the game events as close as possible to the original game, I figured out there was someone/something trying to mess with the timeline.
I thought the foreshadowing with Aerith (her knowing how events would play out, the shady camera shots whenever something suspicious came up and the flashforwards) would lead to the reveal that Sephirot and Aerith came back to the planet at the end of the original game, reincarnating on another timeline thanks to the Lifestream. I thought this would lead to an interesting dynamic between these characters and the rest of the group since Aerith would surely keep stuff hidden from them in order to succeed again in her mission.
Overall, I really liked the game up until Chapter 18. The changes up until that point were all on point with the original game and setting. However... that last chapter was really upsetting. First of all, I want to say that I have no problem with this being a sequel, with the story having big changes and I even supported the project regularly in here whenever people argued about them rewriting the game and ignoring the original. Whoever wants to play the original story can do it by playing the original game, that's fine. The remake needs to be its own thing.
But... the ending was just slapped on this because...? It doesn't flow into the game tone at all, it doesn't follow the same setting and worldbuilding rules from the rest of the game neither. Why are we travelling to another dimension in which Midgar is getting destroyed, buildings floating in the sky, while Aerith is spouting nonsense dialogue that the other characters just ignore, and we get Zack flashbacks with absolutely no relation to what is happening or what Cloud is feeling? Like, they had the perfect moment to tease the Zack/Cloud twist when Hojo mentions it upon meeting Cloud, but they slapped Zack into the ending just because.
Did we really have to raise the stakes like this? The entire Midgar climax was perfect as it was. Did we really need a floating city-enormous monster destroying everything finale? We already got the Jenova fight, the Rufus fight, the two machine bosses... if it was in my hands, I would have ended the game with Sephirot waiting for the group at the end of the highway, and then introducing the alternate timeline twist with actual dialogue between him and Aerith/the group.
It saddens me to say that I can't justify Nomura's choices anymore. I'm a big fan of him, he has built my favorite stories and characters over the course of gaming's stories, but he is really hitting low recently for me. I've grown tired of his narratives. It's evident that he has become a fan of alternate timelines, time travels and multiverse stories, and he's inserting it in his new works. So now we're getting it in every new game of him regardless if it even fits the product he is making. Final Fantasy VII Remake is a case of the director not respecting the work he is making, shoehorning certain ideas and plotpoint just for personal enjoyment?, over making a cohesive body of work with a coherent vision.
And well, if it was the first time he pulled this kind of stuff, I wouldn't be mad. But as I already said, he is one of my favorite creators in this medium. I've followed his career, interested in whichever project he worked on because I knew I would connect with it. But these years have been rough. Really rough. He has become an unfocused creator. He comes up with new ideas, interesting takes on his own creations, but can't commit to what has already been created. The finale of KH's first arc felt like it changed from all the build-up done in the spin-offs to KH3, in which he became more interested in exploring multiverse ideas. And the focus on the Xehanort conflict switched to give more importance to the plot points introduced in Chi. We've already had other cases of Nomura obsessing over a concept and recreating it in every new game (does anyone remember the ensemble cast concept that he pulled up with KH2, Crisis Core, Type-0. (I know he didn't direct it)..?)
I was also starting to fed up with Nomura's objective of trying to make something out of the content he wanted to create for Versus. While Kingdom Hearts is the worst offender out of it and I had assumed VII would reuse some of Versus concepts, I thought Aeris being dead, lingering souls wandering the planet and Rufus challenging Lupus/Ravus Nox Fleuret would be it. Yet we got city destruction setpiece with a gian enemy! Destiny's crossroads! Ghosts guarding up a gate preventing the protagonists to fight against fate!
I don't know. We didn't need this in this game. The finale missed the mark, was over the top and I think its purpose was to create controversy and serve as an another "shock moment! haha" for social media after the internet kept hyping up the "Nomuraaaa" narrative just like what happened with Hideo Kojima. We're now getting incohesive, incoherent stories that rely on shock value related to fanfiction material.
I liked the metacommentary about the fans trying to keep the remake as close as possible as the originals and the characters fighting against it. But in this case I think Nomura forgot include a God character that created the universe and then became uninterested in the world he had created.
...
Man, I've probably sounded harshed that I actually wanted to lol. This must have been discussed too a million times already, since I must be one of the later members finishing the game and we're already on page 280. I would have loved to join the discussion when things started to leak so I could read all of your impressions. Just for the record, for me, VII Remake is still a 9.5/10 game, I think the effort the team put into the project is phenomenal and something that the game industry itself should be thankful of. But yeah, I needed to express my anger at what the game tried to pull at my face during the last hour. I think I will warm up to the ending over these days, though.
Can't wait to hear more about Part 2.
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