FFVII Remake: The Sequel No One Asked For
It's been 3 days since I finished Final Fantasy VII: Remake. I've been unpacking a lot of thoughts. I was always very skeptical of the remake since it's reveal for a myriad of reasons:
1. Switching the combat from turn based to real time after the horror that was FFXV
2. Chopping the game into pieces
3. Making changes to the story.
4. Fear of padding the game up with useless fluff and crappy modern fetch quests.
5. Fear of Nomura Nomuraing things up.
Having finished the game, some of my fears were clearly warranted (awful side quests, padding, Nomura), others turned out to be my favorite decisions the team made (action based combat, so goooood). At the end of the day, the state of Final Fantasy VII Remake has left me confused as to if I loved it or hated it, and honestly, it's complicated. Can it be both?
Bait and Switch
Let's get this out of the way right off the bat: FFVII Remake is NOT a remake, it's a straight up sequel. Perhaps "Redo" would be a more apropos term? Quite frankly this game is the biggest bait and switch we've had in a AAA game since Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty introduced us to Raiden.
Viewed as a sequel, I FUCKING LOVE THIS GAME.
It's one of the best things to come out of SquareEnix in years. Viewed as a REMAKE of one of the most beloved games of all time however, it fails on every level and I hate it with a passion.
Here's the problem: we were sold a remake, but got a sequel.
The lore of FFVII Remake rests firmly on the shoulders of FFVII so much so, that I feel bad for newcomers to the game. There's SO MUCH that goes on in the final chapters of the game that is directly reliant on knowledge of FFVII to understand the stakes going on. Nomura and crew seem to have designed the game explicitly for veteran FFVII players who know and understand the stakes from having played FFVII to its completion at the expense of new players hoping FFVII Remake IS the definitive experience of Final Fantasy VII, which it's not.
Having played through the original FFVII recently, I can confidently say FFVII is the first and largest barrier to entry to the new player. The 1997 original FFVII is a VERY flawed piece of media in 2020. Hell, the original FFVII was already a flawed piece of media just 5 years after its original release: the art styles featured within the game were schizophrenic at best, the translation was subpar, and some of the scenes have aged like fine mayonnaise … that's been left out in the sun…for a week. I'm looking at you "fun snowboarding minigame after you just buried your girlfriend scene.
An Alternate Dimension
Let's go back in time to 2014. Final Fantasy VII Remake has not been announced. We're at the Playstation Experience. Final Fantasy Brand Manager, Shinji Hashimoto, comes out and announces: "FINAL FANTASY VII Remastered" is coming to Playstation in 2015!
Final Fantasy Remastered is THE DEFINITIVE version of Final Fantasy VII:
· It looks NOTHING like Advent Children (nothing against Advent Children, I love it)
· It features a completely redone translation with no voice acting.
· Static 2D backgrounds remastered and now presented in HD widescreen format.
· Turn based combat with updated graphics. (on the level of say Trials of Mana)
· A complete redo of the chibi character models that now more closely match the chibi character design art.
· All the art style is now coherent.
· Remade cinematics that look closer in quality to FFXI.
· The entire game is made for a very modest budget compared to FFVII Remake
"Well," you think, "This isn't exactly what I expected given how cool the PS3 FFVII tech demo was back in 2005, but this is pretty great! The art style is no longer schizophrenic, the translation is good, and I don't have to juggle 800 mods on the PC to get a decent looking game. It doesn't look like Advent Children, but it's a hell of a lot better than playing 1997 PSOne FFVII now with characters consisting of 8 polygons…"
Then, in 2018, at Sony's E3 Press Conference, Square Enix unveils Final Fantasy VII: Whispered Destiny. It's the Final Fantasy VII Remake we got in this dimension, and instead of being divisive, everyone is completely on board with Kitase and Nomura enlisting the player to help Cloud and company fight fate.
You Were the Bad Guy All Along
Obviously what I've presented is not the time line we're in, and we have FFVII Remake and its ending, which is divisive to say the least, and I believe the ending is divisive not because long time fans couldn't go along with it, but rather because Nomura not so subtly frames the players who have been asking for a proper Final Fantasy VII remake that has all the same story beats they loved in 1997 with a shiny new paint job as the bad guy.
This Whispers in FFVII, the ghost looking knock off Harry Potter dementors that constantly accost the characters in FFVII Remake any time they attempt to go off script, are the manifestation of the player base who wanted the story to stay the same as the original game. Nomura and company frame these Whispers as "the bad guy" and enlist you the player's help to destroy them. You become complicit in the action, killing fate and subconsciously granting Normura the ability to do whatever he wants with the rest of the Final Fantasy VII story.
ANYTHING IS UP FOR GRABS!
· Zack's not dead and joins the party!
· Aerith doesn't have to die!
· Cid doesn't have to be a wife beater!
· Jessie and Cloud can have their date!
· Cait Sith can be ejected from the game's lore completely!
· Vincent's Limit Breaks don't suck!
· Sephiroth could win!
· Sephiroth could win??
And that's the point. Nomura and Kitase want long time players to have a new experience, to not know what's going to happen next. And I can appreciate that. I can. I'm actually pretty excited to see what happens next now that there are stakes again…
But at the end of the day, many players, myself included, are still missing that Final Fantasy VII Remake we've been begging SquareEnix to make for years for all the reasons I've listed multiple times now (but mostly the God awful schizophrenic art style shifts). Also, I wish they would have been upfront with me about the Remake and not subverted my expectations by calling it "Remake". I still would have bought it, but instead of being frustrated every time they deviated from the story, I could have enjoyed it. (My post history on ResetEra should tell you that I really disliked the game as I was playing it).
Required Reading Never Looked so Shitty
In retrospect, numbered Final Fantasy games not actually being sequels was one of the smartest design decisions ever. Videogames have a tendency to age incredibly poorly. Some games like Super Mario Bros. are timeless, but many others just don't age well for a myriad of reasons we won't get into here. So when a new Final Fantasy game comes out, you can generally just ignore the previous numbered game, because the new one is its own self-contained game.
But that isn't the case with FFVII Remake. As stated earlier, it's clearly a sequel. A sequel with "required reading". One advantage movies have to games with overarching narratives is that they're short and can be consumed in very little time. If everyone was jazzed to see Star Wars IX and you didn't see I through VIII, no big deal, you can catch up pretty quickly. Not the case with videogames which can span from 6 to 50+ hours for one entry in a series.
Another advantage movies have over games is that they tend to still be very watchable many many years later. I can show Star Wars from 1977 to a newcomer today and they'd probably come away liking it very much. I don't know that I can say the same for Final Fantasy VII. I can personally still enjoy it because I have nostalgia for it, but what would a new player born after the year 2000 seeing the original game think?
Now that the original FFVII is required viewing to properly understand FFVII Remake, will newcomers pick it up and play it in its current state? I would suggest not.
There's gambling on the part of SquareEnix here. FFVII Remake sold like gangbusters based because everyone expected it was a proper remake of FFVII, not a sequel. But how will Part II do? Will newcomers to FFVII stick with the game and move on to Part 2 having been left out of loop on the ending, or will they drop the series completely, not understanding WHY FFVII was a big deal in the first place? Will newcomers go "huh, that was weird" and buy/playthrough the original FFVII to get the context required by the ending to FFVII Remake? I don't know, but damn don't you think it'd be great if we had a proper FFVII Remastered edition for people to buy that would lower the barrier to entry? I do.
Have I not talked the Good Stuff yet?
There's of course more to FFVII Remake than the meta context of the story, and honestly, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the gameplay. I have some minor quibbles about party members basically standing around when you're not directly controlling them; seriously the number of times I would swap to Barrett and he's literally pointing away from the only enemy we're fighting were quite frustrating, but it didn't take away from the fact that the combat in FFVII Remake is good. Really good.
Am I grading it on a curve? Maybe.
I mean, the combat in FFVII Remake no Dark Souls or Devil May Cry, but it's a HUGE step forward from FFXV's combat situation where you only get to control one character, there's no magic to speak of (the magic item things don't count), and the camera actively got in your way. The combat in FFVII Remake is a really nice call back to the original FFVII, and the materia system was brought over intact, so props to Kitase and team. This was the one area I expected the team to turn in another FFXV or Kingdom Hearts and they didn't.
I would definitely like some quality of life improvements for FFVII Remake Part 2 though. There's a severe lack of "All" materia ("Magnify" in this game) that lets you target all your party or all enemies in the fight. And that's fine, I was okay with that limitation. But I wish there was a way to re-assign materia during the fight. There were a lot of instances where I'd get into a boss battle and analyze the boss and deal with its tactics for a bit and realize I had the wrong materia equipped to properly deal with the situation which would lead to a death and a lengthy loading screen. This was probably an issue on my first FFVII playthrough as well, but that was back in 1997 and I was 16, so who knows. Anyway, I think it'd be great if you could say spend 2 AP bars to get to a menu to swap materia.
There was much said about "air combat" being crappy in this game, and while I agree, it honestly didn't bother me too much in the long run, especially if I had Barrett in my party. For the sequel, I think it'd be cool if you could swap in and out characters on the fly as well. Make that cost AP too. "Crap a flying enemy, let me swap Tifa out for Barrett so I can shoot them out of the sky.
Because that's another thing the game did really well: making the 5 playable characters play very differently. In the original FFVII the characters basically all played the same, afterall, it was turn based combat, you directed them to attack, defend, use magic or items, and a skill here or there provided by materia and that was basically the end of it. The fact that Tifa has this crazy combo system, and Barrett is a walking turret and Aerith is a glass canon was really well executed. I very much loved how they gave Aerith a standard magical attack instead of having her smack things with her staff.
Let's Get Textural
Are there some issues with textures in FFVII being less than optimal. Yes. In my 40 hours of playing through the game did it hamper my experience? No, not really. There's a lot in FFVII to hate on. A LOT. But I really don't believe the graphics is one of them. The main cast of characters are some of the best looking characters in any game with realistic looking clothing and very expressive eyes and mouths. The set pieces are really good, and yes there's a LOT of copy and pasting going on with some of the environments, but that's not the graphic designer's fault. That's a different problem…
This Padding isn't so Fetching
Final Fantasy VII Remake is not a well-paced game. Its 40+ hour length seeks to be a value proposition since you're not getting the "full fat" FFVII experience, only the first 1/3rd of the first disc of the original game's content, but it only gets to this lengthy runtime through padding the game out with some of the most egregious time wasters I've ever seen in a game.
Maybe you're expecting me to mention the numerous fetch quests or squeezing through narrow gaps to conceal loading times as the worst offenders, and yeah they're pretty bad, but plenty of people have already talked about those. Yes, they're bad and I could have done with less of the standard JRPG trope sidequests to help a kid find her dumb cats but no…
No, the worst bits of padding in this game are the seconds the game adds onto top of just about everything. So much of this game forces Cloud to slowly walk. For no reason. In many cases it's in areas where we're not moving from place to place, so no loading should be going on, and yet, Cloud is forced to walk at a snail's pace, for no reason. The other bits of padding are also switches, levers, and buttons.
Why does Cloud have to sit and think about pressing a button, flipping a switch or pulling a lever? Every time, you sit and hold the triangle button for an agonizingly long time while Cloud just sits there with his hand on the lever…. Till…eventually… finally… any day now…. He just nonchalantly flips it.
It's like the game bleeds you small chunks of time to artificially pad the game. Oh sure, individually each time you have to pause to flip a switch or push a button, it's a few seconds… but added all together, I think my total time in game standing at a switch waiting for Cloud to decide to press it was about 5 hours.
I think this game would have worked a LOT better as a more streamlined 25 hour experience. I really enjoyed some of the expanded storytelling, like in Chapter 4 getting to go to the upper plate with Jessie, or the entirety of Wall Market's chapter, but a lot of the "mercenary work" and non-optional dungeons the game forces Cloud to do were just an absolute chore, slowed the story down for no reason at all, and felt artificially bolted on. The secret Shinra lab beneath Sector 7 was just about the worst thing in a Final Fantasy VII product since Genesis.
Musical Motifs a Barely Skip a Beat
I think the final thing I want to touch on is the music. Final Fantasy VII's OST is probably one of my personal favorites in all of gaming and the remake does a lot of the music justice in fully orchestrating it. The number of different renditions of the battle and boss theme had me grinning from ear to ear. Some of the new music has even made it into my rotation of whistled tunes…as much as I dislike the Whispers as concept in the game, the theme that plays whenever they show up has burrowed itself into my brain. But the opening section of the Mako reactor just doesn't have the same feel to it as the original, and I'm really upset they changed the music that plays in the Wall Market to this really upbeat tempo thing that gives me vibes like I'm in Las Vegas or something. The original theme made Wall Market feel like a nasty, dirty place where you don't want to touch anything for fear of contracting some disease, and that feels more on point for life beneath the plate.
So with only two disappointments in 40 hours of gameplay, overall, the music is really good and worked for me personally
Hey Nephtes, Why Don't You Shut Up Already?
Well it appears I've gone and done it again…3000 words for a forum post that I doubt anyone will actually take the time to read, but whatever…
My takeaway:
Final Fantasy VII Remake is a flawed product that was sold as an Final Fantasy VII experience for everyone newcomer and veteran alike, but is actually a sequel crafted explicitly to returning fans with little regard for newcomers. It's competent gameplay, mostly gorgeous graphics, good voice acting, fun characters, and superb musical score cannot help FFVII Remake escape the orbit of everything holding it back: awful pacing, some of the worst padding in a game ever, a story only accessible to longtime fans, and the extra baggage of SquareEnix still 23 years later not giving fans a coherent version of the original story told in Final Fantasy VII married to a consistent art style and turn based gameplay.