Many Thoughts On – FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE

Lets Mosey!

I like this game, I think I might love it? I dunno, I’m not entirely certain how to put this one into words. This game has easily been my most anticipated for the past 5 years, it had a mountain of expectations to live up to. So did it? Yes it did….. and no it didn’t.

Before we begin with the thoughts on this game, let me take you back through my history with the original Final Fantasy VII and the lead up to this new one. The year is circa 1999 or 2001 thereabouts, I was around 4 to 6-years old when I first played the game down in my cousin’s house. To be honest I don’t really remember much of it, I recall escaping the Shinra building, Tifa taking over the party later in the game, and that part in the Temple of the Ancients where you have to catch that wizard looking dude with like the 8 holes in the walls. very odd moment to remember I know.

I was very young I didn’t really have the patience for it at the time, it wasn’t until after I have beaten Paper Mario and the Thousand-year door that I fell in love with RPG’s. So fast forward to when the game was released digitally on the PlayStation 3 (I think it was around 2010 so 10 years ago now). It was during this play-through that I really fell into it, I loved the music, the characters and the world itself, it was all amazing. It was so good that it made it to the second place spot on my favourite games of all time list, being beaten out by only Persona 4.

So fast forward now to E3 2015 at the Sony PlayStation Press Conference, the presentation of dreams as I call it. It was here that the remake of Final Fantasy VII was announced, along with Shenmue III and The Last Guardian, two other extremely long sought after games. Now all three of these titles have been released over the course of the past 5 years, Final Fantasy VII Remake being the last of these. So here we are in the now, I have plenty to say about this game, so enough with the introductions and the history let’s get into what I thought about this new Final Fantasy VII. I’ll start by talking about the gameplay and the technical aspects of the game and then later will move into the story, events and the heavy spoilers.

GAMEPLAY

The game plays like a dream, well for the most part anyway, the combat is fun, fast and fluid but walking around non-combat areas can feel little clunky, there are a lot of “load” bearing alleyways and some difficulties making the talk prompt appear on NPCs on occasion. More on this later.

Lets get into the good stuff first, the combat. It’s simple, yet it has a lot of depth once you really get into it. Combat works via the ATB (Active Time Battle) System, so you have a few buttons; square will swing clouds sword, Triangle will have him use his character specific ability and the the X button will open the command menu to use ATB, while hitting enemies a blue bar will fill, It has two notches and when one fills it will allow you to use an ability, a spell or an item in the menu.

Let’s talk Tifa for example, she is a physical fighter, tapping square will unleash a flurry of punches, holding it will cause her to wind up a powerful uppercut. Triangle will also do this uppercut unless you use her ATB special ability “Unbridled Strength”, this will add more punches to her tap the button flurry and well as change the Triangle attack to “omnistrike” a much stronger stinger style punch. You can do this a second time to get even stronger attacks. Pair this with some combat Materia, and you have a recipe for one hell of a satisfying combo heavy fighter.

Moving on, lets talk about Materia; They work identically as the original game, they are equipped to your weapons and Armour to give you spells and other enhancements. There are some new Materia in this game, such as Deadly Dodge, which causes a counterattack to pop off after a dodge, fantastic on Tifa.

She is easily my favourite character to play, fast and powerful. Cloud is also good fun, more of a powerhouse but slower. Then you have Barret, entirely ranged, good for defence and when you need to take a breather after going in with the other two. Lastly you have Aerith, same as Barret but more of healer than a tank, she is my least favourite to play but even then is still pretty fun. When the combat is challenging it really shines, a full party of three in a boss fight is one of the games highest highs, like the Air Buster fight or even the final boss. There is a combat arena in the game so there is ample opportunity to flex your combat skills.

Okay now lets talk about the rest of the game, first off; exploration. It’s very linear, almost FF13 levels of linear, but in this game there are more than just corridors. There are small towns to explore as well as a more circuit style design to the dungeons and paths. For the most part I enjoyed the design of these places, but I think a dungeon on the under-plate on the way to Mako Reactor Number 5 is a real low point of the game, it’s just really boring.

The towns are well designed and have plenty of cool little areas, but there is little to do in them. There is a Dart board in Tifa’s bar, but I played it twice got the highest score possible and then never played it again, it’s the only dart board in the game too. Shops pretty much sell the same items and only the first has any personality to it. The game will gate you from exploring these areas, until the game says “hey lets kill some time” which can get annoying when there is an item you can see that the game won’t let you get right away.

There is a little thing I have to nitpick, the game will slow you down to a walk at certain points which is fine, what is not fine however is when this happens talking to characters becomes little annoying as you need to wait until the talk prompt appears and if you walk to far the prompt will not appear and it can take up to two years to turn around walk away and re-walk back to make the prompt appear… Okay that is an exaggeration but you get the idea.

There are a handful of mini-games, the Darts mentioned above being one, another being Squats and pull-ups (the last of which is the ONLY difficult one). None of them are really that in-depth, and only act as small five minute distractions, I beat 90% of them to the highest possible level on the first try, I just wish they had a little more to them so I could play them more. The most enjoyable one is the Colosseum mentioned earlier.

The game is beautiful, it has astonishing art and world design. A very powerful moment using only visual elements comes early on. You wake up in Clouds apartment and head outside, the light fills the screen and fades down to see the giant metal Sky Pizza and it looks unbelievably pretty it’s the best rusted metal has ever looked. That said, there appears to he a few texture issues, some popping in late and some not popping in at all, its either a bug or limitations of the outgoing hardware. Not the end of the world, but something notable.

Now lets talk about the best part of the game, the music. It is phenomenal, my god it’s sex for the ears. All of these classic tunes remastered are so well done, I am in love with this soundtrack. Not much to say other than listen to this godlike sequence of noises.

WARNING; Be wary of spoilers in the related videos.

I don’t think there is a song on this soundtrack I don’t like, let me put it this way, it’s good enough for me to keep a close eye on when tickets go on sale for the live orchestra show for the game.

STORY

Okay how do I go about tackling this subject… let’s just jump into IT!

This is not a remake, this is either Final Fantasy VII re-imagined, or it’s a secret sequel. Either way it is a big lie on the front of that box, and I was upset when I beat the game. I did not buy the this to play a game that I needed prior knowledge of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core AND Advent Children to enjoy to the fullest. Regardless if I had this knowledge, the idea of a Remake is to tell a story to a new generation of people and for the older generation to re-experience the adventure, not to change it so the new audience has no idea what is going on and for the older audience to go “this is not the game I remember.”

But I suppose I should actually start at the beginning I just needed to get that out of my system. The game does actually follow the early events of Final Fantasy VII pretty faithfully, with a few added extras throughout, that is until the very end of the game were it decides it doesn’t want to be a remake anymore, but we will get back to that.

The game opens on the Bombing Run and it goes off exactly how it did in the original, then comes the first “expansion” to the story. Walking through the streets of Midgar after the bomb goes off, and there’s mass panic in the streets because the explosion was a lot larger than it was expected to be. This has caused a massive amount of destruction in the city to the point where it needs to be evacuated. This is a fantastic addition, really adds a sense of weight to what you as an eco terrorist group (Avalanche) are doing.

The first large deviation from the main story comes after the first bombing mission when Jessie asks you to go on a mission to the upper plate to get materials from a Shinra warehouse, you are joined by Biggs and Wedge and they assume Jessie wants to go see her parents. While they are enjoying what is apparently a lovely pizza, Cloud is tasked with sneaking through the back to steal a key card to the Warehouse. Jessie’s father works for Shinra but has fallen into a coma after passing out in a highly Mako toxic area of his workplace.

Going into that room to steal that key card does a hell of a lot for Jessie’s character, first of all you learn her second name Raspberry. Second you learn that Jessie was an actress at the Golden Saucer, but had the back out as a lead from a show last minute due to her father’s illness which led to her joining Avalanche. I find this to be a perfect example of the expansion of character development in this game compared to the original Final Fantasy VII. this goes not for just Jessie but Biggs and Wedge too. Even the main party get more to them, these character moments are easily my favourite addition to the story.

let’s focus on Jessie for now, I think she’s the one who has benefited the most out of having this expanded story. Biggs and Wedge also have much bigger and better rolls but I think Jessie gets the most of it. In the original Game she had probably what amounted to about 25 lines of dialogue. In this game she has an entire story arc, blowing up the reactor to feeling guilty about it causing as much damage as it did, so she has you go to the top plate to get a weaker blasting agent so the same incident doesn’t happen again. Right up until she uses an explosive to take out a helicopter and then dies from it (maybe?)….. She is also REALLY Thirsty for Cloud throughout all of this.

It’s just really nice to have well done meaningful additions to these characters who are already very well written to make them feel even more real… kind of, that old translation is pretty dodgy at times.

Okay let’s talk about THEM. Just before the chapter I just mentioned, Barrett tells Cloud that he is off of the team on the next bombing mission. Then after that chapter, once you’re back in the sector 7 slums, you go to bed and then you wake up to a bunch of weird as ghosts terrorising the slums. They had previously shown up when you first meet Aerith in Sector 8, but I waited till now to bring them up. These things show up every time the story deviates from the original game, in this case Cloud not going on the bombing mission. The ghosts Injure Jessie to the point of her not being able go on this mission, so that Cloud needs to go instead, putting the game back on course.

These ghosts show up at numerous points throughout the game to make sure everything goes smoothly and as it should. These things are another reason why the game should not be called a remake as they are literally beings trying to keep this game on the timeline of the original. Even these things just existing gives massive implications of what Square are actually trying to do with this project because it’s certainly is not a remake.

Anyway back to the plot, it goes as normal for a while, you do the second bombing run and it goes awry and you fall and meet Aerith. Then you touch her hand and you have a flash forward of her death, it was around this time I figured out what was going on, that and then a few moments later Aerith nearly falls off of a balcony but one of those ghosts save her, it became very obvious to me that this was not going to be a remake. Alright that is enough about these ghosts for now, I will speak more about them at the end though.

After this the story goes on as normal right up until you reach Wall Market, while it plays out the same it is greatly expanded. there a bunch of new characters in this area, one example being Chocobo Sam, he’s basically a cowboy taxi service but he’s also one of the big three of Wall market. In the original game this was the famous cross-dressing scene in which Cloud and Aerith need to sneak into the mansion of a man called Don Corneo to rescue Tifa from his evil lust filled clutches.

In this game though that cross-dressing sequence is expanded exponentially, first to get into the mansion Cloud and Aerith need a recommendation from these big three, Tifa had the recommendation of Chocobo Sam, so Cloud and Aerith need to get recommendations from the other two members of this big three. These other two members are both interesting new characters in their own right. First up being Andrea Rhodea the owner and lead performer at the Honeybee Inn, in the original game it was just a Brothel and in this game it appears to be a Cabaret Club that is also a Brothel.

Andrea decides to back Cloud by giving him a dress and a full makeover on stage, as well as having a dance off. it’s by far the best moment in the game it comes completely out of left field and I love it, I was truly not prepared for it. Cloud catches Andrea’s eye after Clouds performance in the Battle arena, that in itself is a fantastic sequence and has the fan favourite enemy Hell House show up. The reason cloud is performing in the Battle arena is to earn the One Hundred Thousand Gil prize to buy a dress for Aerith from the third member of the big three, Madam M.

The Madam is my personal favourite of the new characters. She is the owner of a hand massage parlour and she’s the one who gives Aerith her makeover. She’s very bi-polar, can be calm one minute and extremely agitated the next. It’s just an interesting character trait to throw on a small time character like this. Made for a good moment, and there is there is the hand massage scene, wow.

There handful of other good new characters as well. There is Roache, who is a member of SOLDIER and kind of nuts, he’s basically a lame Dante from Devil May Cry and that kind of works. Then there is Johnny (well he is in the original but he’s greatly expanded upon, basically a different character) who is a “friend” Of Tifa who Cloud runs out of town but sticks around for most of the game, he sucks… But in a good way ya’know?

Alright let’s move on, I’m not going to describe every event from here on but I suppose a choice mention would be that Wedge survives the plate falling and then maybe dies later in Shinra tower thanks to those ghosts, not sure what’s going on there right now to be honest.

So other than this and the fact that the ghosts appear throughout the game to make sure everything is on track, the game plays out almost as it did back then. Right up until you reach President Shinra’s office, you enter the endgame and it’s all different from there. In the original you arrived at the office and president Shinra had been stabbed in the back by a giant blade owned by Sephiroth.

In this version there is a hole in the window and the president is hanging off the edge of the helipad, Barret pulls the President back up and takes him back inside, the President then pulls a gun out from under his desk, shockingly he is stabbed in the back by Sephiroth. Barret is extremely annoyed about all of this, he walks right up to Sephiroth but is then also stabbed through the chest. Barrett is killed, that is until the ghosts fly in and heal the wound. Meanwhile the party have a brand new fight with Jenova. After the battle Barret awakens, the story continues as normal for a bit right up until they get to the end of the Midgar expressway. After they have beaten the original final boss of this sequence, Sephiroth reappears and walks through a portal.

Okay, I’m going to go off what my understanding for this next bit is because it is pretty confusing, but here we go. Sorry if this is a bit of a ramble;

Aerith sort of kind of realises that this has all happened before, or at least this is the future that is set out for them. But fate/destiny can be changed if they walk through this portal and fight the ghosts and Sephiroth who are trying to keep them on the path of the original Final Fantasy VII, because that they are arbiter’s of time or something along those lines anyway. So the party agrees they walk through and fight this eldritch god-like being to change the course of the past as well as the future, and create multiple timelines in which everyone survives I think?
As they are fighting this creature they are getting flashes of a future that could be, these flashes happen to be clips from the movie Advent Children, so I completely understand wanting to prevent that.

It was at this point that I was utterly disgusted with everything going on, as this is very much not a remake. One would need knowledge of the movie Advent Children or at least the plot of FF7 to know what the characters were seeing. After the creatures defeated, Sephiroth appears, you have a boss fight with him to the tune of One Winged Angel because Square cannot help themselves, it was a cool, challenging and heart pumping last battle that I really wish wasn’t there and saved for later.

After the fight Cloud and Sephiroth return to the point of the universe’s creation, they then almost recreate the sequence from the end of the original Game with the flash cuts included but Omnislash doesn’t occur. Sephiroth tells Cloud he is not ready yet and that he has 7 seconds to change what he wants but god knows what he means by that. Some people have timed out the cutscene of Sephiroth falling from the sky to stabbing Aerith being 7 seconds long in the Oirginal Game, so maybe it is that?

After this Cloud is returned to a cliff just outside of Midgar with the rest of the party, this happens to be the same cliff that Zack Fair died on before the events of the original Game began, due to the fate changing shenanigans the party just pulled, Zack no longer dies on this cliff, instead he lives and begins walking with Cloud towards Midgar. However this appears to be in an alternate universe and not the one the party is currently in. Once again the game assumes you know who this is.

Then the game ends with the line “The unknown adventure will continue…”

As stated earlier I was upset, I was expecting to get a remake yet that is not what came out, what I got was a sort of retread secret sequel instead. Since initially beating the game and then sleeping on it, besides the fact that I was very much misled about what this game actually is, I think this is my favourite game I have played this year.

Looking at I the whole package I’m satisfied with what I got, let me put it another way. When towards what the future of this new project will hold, I’m excited to see where it will go and I hope for it to be good. Circling back again, I like this game a lot, it’s extremely fun to play, it’s beautiful to look at and it’s a dream to listen too. It’s a Phenomenal game I think I might love it, I’m not gonna lie, when Barret was stabbed my heart rate went sky high so there is definitely something the game is doing right.

I have seen people talking about how the final boss fight against the Time Ghosts are a way to kill your expectations, and I suppose there is merit to that statement. It’s just a damn shame about the lie that is the word on the front of the box. But I get it, how do you market this game otherwise. While the game is absolutely amazing the disappointing taste of it not being remake won’t be leaving me anytime soon.

But then again, I still have the Original game and all of it’s many ports, so this isn’t the end of the world or anything.

Before I end, I recall a line from the announcement trailer for the game. “The reunion at hand may bring joy, it may bring fear, but let us embrace whatever it brings” This line REALLY resonates with me now.

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Aaaaaalright we are done, that was a fun write. It’s been a couple of months, but there was nothing coming out, then everything came out at once as per usual so I have some more games that I need to write about soon, I just needed to get this off of my chest ASAP. Right I just need to get Persona 5 Royal done and I can get to the the rest of these write-ups.

So with that said,

Until next time…