Let's Talk About: Final Fantasy VII Remake

Can you believe it took them this long to remake Final Fantasy VII? Every game preceding it got remade in some way, even Final Fantasy II and that's considered one of the worst in the series. Maybe they felt like it deserved something bigger than a simple graphical update or something. Final Fantasy VII is a landmark title in gaming. Whatever your thoughts on the games quality, whether you think it's overrated or the greatest game of all time, there's no denying the impact it has had on gaming as a whole. Final Fantasy VII not only helped put the original PlayStation on the map, Final Fantasy VII helped the JRPG genre, that stands for Japanese Role Playing Game for you plebes out there, it turned it from a somewhat niche genre to a massive mainstream blockbuster. Without Final Fantasy VII you wouldn't have Persona or Suikoden or the Xeno series, yes we had JRPG's in the west before Final Fantasy VII but not to the same extent as after Final Fantasy VII. And while the series as a whole has, seen better days let's just say, the name Final Fantasy still holds a strong place in peoples hearts because of the seventh entry. If they were going to remake it they would need to do something big, something grand, something multi-part series. Yes you read that correctly, Final Fantasy VII Remake is only the first part in a planned episodic adventure with the game I'm reviewing here only covering the Midgar portion of the story. It seems like an odd choice but, according to the developers, this was done so as to expand the story beyond the original and give more importance and depth to the world. I guess that makes sense, the entire point of a remake is to expand on the original after all, so going episodic was the best way to do this without making one game that feels bloated beyond player comprehension. Whether it pays off in the long run remains to be seen but I'm here to look at the game currently on the market and see whether or not it's worth your time.

I should mention before going forward that I don't have a big history with the original Final Fantasy VII or Final Fantasy as a whole. I never played any entry growing up aside from Crystal Chronicles back on the GameCube and my only real exposure to the series were magazine ads, Newgrounds parodies and Final Fantasy The Spirits Within, and does that last one even really count? So I'm going to be looking at this from the perspective of a newcomer. I'm not going to be judging how faithful Remake is to the original because I haven't played the original, I will only judge it as a standalone game and whether or not it's worth your time. That being said, if you are a fan of the original you may be surprised to hear that Final Fantasy VII has ditched the turn based battle system of yore in favour of becoming an action RPG. While I trust that most fans are open minded enough to give this game a chance, purists might be put off by this chance. If you are a fan of action RPGs however then you might like this game a lot more, if you go in with the right expectations. If you go in expecting something as flashy and over the top as Kingdom Hearts, you may be disappointed. Final Fantasy VII Remake instead goes for a more grounded style of combat with less emphasis on long combos. Battles in FFVII Remake aren't just about whittling down an enemies health bar with button mashing, enemies also have a stagger gauge that builds up as you attack them and when it fill up you do way more damage. Enemies have different methods with building up stagger, mostly by getting them into a vulnerable state, so learning how each enemy works is a large part of the game.

While Final Fantasy VII Remake has a very different battle system than the original it does have similar mechanics, namely the Active Time Battle system. As you attack enemies the ATB gauge will build up, you have two stocks and when one fills up you can execute a command from the command menu. When picking a command the game slows down allowing you to carefully pick which one you want. This makes battles have an interesting flow, almost feeling like a turn-based/action RPG hybrid that can take some getting used to. Commands can be assigned to a quick select to keep the action up but I barely used it because I felt it better to slow the game down and pick the commands given how hectic fights can get. If you're not a big fan of this system you can always switch to classic mode which puts battles on auto pilot and lets you focus on giving commands. I call it “Final Fantasy XIII mode”. I know that sounds like a lot to take in but FFVII remake does a good job of easing you into it before throwing tougher enemies at you and once you get to grips with it you can have a lot of fun with it. What I like about the battle system is that it adds an element of strategic thinking into the mix and doesn't rely on mindless button mashing like Kingdom Hearts often devolves into.

As a fan of action RPG's I had a blast with it especially the boss fights, which were a constant highlight. The game is a fairly decent challenge on normal difficulty but I never found it too hard, though I did see a handful of losses during my playthrough. The game can be tough if you go in unprepared but if you keep your healing items stocked up and plan the use of your magic you should be ok. Even then the game throws a bone at you in tougher fights thanks to Limit Breaks and summons. Limit Breaks are like super moves, big flashy attacks you can perform when the Limit gauge is full. Every character has two levels of these, with the second being unlockable. Summoning has been reworked from the original game. In the original you could summon very powerful beasts to do a powerful attack at the cost of a lot of MP. They no longer cost MP but you can now only do one summon per fight and only use them in specific fights, mostly boss fights. This sounds lame but these summons can be devastating, if you could use them whenever it would make the game too easy. If you pre-ordered the game you got access to one of three different DLC summons depending on what version you got, I got the standard version so I got Chocobo Chick and that summon could be used in regular fights when my health got to a certain level though he wasn't anywhere near as powerful as the regular summons you can get in the base game. At the time of this writing these special summons are only available through pre-ordered copies though they may get added as DLC at a later date, I'm not a fan of this practice personally and think these should have been a part of the base game but it is what it is. Speaking of attaining summons you'll have to go out of your way to get most of them as only the summon you get through main story progression is Ifrit the rest have to either be found in a side area or battled in special VR missions. I was able to get 90% of them only missing out on the final one because it required doing all of the optional battle intel missions and I was unable to do them all. Just missed it by a gnats wing too. I do like how summons are handled here though I do wish I was able to control them directly as opposed to just giving them commands.

Speaking of control I should probably talk about the four main characters you'll be playing through the game. They can be broken into two categories, close ranged and long ranged. Cloud and Tifa take up the close ranged category, Cloud has two different stances he can swap between each with their own strengths and weaknesses while Tifa has different levels of special attacks she can build up and has a faster, combo oriented fighting style, she's my favourite. For long ranged fighters you have Barret and Aerith with Barret being a defensive tank with decent damage output and Aerith being a support character with stronger magical power. While there's a smaller amount of playable characters in the ramake, owing to the fact that only the Midgar segment is represented, at least they each offer different gameplay styles and you can swap between them at any point in battle. Sadly there's no way to choose your party, your completely at the whims of the game on who you can play at any time. I get that the original game didn't give you this option until late into the Midgar portion which in this game would mean near the very end of the entire game, but they could have changed things up to allow the player the option of choice. The game does emphasize swapping between characters to learn their playstyles so this issue is mitigated somewhat but RPG's should never force players into certain roles, the entire appeal is player choice after all.

Final Fantasy VII Remake is a very linear game. The game has 18 chapters that act like individual levels. There's no way to travel back to certain areas unless it's part of the story, outside of chapter 14, which is more open than the rest, there's very little backtracking. I know when people think of Final Fantasy and linearity in the same breadth the first thing that comes to mind is Final Fantasy XIII and the long hallway like level design that game had, rest assured the FFVII Remake is nowhere near as bad. For one, some chapters take place in small towns and allow some time to run around and do some side-quests and even in the more linear parts it never feels like running down a hallway. There are several side activities and minigames to partake in to shake things up and most of them are rewarding to do and pretty fun, except for the pull-ups minigame, that one is utter hell. Why is there always that one minigame that pisses you off in RPG's? Due to the linear nature of the game there's no way to go back and complete side quests and minigames. You only get one shot at them and that can be annoying for things like the Arena battles. The linear approach might put off those who like their RPG's to be more open not helped by the cramped level design. It may not be a hallway but levels in this game still feel claustrophobic, by design mind you since Midgar is supposed to be that way but it wore on me after a while since a lot of these levels go on for far too long. Final Fantasy VII Remake may only cover the first ten hours of the original but that does not mean it is only a ten hour game. This is a lengthy adventure that should take you roughly 30-35 hours to complete, longer if you do all the side content, and while having a lengthy game means you're getting your money's worth I can't help but feel like the game can drag at times. The pacing in this game is all over the place, some chapters go by at a mile a minute while others go by at a snails pace, if the snail was covered in molasses and traveling through honey. Now admittedly I was doing all of the side-quests along the way which does add a considerable amount of time but some chapters are little more than that and while some side-quests are enjoyable and they do a lot for the games world building a lot of them involve a lot of running back and forth tediously.

When it comes to RPG's I'm very big on customization. I love being able to tweak characters in whatever way I want and Final Fantasy VII offers several ways to customise characters to fit whatever playstyle you want. Each character has three types of equipment, a weapon, a piece of armour and an accessory. Both weapons and armour have slots for Materia. Materia are orbs of magic energy that provide different attributes and come in different types. Green Materia allows the use of magic spells, yeah you don't learn magic naturally in this game you can only learn them through Materia meaning any character can learn any spell you want. Other types of materia include red summoining Materia which has it's own seperate slot for each character, yellow Materia which allow using different types of abilities, purple Materia which boosts stats and blue Materia which does nothing on it's own but can be linked with other Materia for a variety of effects. I like the Materia system. It allows me to pick and choose how I want each character to play but with a limited number of slots available I have to think about the role each character plays and which Materia fits that role. I only have two complaints with Materia, the Wind and Ice spells are somewhat unwieldly, especially against enemies that love to move about, and that blue materia is very scarce and hard to find. I only found one elemental Materia in the whole game and that one is a favourite of mine. Maybe there's more and I just missed it but I find it odd that the game gives you plenty of equipment with linked Materia slots and very little of the Materia that actually takes advantage of it. I also would have liked an option to combine Materia in a sort of crafting system because you get plenty of it throughout the game but don't do much with most of it.

Weapons work differently in Remake than they do in the original. Instead of buying or finding a new weapon and them immediately scrapping your old one, because in RPG's that's just what you do, now weapons act as another method of changing each character with some even offering radical changes to how a character plays. Each weapon has it's own upgrade tree which allows further customisation, it can be a pain to constantly upgrade weapons all the time, especially late game when each character has five or six different weapons, but you can set preferences that will automatically upgrade weapons in certain peramaters if you wish. Just be aware that you won't be able to get all the upgrades in one playthrough, so make your decisions wisely. With this upgrade system it's entirely possible to play through the game with just the default weapons of each character if you so which. You should try each weapon when you get it though because each weapon has a unique ability that can be learned and used with other weapons.

Visually Final Fantasy VII is a nice looking game but it has some issues. The character models look great and I'm impressed that they were able to keep the games original character designs while also updating them with a more realistic art direction, well as realisic as a Final Fantasy game can be anyway. Cloud still looks like Cloud, Barret is still the anime equivalent of Mr T and Tifa is still a total babe despite supposedly being toned down by the Square Enix “Ethics Department”. I always feel like Final Fantasy looks it's best when it leans into the Fantasy part a little more than the Sci-Fi and Final Fantasy VII Remake does just that. I mean one of the bosses is a house for God's sake. But while the game's art direction is great and it manages to keep at a consistent 30 FPS throughout, other technical aspects are baffilingly bad. The texture work is awful in places, like PS2 levels of quality. I didn't notice it that often but the times where I did notice it were bad. It's unreal how bad the textures can get in this game especially given how high profile a release it is. I also have beef with the animation in some of the cutscenes. In major cutscenes the animations are fantastic but in minor cutscenes characters have very puppet like animations that are very distracting, especially when the quality shifts from one scene to the next. I get that minor cutscenes never have great animations but FFVII Remake is odd in what cutscenes have great animations and which ones don't often having both back to back which only makes the weak animations in certain cutscenes look even worse. It's still a good looking game but it lacks the kind of polish I expect in a major release like this.

Audio wise though it's goddamn flawless. I'm not kidding, I have no complaints regarding how this game sounds. The soundtrack is phenomonal but what do you expect from Nobuo Uematsu. I don't have much to say about it that hasn't already been said but I will say that one aspect of the soundtrack I liked was the large variety of musical genres used. There are a lot of songs in this game for areas you don't visit but they included them via collectible music CD's that can be played at any jukebox in the game. And they all sound great with a large variety of genres covered from hip-hop, country, techno, tango even circus music. If there's a genre of music you like chances are there's a song to fit your tastes. Even then the compositions blow the original out of the water, I don't mind midi music but true orchestral sounds will top it any day of the week. As for the voice acting it's top notch across the board with a few exceptions and an awkward line read here and there. Though in a strange move, Square Enix have recast everybody, none of them retain their voices from previous Final Fantasy projects. I don't mind because I think the new voices are great with everyone doing a great job. I especially enjoyed Brianna White as Aerith, she really nailed the role and balanced out Aerith's sass while also showing her kind and friendly nature.

Which leads us, at last, to the story. I've saved this part for last because I will be spoiling certain parts of it later but don't worry I'll give you fair warning of when that will happen. As for my spoiler free review of the plot, I enjoyed it. It follows the same basic beats as the original, well the Midgar section anyway, but with additional scenes and characters that help flesh out the world of Midgar. In the original, Midgar wasn't that important, it was merely a spring board to get our character out into the wider world but now it's been given a greater importance and worth. This feels like the vital first episode of a multi-part series designed to show the characters and what the main plot is while developing a mystery that can be explored in future episodes. The basic plot follows Cloud strife, a former SOLDIER turned mercenary working for an Eco-terrorist group callled Avalanche who are trying to take down the company he used to work for, the Shin-Ra Electric Power Company. See Shin-Ra gets electricity by sucking it up from the planet in the form of an energy called Mako which is having a detrimental effect on the planet itself. The game has a strong environmental theme but it handles it's message in a way that never comes across as preachy.

Without going into spoilers I will say that the story is very entertaining with some powerful emotional moments that actually managed to get to me, mostly because I cared for the characters even the side characters. Take the members of Avalanche for example, besides Barret they weren't given much character development but here they are and are far more likable as a result, Wedge is a bit of a fat guy stereotype admittedly but he's such an optimist it's hard not to like him. Really it's the characters that help make the story as entertaining as it is mostly because the events of the story can feel somewhat stretched out, unsurprising given they turned a segment that was only 10 hours long into a nearly 50 hour one but it's a testament to the writing that while it might fell stretched out it is still entertaining throughout. The story does get pretty dark but never so much that there aren't moments of levity here and there. The entire Honeybee Inn sequence is hilarious and a highlight of the game. Ok, let's get into spoilers. Skip ahead if you don't want spoilers, when you see the Chocobo that's where the spoilers end.

Final Fantasy VII Remake introduces a couple of new story beats that help flesh out the world of Midgar but the most important new element are the Whisper, or Arbiters of Fate. These are strange wraith like creatures you meet throughout the game that either hinder or help the characters. The Whispers job is to ensure that events play out the way they are supposed to as willed by the planet itself. You know the events of the original Final Fantasy VII, that's how things are supposed to be and the Whispers will do all they can to make sure they do. They're Final Fantasy VII purists basically. At the end of the game you fight the Whispers in the form of a giant monster and destroy them, basically meaning that subsequent installments will likely have changes to the plot and we even see some changes in this game with Biggs being alive, Wedge also might be alive though we're unsure of that, and it's implied that Zack might still be alive as well. Why are the Whispers doing this, because of Sephiroth. Not the Sephiroth you're thinking of, this Sephiroth is from an alternate timeline and is manipulating the events of the game since he loses in the original timeline.

At least I think that's what happens, it's a little unclear as to exactly what’s going but that's the gist of it. This ending has caused some controversy among Final Fantasy VII fans, they're worried that Square Enix are going to make radical changes to the plot and, given their recent output, fans are nervous they will ruin the story. While I can understand the concerns I don't think they will make too many changes to the story. To be honest, I wanted them to make changes to the story, why remake something if your just going to do the exact same thing? I expected changes to the story but not in the way it was presented here. The Whispers mere existance means that the original Final Fantasy VII game will always exist as the true verision of events while Remake is an alternate retelling that takes place in a new timeline constantly living in the shadow of the original. Why do this? To me this comes across as Square Enix trying to have their cake and eat it too, they get their high profile remake but they also get to re-release the original game over and over again. I don't want to judge the Remake based on any changes because there isn't anything here too far out there and any changes that could be done in the future are up to speculation. What I will say is this, given that Tetsuya Nomura is heading the project, and with how Kingdom Hearts III went, it wouldn't surprise me if the tragic elements of the story are toned down somewhat. Despite the name, given the change of gameplay style and the fact that it takes place in an alternate timeline to the original and follows on from those events, Final Fantasy VII Remake is more a reimagining than a remake. Nothing wrong with that, but why then call it a remake? Just call it Final Fantasy VII, we're smart enough to know which one is the original.

So can I recommend Final Fantasy VII Remake? That depends. If you're a huge fan of the original you may enjoy this if you can accept the change in gameplay style, if what you've read here doesn't bother you then give it a shot. If your a purist who wanted the exact same game but with better graphics, get one of the recent ports instead, preferably the PC version so you can mod it. If your someone completely unfamiliar with Final Fantasy VII and you're looking for a good action-RPG with a lot of content to keep you busy, which people really need nowadays let's be honest, then Final Fantasy VII Remake is worth your time. It might be a bit too linear and the battle system may not be for everyone but at the end of the day it's an enjoyable game. At the very least I do want to play the next game in the series to see what happens next. I mean, i the original game the moment you left Midgar was when the game really opened up, I'm excited to see how they handle future games in this remake project. Whatever happens the only thing I ask is that the next installment doesn't rest on it's laurels and actually improve the formula, if they're going to treat each entry as a standalone game then they should treat the next entry as a legit sequel and develop it as such. Then again if they do that it might take another six years for the next one to come out, hell, with Nomura heading this thing it might take a decade or two. Fingers crossed we see the next entry sooner rather than later. Next time I'm going to be looking at a remake of another RPG, one I've already looked at in the past, Trials of Mana.