Final Fantasy 7 Remake Review

Hold onto this. This anger.

It most certainly has been a very long time coming, but in my defence Square Enix were cruel enough to keep the damn game from me for several years for the crime of not having a Playstation. And Sony. I blame them too. But given enough time for the game to release, then to wait for a Steam release, then to wait for patches that never came so I had to mod it to become playable- needlessly to say that somewhere along the way the allure of Final Fantasy kind of slide off the table and become muddied in the dirt. I wasn't quite in the best state of mind when I finally got around to FF7R, which is why it would have been something of a note-worthy event for said game to have somehow won me over despite my grumblings. And that may just bit a little bit of a hint as to where this blog might be headed, who knows- I haven't written the darn thing yet.

So the original Final Fantasy 7 is a game of huge significance to the landscape of gaming as we currently know it for a few key reasons. Firstly, Final Fantasy was originally pretty close with Nintendo, releasing by Square on Nintendo systems all the way up until 6- from there was born a rift. You see, Final Fantasy developers wanted to move on to a new style of rendering, throwing away the sprites of the past in favour of full 3d rendering. But Nintendo's systems were just simply incapable of rendering the models that Square were aiming for. Even a proposed N64 version ended up lagging the game whenever the model for Behemoth was loaded into it. In the end Square made the shock decision to move to Playstation, who themselves were using a disk-based hardware that seemed much more powerful than Nintendo's entire slate. The choice upset the otherwise close relationship Square had with Enix, causing Nintendo to shun Square for the next half decade, and then fall on the back of a Scottish studio under their umbrella to force them to make an RPG in it's place. That frayed the relationship with that Scottish studio who eventually broke off and went on to start the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Funny how things work out, eh?

After the release and critical success of Final Fantasy VII, the game would live rent-free in the heads of it's developers for many years more. Particularly for character designer Tetsuya Nomura, who would go on to stick the characters from that game in just about every project he worked on from then onwards.- sometimes haphazardly. For all the many strange crossovers that characterise the Kingdom Hearts franchise, it was always Cloud and Sephiroth's little interludes that were the most discordant with literally everything else that was going on at any given time. They weren't even 'characters' within those stories, more just icons representing the mythical essence of the franchise they were birthed from. I guess it was only a matter of time before Square got around to announcing a full blow remake. Back during the early 2000's.

That's right, Final Fantasy 7 Remake was announced during the reveal of Final Fantasy XIII as yet another companion to that giant remodelling of the franchise, which I find especially bizarre given that FF Versus XIII literally featured a character directly inspired by Cloud. (There would have been some crazy Deja Vu had that all gone through!) As it would transpire the ever expanding workload going into the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy ended up sucking all the attention away from the Remake project which ended up going unofficially cancelled until renewed interest in the next console era gave enough cause to revive it once again. The Final Fantasy 7 Remake we see today has technically been buzzing around in the thoughts of those who want to do it for decades now, and this is essentially their giant effort to get the project out there before they're too old or too dead to start getting it done. What a story, eh?

Now the Remake was never going to just be a straight recreation of the original Final Fantasy 7, as sensible of a prospect as that would be. In the years since it's announcement the world wide fervour sparked up by Final Fantasy 7 had spawned endless spin-off games and even a movie- turning this one entry into a franchise all on it's own. Final Fantasy 7 Remake would have to reflect that, ballooning out in a franchise all of it's own, whilst bringing a lot of these ancillary spin-offs roaring into the modern age to in order to create the definitive string of games that tell the FF7 story. This, of course, being how we ended up with Final Fantasy 7 Remake only covering the first act of the original story, with Rebirth coming soon to tell us the second act, and an unrevealed third game somehow taking the end of that tale and expanding it into something all of it's own.

So what Final Fantasy 7 Remake really represents is a lot more than just a Remake. Even the Capcom remakes in their most transformative, (Such as for Resident Evil 4 Remake) confine themselves to the approximate scope of the original games. They don't stray to change the nature, or size, of the games that they spawn from and use those parameters to polish up the moment-to-moment activity to be as fun, exciting, scary and gorgeous as they can manage. Final Fantasy 7 Remake, on the otherhand, very much wants to turn these into retelling-reimaginations that aren't just 'updates'- but a totally modern recreation. You can go by shot-for-shot as much as you want but you'll run out of direct comparisons pretty quickly, there's so much more game in FF7R than the original- and we're about to decide whether or not that is for better or for worse.

One of the big changes from the original is the way in which Final Fantasy 7 presents it's gameplay. The original game, in keeping with the turn-based style of RPGs in the 90's, was hybrid active/turn-based with a slot-in system of special gems called 'Materia' allowing the player to change what spells are equipped to what character, or to augment certain spells they might already have equipped. Final Fantasy 7 Remake takes the fundamentals of this system and forcibly ejects them into full-action live combat inspired, no doubt, by Tetsuya Nomura's years working on the Kingdom Hearts franchise. (Games in which he ported his reimagination of the Sephiroth fight decades before he got the chance to bring it back to the FF7 franchise.) What results is a genuinely visually spectacular and somewhat freeform combat system that intertwines moment-to-moment reactivity with dodging, guarding and even parrying (with the right Materia) and some light tactical work with giving commands to your team members, synching up their special abilities with your own and creating the illusion of a well-oiled fighting machine through decently light-weight squad command options.

The new stagger system (Which I personally remember seeing first in Final Fantasy XIII, but I'm not exactly the most familiar with all the FF games. It could have been introduced earlier.) presents a bar under the health of enemies that can be filled with certain attacks in order to create a 'stagger state' which incapacitates the enemy and boosts damage received for a certain time- creating a natural flow to long battles of burst damage to defensive play to stagger building. The ATB (Active Time Battle) bar- which you expend in order to use abilities, spells or items- still fills at a live rate as it did in the original game creating a curious through-line to the original style of play and presenting a natural buffer against ability spamming. It's a deceptively complex combat system which feels simple when you get your hands on it and deftly unveils layers of complexity as you become more familiar in a way that many other action fighting games of this age do not. Of course, many of these complexities don't really come into play until the later chapters of the game, against the biggest threats.

I would have to say it is the presentation of Final Fantasy 7 Remake that is perhaps it's biggest gratis: top quality models, animation work and particle popping beauty make the most exciting boss fights stun and wow with cinematic glamour. The new fully orchestral remixes of many of the original's iconic tracks utterly soar, isolating and building upon some of the overpowered layers of the original and injecting whole new worlds of grandiose richness. It's not just about making things louder or prettier, it's about taking advantage of modern technological limits to improve on all aspects of presentation- all to reinforce the mood, themes and world of Final Fantasy's most unforgettable setting. If there were anything this team needed to do justice to, it was the first act set entirely within Midgar- and that is exactly what the team did. And bonus points for how that unified design style in being retroactively applied to all the Final Fantasy 7 sub-games as well- bringing everything under a unified fold. 

Focusing a bit on the world, it is gratifying how good of a job the team did in conveying the sheer scale of the floating city of Midgar and the layers of slums beneath it. Adapting the overhead vignettes from the original game into sprawling adventure hubs packed with various different people, in-world advertising mascots, and all those little details and touch-ups that breath authenticity into play spaces like these. Perhaps the most impressive has to be Night Market and the job that went into turning that into the paradise of commerce and debauchery it was always meant to be in the lore. The cramped streets, the over-stuffed clubs, buzzing neon- they read the assignment and perfectly recreated the market scene from Blade Runner as I can only assume was the intent. Midgar in this form feels tangible, and that is the highest form of praise that any Fantasy world can receive, which might be one of the key reasons why 7 is so beloved.

And as if to rise up to the challenge of making this world alive, the Final Fantasy 7R team went above and beyond to include a surprising amount of interactivity fresh for this remake. You'll find minigames for dart throwing, competitive squats, dancing at the Honey Bee Inn- all innocuous little snippets of play that just change up the routine enough to be memorable breaks from the quality bursts of action. Unfortunately given the nature of the narrative these aren't exactly evenly spread out through the game, and you'll find such side activities pretty much only in the obvious places one would expect to find them. (Chapters in Wall Market and under plate Seven.) As a Like a Dragon obsessive I adore whenever games find the time to take us aside for little diatribes like these, and knowing that enriching the world is a core development pillar of this Remake franchise further cements it as 'on the right track' as far as I'm concerned.

For Yuffie's exclusive and brand-new side campaign, which is part of the 'Intergrade' release of the game, they even went so far as to bring back the old classic 'Fort Condor' strategy game, a total optional from the original. This new quick-RTS recreation of Fort Condor is perhaps the best minigame in the entire game so far, with collectable units and special effect decks and genuinely tough and challenging opponents who only become tougher in Hard Mode- There's some 'Gwent' levels of effort in this little minigame and I surely hope there's a resurgence in Rebirth to expand the boardgame from a minigame into a wider meta game. Seriously, if you never had the chance to give it a shot in the original you simply must find the time to try it out in Yuffie's chapter, it's really something quite special. 

The story of Final Fantasy 7 is something of an ungainly beast in it's virgin state, spanning several hundred short stories and touching characters who's backgrounds don't even occur during the events of the game and who's overall conclusions are wrapped up in a freakin' tie in movie! By expanding out the first act into an entire game all on it's own Tetsuya presents more than enough space to bring in many of these ancillary characters into the fold as well as to expand on the core cast in genuinely strong additions. Kyrie Canaan is plucked right out of an ancillary novel and turned into a reoccurring side character, the members of the Turks are inserted all over the place to better seed their mysterious agenda over the plot and Sephiroth is present pretty much from the first few chapters, albeit as a phantom haunting Cloud's vision and building up his mythos.

But for me the biggest change has been the characterisation of Cloud Strife. In the original Cloud was meant to be little more than an vehicle for the Player, as such all of his speech was handled in non-committal dialogue boxes and there was not really a person behind all the spikey hair. Over the years he developed something of a personality in side adventures as a surly and taciturn anti-hero kind of character, but given that a lot of FF7 side stories were melodramatic drivel those characterisations felt less like evolutions of his presentation and more like derivative 'edgy' trite. This time around Cloud's taciturn and surly traits are inserted into the main game, for a fully voiced protagonist, but presented and written in a manner that makes him a genuine character! They worked a miracle on the boy!

Cloud Strife is brought about less like an edgy enigma who is just too cool to talk to anyone, and more like an emotionally repressed kid who wants to be true to his morals and promises, specifically his promise to protect his childhood friend Tifa, but lacks the emotional tools to quite reach out. He gives his strength when he can, but when Tifa just needs someone to reassure her he's at a loss. It makes for a curious dynamic that all the more heightens the eventual appearance of Aerith around whom Cloud, almost immediately, slips out of his shell. Something about the bubbly flower girl slips right under the boy's emotional shields and teases out the hero we would come to see Cloud as. It's all worlds more refined than the original game and genuinely subtle in a franchise absolutely not known for such a trait!

In terms of the actual story beats themselves, Final Fantasy 7 Remake does hit pretty much everything it needs to in order to present the beginning of this world-spanning tale of eco-terrorists saving the world, leaving just enough space to drown us all in Christian symbology come the third act. But in drawing out this first act so long there are some chapters that sag more than others. The journey through the train graveyard felt like a particularly aimless diversion and they turned the infiltration of Shinra HQ into the entire final act of this game! And fighting the same stock of Shinra enemies gets a bit boring after the tenth hour, believe it or not. But by that same merit, small sections from the original are made better by their expansion. I've already mentioned it before but Wall Market is absolutely a stand-out moment worth lauding.

Of course, the actual finale of the game is perhaps it's most controversial. Part of the purpose of this remake was to try justify the act of changing the events of the original beloved game and Tetsuya actually personified this argument into a ghostly force that plagues the game, keeping characters from meeting others outside of their destined date. (As determined by the original game's canon.) The finale of the game throws players into direct conflict with these spirits, in a representation of breaking the chosen canon and choosing to go one's own path- which has created huge rifts in canon the series will have to face going forward. (Including one giant plot point I won't touch on in this review for fear of spoiling it's impact.) Now I actually applaud this effort to make an event out of changing the story that we know, legitimising the original without kowtowing to it's borders and constraints offers a future for this remake franchise that can now dare to surprise and be different. Rebirth will no doubt present our biggest shift as we'll see the ultimate fate of Aerith, live or die. Which I guess makes this a bit of a 'reboot' in truth, no?

The general cast of FF7 Remake enjoy much more in the realm of development than their past counterparts did, which allow them all to shine as more real characters. Tifa and her feelings about Avalanche becoming more militant and her place within that primarily exists to present a purpose for Cloud to stick around but works double-shift in giving her a quandary to work through. Aerith has her more 'pixie-esque' attributes rounded out by story and connection with Cloud and Tifa, better integrating her as one of the team that everyone would be on board with trying to save in the final act of the game, not just the boy who has become quickly smitten with her. Barret's relationship to Marlene is really all the depth he is afforded, given that the bulk of his story can't occur until the crew leave Midgar- but given that Barret really only served as a mascot anyway, even this bit of humanisation is appreciated. The cast are brought back to life in a mature manner, I was quiet surprised. And with solid performances across the board that maintain that genre-typical anime floatiness to delivery, (the odd 'unnatural sentence structure' or 'speedily delivered line') but sells the drama and personality where necessary.

My one position to gripe with would have to be the characterisation of Sephiroth, a character who has been stuck in all over this game whereas in the original the man was absent throughout the entirety of Act 1. Sephiroth is presented as a character that the audience is already intimately familiar with, delivered with an expectant gravitas and unspoken context which doesn't quite land on newcomers. Heck, even I- who played the original- was unsure as to what he really was meant to be doing popping up everywhere. I mean visions of the man is one thing, but then he literally turns up by the late game doing god knows what and his presence feels almost as aimless as those Kingdom Hearts cameos he is always making. I'm not putting my faith in Rebirth to justify all of those early appearances in hindsight, I think he was overused for the Remake somewhat. 

But even with all that said, I can't bring myself to rag on the new ending for the Remake which I think did a spectacular job justifying a change in direction for the franchise. Doing the JRPG classic and having the heroes battle a concept is exactly what we come to these games for, and defeating the concept of fate in order to change the story of Final Fantasy 7 goes just far enough to make this feel like canonical fan fiction, rather than the watered down fan fiction sensation that 'Crisis Core' leaves you with. From the ending of Final Fantasy 7 the mystique of the unknown has been returned to this remade story and I think that's worth taking significant narrative liberties because I live to be excited, and shocked and heart broken. I loved the ending, and I didn't even find that final fight to be as tedious as I was led to believe. (Then again, I've endured Crisis Core. So maybe my threshold for tedium is just a bit more elastic than most other people's.)

Conclusion

It is little surprise that Final Fantasy 7 Remake was one of the catalysts sparking off this age of remakes and remasters that we currently reside in within the AAA development space. It is a masterclass in resurrection and renewal which gives us a Final Fantasy 7 vision better than most other action games of today. Tetsuya Nomura seems to have been building up his entire career to this moment and in doing so delivered a product that did more than just justice to the original game, it elevated Remake to the status of a bonafide masterpiece! I would not call the product flawless, however, and I'm certain that future entries have ample room to keep things fresh and improve upon some of those dangling story threads- but none of my issues prevent me from awarding a Recommendation solidly on Final Fantasy 7 Remake's chest with an arbitrary review grade of A. A simple must play for Final Fantasy fans looking to keep the magic alive. I can't wait to see where we go next...