Final Fantasy VII Remake: Part 2

After last week’s appetizer, it’s time for the main course.

I’m not going to lie, this is probably going to be a long one.  I know all about the whole “recommended word count” for online articles and this post is going to blow it out of the water.  I can also say for certain there will be spoilers, probably some big ones, for both the original Final Fantasy VII and the Remake.  So, strap in, grab yourself a beverage and read on because its pretty much illegal to go anywhere anyway.  

In the first article I posted when I re-started my blog last year, I ranked my top 10 titles from the previous generation, a list that saw “The Last of Us” finish in the number 3 spot.  I talked about how that game set a new standard for how a video game could look, sound and be presented.  It raised the bar higher than I had ever seen on a console before, pushing the PlayStation 3’s hardware to its limits in every way.  Well, the bar has been raised again.  The FFVII remake is unlike anything I have seen or hear before in a video game.

The graphics crisp and detailed, you can see the detail in every inch of the backgrounds, enemies and characters.  You can read the fine details on posters hung throughout the slums, from the Anti-Shinra messages left by Avalanche to the promotional posters for “Loveless.”  You can look up and see the plate above you, you can clearly make out individual pieces of scrap metal in garbage piles in the slums and you can see the grain on the wood in Tifa’s bar.  Words don’t do it justice, here are screenshots:

That’s it for the graphics, that’s all.  I can’t say anymore.  The original FFVII set the same bar 23 years ago.  It’s sequels pushed the bar even further.  Other games continued to push and push, Halo, Doom 3, The Last of Us, and I’m sure there are others.  The FF VII remake is the latest entry on this list.  If I had one issue with it, its that the dubbing is off at times, but I consider that a minor gripe.  

The sound is just as amazing, the quality is top notch and every track is full of detail.  Every one has tons of depth and they go a long way to making the world feel alive.  The original music is great, all of it fits perfectly within the aesthetic of the game.  But the standouts here are the updated versions of the classic FFVII tracks.  One of the things that has always put the original in such high esteem for me is the music, it’s one of my all time favorite soundtracks.  The remixed, remastered, reimagined or re whatever versions of the songs are all amazing.  They did an outstanding job of adding when they needed to add, altering where they needed to alter and leaving alone where they needed to leave alone.  The familiar sound cues are all there, although I do have one minor gripe with the sound design as some of the classic tracks are out of place.  Sometimes this works, but other times its very jarring.

Anyone who sees or hears this game will agree it looks and sounds great.  There will be less agreement about the changes to the gameplay and story.  We will start with the former.  I am just going to get this out of the way; I really, really, really, really, REALLY, hate that this isn’t a turn based RPG.  I’m sorry, but the whole “turn based combat is outdated” thing is BS.  The same critics that say that are also usually the first people to flagellate the latest Persona game as soon as it comes out, perpetuating a double standard that has existed in the RPG community for some time now.  I think I’ve made it clear that I really don’t like Persona, but turn based combat isn’t the reason. I reviewed Cosmic Star Heroine about a year ago and I hadn’t had that much fun with a game in years, mostly due to the turn based combat.  I don’t want every game I play to be a glorified QuickTime event and it has nothing to do with not wanting to “get good.”  Turn based combat offers its own challenges, so maybe people that dislike it should “get good” at creative battle strategy, proper preparation and understanding the world of the game they are in.       

Don’t get me wrong though, I have no problem with real time combat.  I wouldn’t like it if all the RPGs out there were turn based either, I like a good mix.  I especially don’t have a problem with real time combat that is done well and fortunately, the FFVII remake does it extremely well.  You take control of one character at a time, with square activating your regular attack and triangle activating your special attack.  You can bring up a menu to cast spells, use abilities, use items or assign commands to your other party members.  You can also assign any of these things to quick actions, which helps.  I didn’t like having to bring up the menus at first, but combat is so fast paced that it almost feels like a reprieve later on.  The characters are balanced and everyone does something well, Cloud is the bruiser, Tifa strikes quickly but constantly, Barrett is a tank with a long range attack and Aerith excels at buffs and debuffs.  I wish the AI was a little better, but it certainly could be worse.

You can use your regular and special attacks at any time, but you need to use your ATB gauge for any of the assignable actions.  This adds some strategy and helps the game really feel like Final Fantasy.  The stagger mechanics from Final Fantasy XIII are back as well, but they are substantially improved and you don’t have to use an extremely specific type of attack to fill the gauge up.  Some enemies are staggered by physical attacks, some by magic and others buy exploiting their weaknesses.  It’s adds even more strategy and variety to the combat.  

Dodging is fun and doesn’t rely entirely on timing, which I like.  Even the blocking, which does have a timing component, isn’t so bad because even if you miss you still block some of the damage.  You aren’t punished too harshly for failing, which removes the frustration factor.  I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I like the combat a lot, especially the boss battles.  I was very worried after the demo, but these battles are set up in such a way that you can attack them in a number of ways rather than forcing you to play a stupid game within a game to exploit a very specific weakness (though you can do that if you are in to that sort of thing).  I’m still a little disappointed it isn’t turn based.  But if it absolutely had to be in real time, this is as good as I could have hoped for.  Honestly, if this wasn’t called “Final Fantasy VII,” and was a new IP or even a new Final Fantasy Title, I wouldn’t have had a second thought about it. 

The Materia system is back and it’s largely unchanged from the original, which I think is a good thing.  There aren’t nearly the variety of magic or summon abilities, but there are far more command and passive materias to balance them out.  The only major changed here is that summon materia gets its own dedicated slot, each character can equip one and you can use it once per battle, but only during “dangerous” battles.  It’s a little disappointing, but they are all very powerful and would be overkill against normal foes anyway.  

Navigating the world is fun and rarely feels like a chore.  Those who played the original will have some familiarity with the layout, but there are enough new areas to keep things fresh.  All of the new areas make sense within the context of the game and none of them feel tacked on or unnecessary.  The game is a bit linear, but I kind of expected that.  RPGs without a world map always tend to feel that way and even for those that do have overworlds, the first five to ten hours of these games are usually linear.  That’s often by design, the first few hours of RPGs are usually spent establishing the plot and helping the player get to know the combat systems.  Since this is essentially the first five to 10 hours of an RPG stretched into 40, I’m not surprised.

The game may be linear, but its so well paced and there is so much to look at that it rarely feels that way.  I personally was worried it would fall into the same trap as Final Fantasy XIII, with its endless, sterile corridors, but that didn’t happen here.  If I had one gripe, its that the side missions are all fairly redundant.  Go here, find/kill this, go back.  There aren’t that many of them, but it did get noticeable after a while.  They aren’t the best part of the game, but they aren’t awful either and they don’t tend to last that long.  There were worse ways to pad out the game, for what its worth.

And those worse ways would have involved adding unnecessary, cannon destroying crap to the story.  Look, there are definitely changes made to the storyline from the original.  This is not a shot for shot remake and that really comes through with the plot.  What I think they did masterfully here is make changes to the plot that feel major without actually having a major impact on the overarching story.  There is a massive exception, which we will get to later, but most of the changes are welcome.  In my previous post I talked about the added exposition around Biggs, Wedge and Jessie, which is great.  Other sections, like Wall Market and Sector 5, have been fleshed out into several hour areas.  You learn a lot more about their denizens and they feel like essential destinations as opposed to comic relief or speed bumps respectively.

Some of the added sections reference story elements that were introduced into the FFVII universe after the original game, whether it was via Dirge of Cerberus, Advent Children, Crisis Core or some of the other side games.  One specific example is the underground testing facility the party finds beneath sector 7 after the plate collapses, which is an allusion to the Deepground facility from Dirge.  Again, adding stuff like that was the perfect way to pad out the game.  It doesn’t change the story too much, but it adds relevant sections to the story.  Other changes are minor changes to the order of events.  You meet Rude much earlier and you fight Reno in the church rather than just talking trash to him, things like that.  Cloud has his first Sephiroth-related hallucinations after the first mission, which I was a bit conflicted about.  In the original, you don’t even actually see Sephi until the Kalm flashback, which really feels like a big moment.  By now, however, even people who have never played the original know what he looks like and how important he is to the story, so its probably the right call.  They also do a way better job showing what Cloud is experiencing during the hallucinations, so there’s that.

I did have some issues with story elements they added though.  I talked last week about some of it, like the addition of Roche and the Wutai war subplot.  But the biggest change to the story comes in the form of the ghosts that randomly attack the party.  They show up seemingly at random to pester you, preventing you from whatever goal it is you are working towards at the time.  I really can’t say anymore without completely spoiling the plot, I will just say that the twist at the end of all of this is...weird.  I can’t call it anything else, its bizarre and I’m not sure it was the correct decision.  I can say without a doubt that experienced FFVII players will find it off-putting and new players will likely find it confusing.  All I am going to say is there are characters still alive that were not at this point in the original.

So, what does that all mean?  Personally, I think Square did a better job than I ever thought they would.  They managed to make a game that will appeal to both fans of the original and new fans.  This is an entirely new game in terms of play style, but it did justice to the the classic characters of the original.  I absolutely loved the remake and I certainly think its worth playing through, even if you never played the original.  Hell, it might be better for those who haven’t.  Because at the end of the day, this is an incomplete story.  As someone who has played the original and all its supplements several times over, I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that I was missing something.  I could understand breaking the game in half even, but this was too much.  The remake ends just when the plot of the original was really starting to take off and I found that frustrating and the bizarre twist didn’t help.  That, more than the new combat or linear exploration, are what keeps the FFVII Remake out of the tippy top, upper echelon of all time great games.  But its still phenomenal, a game I consider a “new classic” and a contender for my top 100 games of all time.  For the second part of the series, which will start right where the original game opened up and started taking off from a plot standpoint, the sky will be the limit.

9.5/10