All said and done, playing Final Fantasy VII: Remake was a definite trip. It wasn’t a game I thought I’d like, or one I was sure I’d even play, given my somewhat less than enthusiastic response to the original Final Fantasy VII along with what I thought was a bad decision to split the Remake into multiple parts, with this current game only covering Cloud’s adventures in the city of Midgar and the rest of it scheduled to arrive later.
I found Final Fantasy VII: Remake though to be surprisingly faithful to the tone, atmosphere, and spirit of the original game, managing to somehow capture the inventiveness of that gaming era all while updating it successfully to what gamers expect of games today. To do this while expanding what was only the first 6 or so hours of the original Final Fantasy VII into a full 40 hour+ game was a major accomplishment. It’s a fusion that’s pulled off surprisingly well, and though this is by no means even close to being a perfect game, I found Final Fantasy VII: Remake to be a compelling RPG and one that really made me think about how gaming has evolved and changed over the years, both for better and for worse.
Final Fantasy VII told the story of Cloud, a former soldier in a world that’s essentially ruled by a massive corporation known as Shinra, who not only reigns over the metropolis known as Midgar, but essentially wields control of the planet by using its lifeblood, Mako energy, for power and control. Cloud serves for hire for the eco terrorist group known as Avalanche, which bombs various Shinra Mako reactors throughout the city. His childhood friend Tifa is a part of the group, along with the always-cursing Barret and the likable Jessie, Biggs, and Wedge. It’s a storyline that actually resonates just as well today as it did in 1997, with humanity’s reliance on oil seemingly virtually unchanged after all these years. Presented here of course with incredible advancements in storytelling, cutscenes look and animate beautifully, giving the characters life that I didn’t think the original managed to pull off. All throughout Final Fantasy VII: Remake, in fact, I found myself realizing that this is what the developers of the original game were going for; this is what they’d envisioned, but couldn’t pull off in 1997. I worried that this remake would feel like something entirely different, but this is Final Fantasy VII, without a doubt. And it’s something to behold.
My thoughts on Final Fantasy VII were complicated; I’d played it many years after the fact, having gotten into the series with Final Fantasy X on the PS2 and then working my way backwards. I appreciated that VII was a truly groundbreaking game for its time, but having played it after what were in my opinion the far better games that followed, I found its characters and world to be flat and mostly uninteresting, with the pacing constantly interrupted by terrible mini-games, and the storytelling often hurt by a flawed English localization. Interestingly enough, I found the first 6 hours of Final Fantasy VII in Midgar to be the game’s best, with the city’s slums, their residents cast in the constant shadow of the plate above their heads which houses the city’s wealthy, proving to be a compelling and intriguing setting. It was a gritty and very sci-fi oriented story, one that I thought became less interesting once the characters left the city and the game became a slog across far more bland environments in pursuit of a very creepy but not especially likable villain.
It’ll be interesting to see whether the improved storytelling will help me to appreciate the rest of the game, whenever the future episodes happen to arrive. As a standalone title though, the first part of the Final Fantasy VII Remake saga works well as its own adventure. Given how long it took to develop this part though, as has sadly become customary for games from Square-Enix, I’m hoping I’ll get to experience the rest of this saga before I’m in my 50s, but who knows, honestly.
The biggest factor that differentiates Final Fantasy VII: Remake from the original, aside from the content added to spread it out into a full game, is the battle system. Remake gets rid of the original’s turn-based battles in favor of something more along the lines of what was featured in Final Fantasy XV, where you run around the battlefield hacking and slashing at the enemies in real time. Though the AI here does control your teammates, it operates on only the most basic of levels, with the game expecting you instead to take control of the character you want to use with the d-pad and issuing them a command. It’s a bit of a weird system in that the AI which controls the other characters has been dramatically dumbed down from where it was in XV, and you’ll find yourself having to take control of your AI partners whenever you need them to do even the most basic things such as healing or using specific abilities.
I found battles generally to be fun and satisfying as far as fighting regular enemies were concerned. Attacking the enemy fills up their Stagger gauge; doing certain types of damage to certain enemies fills it much faster. Once staggered, the enemy sits there stunned while your attacks do significantly more damage against them. It’s a system that’s been more or less present in the series since Final Fantasy XIII, and it’s one that still feels incredibly satisfying. Each character plays very differently from each other, with two different types of attack styles that can be switched between on the fly; one of them more powerful but slowing your movement. Final Fantasy VII’s oft-praised Materia system remains mostly intact here, with equipping the various Materia to your weapons (such as Cure, Fire, etc) and watching them evolve the more you battle with them a cool way to customize your characters.
Less satisfying is the new stat and summon systems; each weapon has its own Sphere Grid-like system, where you earn AP through battle to upgrade things like “HP+ 250” and “New Materia Slot,” in a spacey menu that looks slick but feels hollow. You lose these advantages when you equip a new piece of equipment, making it hard to tell when coming across a new weapon or armor whether it’s more beneficial to equip it or to stick with your original. Each weapon’s “main skill” becomes permanently learned once unlocked, but I’m genuinely not sure whether I ever accomplished that or not, or whether it’s even worth using old weapons until that point. The Summon system returns from Final Fantasy XV, where once again the ability to use summons is completely out of your control, the game seemingly allowing it only when you’re getting your ass kicked. Somewhat frustratingly, you only come across 2 summons over the course of the main story; with 3 controllable characters in your party at once, that means you’re either stuck sharing 2 summons between your entire party, or you’re forced to seek out additional summons through side missions or, of course, if you happened to preorder the game from the right place. Needless to say, not my favorite way to go about it.
Where the combat system completely falls apart is during the boss battles, where the number of frustrations pile up one by one. The first big offender is their excessive length, which dramatically increases the frustration you face when you die and have to start the entire fight over again. Bosses just seem to have far too much HP, and in fights where targeting specific parts of them provides an advantage, those parts are often hard to target amidst all the chaos. As with Final Fantasy XV, I found myself having to use far more HP recovery items than I had in previous entries in the series, which focused more on magic as an affective way to heal and to revive your characters. Unlike Final Fantasy XV though, Final Fantasy VII: Remake’s bosses are far more challenging, and not having a major stockpile of Phoenix Downs in your inventory (and they’re expensive to purchase) can ultimately make certain fights incredibly frustrating.
One reason for this is that bosses have the tendency to unleash majorly destructive attacks with wide range seemingly without warning, the block and dodge buttons hardly enough to stop them. Annoyingly, you’re prevented from using any items or magic abilities until your ATB gauge fills up, often creating an inescapable loop where the boss kills your fellow party members, as you run around the battle arena waiting for your ATB gauge to charge up, which then allows you to finally revive one of them, but not heal them afterwards; for that, you’ll have to wait for the ATB gauge to fill up yet again, assuming the enemy doesn’t kill them again before this can happen. During times like these it’s sometimes almost better to restart the battle from the beginning than having to keep doing the dance of trying to revive your fallen party members.
It’s not that I don’t like a challenge; Final Fantasy XIII was incredibly challenging I thought in a fun and strategic way. Final Fantasy XV was too easy and I’d have preferred for things to be tougher, but Final Fantasy VII: Remake’s issue is that it goes about its difficulty the wrong way. It’s a fun battle system that, more often than not, falls apart during the boss fights, which just don’t provide the same level of satisfaction as the fights during the rest of the game.
Outside of bosses, combat works well most of the time, which is good, because Final Fantasy VII: Remake features a lot of combat. With a majority of the game’s new areas (somewhat disappointingly) focusing mostly on lengthy dungeon/combat sections, it’s a good thing that the battle system is at least fast and fun during Remake’s many regular encounters. It has to be said though that I can’t help but feel disappointed that Remake didn’t take this opportunity to give us more time to explore Midgar’s wealthy districts on top of the plate instead, or even see some new towns in the slums. Not that town exploration’s completely absent, however; you’re given more time in the slums of Midgar than in the original to wander around the town-like areas completing sidequests for the locals. The side missions are unspeakably bland, but at least their inclusion and the additional story-focused moments in Midgar’s residential areas prevents Final Fantasy VII: Remake from feeling like a claustrophobically linear journey the way Final Fantasy XIII did. You’ll have to finish the sidequests before you complete the chapter they’re in, though, which does take away some of the feeling of open-endedness that they provide.
Other than the boss battles, the biggest gripe I have with Remake is that it features what might be one of the worst navigation maps I’ve used in a long time. You can switch to the more traditional GTA-style map with the L2 button, which is at least significantly better than the awful Elder Scrolls style navigation display that’s set as the default. But even this map is fairly unhelpful and bound to lead you straight into walls instead of pointing you forward. The full screen map visible in the main menu is also fairly lacking, as it divides the city into sections, taking away from the feeling of Midgar being a full world to explore, even if by the end of it there are tons of locations to return to. Segmenting the world on the big map also makes it harder to tell which locations you’ve been to when backtracking, or which road leads to which place. While certainly better than this team’s previous work in Final Fantasy XIII as far as exploration’s concerned, I’m a little worried about how they’ll handle what’s supposed to be the vast world map that becomes available in Episode 2.
On a story note, Final Fantasy VII: Remake is more faithful to the tone of the original game than I ever thought it would be, and in many ways, it remains in lockstep with it. This is definitely better than what I was hoping for, and never does it feel non-cannon or outsourced in any way. That’s not to say that it doesn’t have issues, however. Remake makes changes to the fates of certain characters, and the changes are handled in such a heavy-handed way, and in a way where it’s not even really clear what actually took place, that I questioned why they bothered to do it.
The game’s final few hours are similarly mishandled; as with many RPGs today, Final Fantasy included, entering Remake’s final dungeon doesn’t simply mean a challenging path to the final boss, but instead it means hours upon hours of combat, boss fights, and action scenes…..never seeming to end. This isn’t a problem unique to this game, but it’s one that I wish hadn’t become the norm. As the dungeon and boss battles and plot revelations rattle on and on, they become tiring, as if we’re being trapped in a Michael Bay movie that I couldn’t just sit back and watch the mindless spectacle of.
Remake also makes the decision to fit Sephiroth into the proceedings, despite him only having a tiny, mostly off-screen role in the Midgar portions of the original game. Some fans might be happy to see him and Jenova make their early appearances, but I found them to be forced and unnecessary, and people who are new to this story will have no clue about the significance of this character and why he suddenly keeps showing up. The ending encounters also expand Aerith’s role in ways that I’m not thrilled with, but I’ll stop there. These are really the only blights on Final Fantasy VII: Remake’s otherwise great storytelling, which makes for a compelling journey through a very intriguing world; far more than the original did. I just wish I didn’t find myself cringing whenever Sephiroth and whatever those weird spirit things are kept forcing their way into the story.
Remakes are always a daunting prospect, and Final Fantasy VII is such a beloved property. As someone who didn’t find that particular installment to be nearly as compelling as several of the others, I have to say that I thought Remake really elevated the original’s storytelling and its characters to turn them into something great, some long dungeons and a never-ending final several hours aside. It’s faithful to the original game and really captures the tone and vibe of Midgar perfectly. The combat system’s fast and fun but often a nightmare during bosses, with the few diversions from the original’s story similarly proving to be hit or miss. Music’s overly-orchestrated and far from Masashi Hamauzu’s best, while exploring the world can feel unintuitive due to its segmented nature and poor mini-maps. But whether it’s the quiet moments in the bar in Sector 7, or Cloud and Aerith traversing the slum’s rooftops together, or of course the eventual appearance of Red XIII, Final Fantasy VII: Remake manages to capture beautifully and expand upon much of what made the original game so beloved to begin with. It isn’t perfect, but it’s an adventure I’m incredibly eager to continue, and hope we won’t have to wait another entire console generation to get to do.
3.5/5
Note; this review is based on the PS4 version
