35 thoughts on Final Fantasy VII: Remake
Before its sequel is released, I want to encapsulate the legacy of the game that took longer to develop than any game in the history of video games.
To get me pumped for the release of Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, I wanted to replay Final Fantasy VII: Remake, to brush up on the story in specific (what was the name of Tifa’s landlady again?) and reclaim the feeling I had on completion of the first installment: That of wanting more.
As I played through it again, I captured some thoughts that I may or may not have shared with people (may or may not have felt, also) during my original playthrough.
With Rebirth poised to hit stores in a couple days, let’s take one last look back at Remake before the sequel possibly comes out and ruins everything we thought we liked about the game.
First and foremost, thank you, Square Enix, for trying. Irrespective of how successful or terrible the game actually ends up being, it is nice to see a product for which there was great demand created to so fine an effect. This game could be utter trash, and we would at least have the satisfaction of knowing it wasn’t meant to be. Here are my kind of overture thoughts, by the way, on Final Fantasy VII, the franchise within a franchise.
My last save file was a from 2021, which means two full years passed without touching this game. In that time, I had a whole second child, changed jobs, quit that job, and, actually, got rehired at that job. Other stuff happened too. It’s been a minute. The reason it’s been so long is because despite being a remake, this game doesn’t jump out as highly replayable. There’s no easy avenue to dive back in to touch base with the game. I could more easily fire up a save file on the original and get my bearings and do something. Remake was very plot driven and also very much about its own reveal, to where just experiencing it over again isn’t super appealing.
Right away, the opening movie deviates from the original, but in ways that are representative of the remake’s ambitions. They show you a lot more of Midgar, and little details: kids on bikes, cafes, construction workers wearing the selfsame bright orange garb we see in our world. The message, to me, is that Remake intends to be a more real version, with serious depth, compared to the scope of the original. That’s great! That’s what we wanted. The issue is, you don’t end up exploring this deeper world they showcase in the beginning (the world up on the plate, that is). You get the same slum backdrops we got in the original, only expanded. The images you first see wind up being outliers, which isn’t the end of the world, but it does get me excited for the VR Remake remake, coming out in 2050.
For Christmas this year, I was gifted Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII: Reunion (or something like that, Googling didn’t really help me figure out the formatting of the title). Playing through that kicked off my reinvigorated interest in the world of Final Fantasy VII. It’s a much airier game, itself a remake of a PSP game I never played, and it gives a pretty glossy backstory of Zack Fair, the bizarro Tyler Durden of Final Fantasy VII, and also of Cloud. All this to say, playing through that game gives Cloud a completely different edginess as we first see him atop the train pulling into the Sector 1 station. In Crisis Core, Cloud is a bashful recruit whose main personality trait is being too embarrassed to show his face back home. He’s quickly incapacitated and spends the majority of his arc in a state of unconsciousness while Zack talks to him like the volleyball in Castaway. So seeing him awake, with an intense air and doing badass things like wielding the Buster Sword and flipping off the top of a train is a complete reversal of the character established in the prequel. It’s like, “Whoa, what’s gotten into Cloud?” The answer is lots of Mako and some Jenova cells, along with (spoiler) the memories of Zack. If you haven’t played Crisis Core, Cloud’s just a brooding, self-serious badass, which in the age of this remake is a played-out archetype. The depth of his character gets installed later, although mostly outside the scope of this game.
One of the major wins in the Remake’s glow-up is Jessie Rasberry (when did she get a last name?), whose character appeared to seven-year-old me as androgynous, but is now a powerhouse in the opening act of Remake. Her voice-acting pops, and her personality jumps off the screen. Sometimes it’s too much and feels a little overwrought, as when she tells Cloud to “keep those beautiful blues on me.” Overall, though, the creative direction of really magnifying her character was an awesome success. As I’m playing this game, I’m watching every single component and evaluating it for whether it feels honoring to the experience of the original. That’s both ridiculous and inevitable, but Jessie’s prominence gets a major stamp of approval from me.
Part of the difficulty of remaking a steampunk universe 20 years later is reassessing what’s futuristic and what’s contemporary. Will there be landlines?
Semi-relatedly, part of making modern games is deciding how interactive to make the world. While it could seem like a cool idea to have a laser security system that can harm your character’s HP, the idea that the Shinra Corporation, whose immersive theater technology is used to exhibit peoples of the past in 1:1 realism later in the game, is using blinky laser lines to keep people out of certain parts of their energy reactor afterhours, is cringe-worthy. They have Jessie guide Cloud through the visible lasers that flash on and off every few seconds, and it’s clear they’re showcasing that the game will have interactive environments; only there wind up being so few similar elements that the lasers in the first reactor jump out to me as evidence of the game’s creative evolution through years of development, and how hard that can be to reconcile into a world that feels totally cohesive. “We’re going to have interactive environments!” production declared while they crafted the first chapter. Also, they are blinky lasers. Like, come on.
One of the aspects of remaking the game that gave me the most anxiety as a parent-fan is the approach they would take to remaking the game’s music. The original game’s score was one of its highlights, with Nobuo Uematsu one-manning the massive project, world-building and storytelling through the creation and interweaving of various melodic themes. It was a continual relief to see how artfully and honorably they re-envisioned the musical score, modernizing it while adhering to the tone and presence of the original. The theme that plays as you get to the reactor core showcases the game’s willingness to strip down and give fans a bare version of familiar themes, so that certain moments of the game feel perfectly embalmed.
Harkening back to point 2, the game is a lot different when the thrill of the reveal is taken away. My initial playthrough was dominated by the thoughts of “How are they going to do this part? Oh, that’s how.” and on replay I’m really feeling the absence of that. Relatedly, I wonder if players who never played the original feel like the game has higher replay value?
There are moments, particularly in the early going, where Barret Wallace’s character feels a little over-Barrety. The original presented Barret as what felt like a caricature of an angry, gun-toting Black man, only to spend the game kind of debunking said caricature by giving Barret one of the most gripping backstories of any Final Fantasy character and leaning into his emotional nuance in key moments (such as when Cloud feels guilt-stricken for losing control of himself and conveying a tremendous power into the hands of the enemy, and after Aerith’s death1). So when I say “over-Barrety,” that refers to both the over-enunciation of the caricature of Barret as well as the overcompensating presentation of his emotional depth. Also, a subtle thing I miss from the original is Barret’s outward-facing main character syndrome, in which he frequently asserts that he’s the leader and is aspiring to that role (the “real” Barret insists on jumping out of the train last, not first).
Cloud sure looks inconspicuous leaving the scene of a bombing with a seven-foot sword on his back. One of the problems with a more vivid game is the way failures of due consideration like this stick out. There are many times throughout the game in which it is patently ridiculous for the main character to be walking around with a sword on his back. In the original, field Cloud didn’t have a sword, it simply went away except for in select high-resolution moments. Now, here we are, the entire town is in chaos from a massive explosion, and Cloud stalks by citizens who ramble on unsuspectingly while he is walking around with a surfboard-sized weapon affixed to his person. Similarly, Barret’s gun-arm is a tough sell in moments of relative normalcy, such as on the train. Still, I wonder if they considered having Cloud account for the sword in moments where it would make more sense to. I’d feel a little better knowing they at least had the discussion and decided, “screw it.” They could have been a bit more intentional about designing non-playable characters to appear a bit more battle-ready on the whole, to help Avalanche blend in.
Similarly: Clothes, man. We have to be able to do better than “one immutable outfit” per person. Especially in a universe where there are clothes shops! They don’t need to make it a whole thing a la Grand Theft Auto, but some intentional and logical outfit contrast would go a long way.
The choice to involve and showcase Sephiroth early and often is another departure from the original, but one that I find allowable. In his second scene with Cloud, right as Cloud first encounters Aerith, he tells Cloud something that strikes me as incredibly ominous upon replay: “You can’t save anyone. You can’t even save yourself.” What could that second part possibly mean? With Rebirth days away, the main question of that game is how they replay the ending. It’s said to end “with the events at the Forgotten Capital,” which we know is where Aerith is killed by Sephiroth in the original. We also conclude Remake with the oddly pointed statement “The unknown adventure will continue,” which appears right after you literally murdered fate and saw images that suggest a parallel universe. In said parallel universe, there is a different type of dog serving as the mascot of the Shinra corporation, could there also be a different person murdered at the Forgotten Capital, and could it in fact be Cloud? Aerith’s death in the original registered as a shockingly bold stroke in the relatively uncharted world of video game storytelling. In order to recreate the sense of boldness, could Square Enix actually decide to completely zig where the original zagged? While that is unlikely, it is less unlikely to me that the creators aspire to do something unlikely. That could be as crazy as killing Cloud, or as simple as following Aerith through death and giving her a narrative arc to complete from “the other side.” Either way, that’s my biggest point of anticipation, and they have heavy incentives not to mess it up.
Listen, man: Why in the hell couldn’t we see the basement of Seventh Heaven? This game faithfully re-rendered every space in the original, while fully inventing others, except one space. Why, damn it, why couldn’t Cloud have been brought down there for a look? Instead we’re left in deep suspense. What would this have looked like really?
One dynamic I’m interested to chart as the world of the game expands in the sequel is how the intimacy of the Midgar phase of the game is imitated in the game’s other locales. The Slums of Midgar are vividly realized with all types of details, from a railyard with a backstory, to various bit characters that add charm and depth, to thoughtful looks at how and why the city exists in the way it does. In the original, much of that is lost as you go from town to town mainly because of a lack of time and space. The game focuses on character depth, while mentioning things like “Oh yeah, here’s a town that’s built like a cliff-face that has a giant gun pointing out into the middle of the ocean for … reasons.” There’s potential to make every subsequent space feel really intimately knowable, but that would definitely require a ton of invention and lots of time and space.
Listen, I’m grateful for Testuya Nomura, the creative director of Final Fantasy VII: Remake and main character designer from the original. But I don’t know if I trust him. His creative direction is certainly distinct, and I don’t believe I have the ability to properly characterize it, but it’s something I think about a lot. I was a huge fan of Kingdom Hearts, which he co-created, but the way in which that world expanded as it progressed through various sequels that felt increasingly like bald money grabs gives me real concern for the direction in which Final Fantasy VII’s remake series could head. The original Kingdom Hearts was a blending of Final Fantasy and Disney characters, like an RPG version of Marvel Vs. Capcom, designed mainly as a crossover between different universes. It bared out better than could have reasonably been imagined, and took on a life of its own. As the series evolved, however, it departed from this premise and subverted its formula, in which it created a universe as a plot device for bringing together Disney and Final Fantasy characters, into a formula wherein Disney characters were a highly lucrative plot device for developing the universe it created. Kingdom Hearts 3 has an entirely different feel from the original and feels like it abandoned its original purpose. You could definitely see the Remake games taking a similar path, diverting further and further from the original storyline and becoming about something else entirely. I’d be sad about it, but they definitely have the right to create what they want, and I don’t think I could complain, considering much of what I craved in a Final Fantasy VII remake was accomplished already through Remake.
It’s tough to expand on source material the way this game does. You have to be judicious in what threads to pull on, and how, and why. Any segment of content that isn’t directly derivative of the original is liable to be labeled fluff and filler. It has to feel rich, but cannot be overly consequential. That’s a tough balance to strike. Chapter Six of Remake, “Light the Way,” is a good example of this. On the way to Avalanche’s second bombing mission, you have to traverse a vast network of platforms on the underside of Midgar’s upper plate. In the original, you find a hole from the railway that leads you into tunnels that directly connect to the reactor. In Remake, they stick this part in. It has a few different functions. It gives you extended time working with the newly formed party of Cloud, Barret, and Tifa; it introduces the concept of “sunlamps,” absent from the original, which explains where the slums deal with the natural light problem caused by stacking a city on top of them. Ultimately, it’s probably not worth the add. The second bombing mission already takes plenty of time (three whole chapters, 17% of the game) and the world and character building the extra segment buys you probably isn’t worth the investment of winding through the needlessly mazy layout of the underplate.
I love, conversely, how they depict Shinra springing the trap on Avalanche in the second reactor. It’s a bigger production than when, in the original, President Shinra himself walks out to greet you and introduce the supersoldier they’ve created. You hear it’s being broadcast on television (though we are denied any glimpse of what this looks like to stakeholders who may be reacting to it, a missed opportunity to rope in some of the commonfolk we showed in the game’s intro), and the plan is to murder Avalanche and use their actions to justify a war they’d like to get around to waging. It feels organic and huge, even if the execution feels drawn out when you’re massacring rooms of Shinra soldiers who are trying to assemble this weapon on the fly as you get closer to carrying out your explosive plot.
Why did the boss music being correctly deployed for the first time in the battle against Airbuster make me emotional? I love the Final Fantasy VII boss music, it’s one of my favorite tracks in the whole Final Fantasy discography, and in the original you hear it for the first time against Airbuster. There are wisps of it in other tracks prior to this, but this is the most 1:1 rendition of it we get in the whole game. Understanding they weren’t going to use the same song for every boss fight in a game like this in 2024, I appreciate so much that they used it the way they did. I was definitely thrown off that the corresponding battle wasn’t very easy!
Thinking back to point 5, on technology, it is a little funny how important keycard access is to the entire Shinra corporate machine. Various single-use keycards are essential for unlocking the full potential of the corporate supersoldier? Alright. Keycards that grant a floor-specific level of access to the company’s headquarters? Sure.
After the fight with Airbuster, we meet Aerith in earnest, and this is a good time to say they absolutely crushed her character in the remake. She’s not exactly an overly difficult character to depict, but she is the perfect blend of aloof and deeply aware, ditzy and omniscient.
In contrast to point 16, the segment of the Collapsed Expressway, where Cloud and Aerith travel together, is an example of a high-level expansion on the original. The backstory that accompanies this expansion is cogent, and the way they took the below map and built it out is just the sort of thing you wanted to see.
Complete with walkthrough, here. While it’s an example of good expansion, it definitely does not constitute a “shortcut,” as opposed to walking through harmless Wall Market, and Aerith’s rationale for bringing them through here makes no sense.
Furthermore, one of the weird things about this game, all recent Final Fantasy games (starting with XIII), and games in general is the addiction to linearity. In the PlayStation 1 era, a given map tended to have four exits, with one on each edge of the screen. Now, maps tend to have two exits, the bottom and the top. This shift has made all dungeons essentially linear, including little brief, dead-end paths that had darn well better contain a treasure chest. It makes the world feel less organic, more two-dimensional. It’s like a sidescroller shot from a different angle. I guess it makes sense when literally you’re traversing the ruins of an expressway, but generally speaking, linearity is way too prominent in games.
Similarly, I don’t know why games like this bother featuring “puzzles” that amount to being light switches with superfluous steps. In the expressway, there are numerous obstacles in the form of ladders that have been pulled up (by whom, and for what reason, by the way?). To advance down the (linear) expressway, you need to configure the shipping containers in such a fashion as to allow Aerith to access the ladders from above, so she can kick down the ladder and you can cross. This is all a heartfelt homage to the odd, hand-shaped object shown in point 21, but it’s done wastefully. You can’t advance unless you solve the “puzzle,” there’s no alternate route, the puzzles are unsophisticated, there’s no way to do them more or less successfully — they’re all either done or not done, they don’t force you to innovatively employ your skills within the game, and there’s nothing that changes upon completing them other than the route forward opening up. So, a player is only ever going to solve the puzzles, and the puzzles will only ever accomplish taking up a little bit of the player’s time. They’re a waste. Why are most video game puzzles like this?
I’m also confused as to why certain action prompts want you to hold down the button to initiate. It’s customary practice for games to have you hold down a button if you’re say, pushing a crate, or doing something with a time element. But opening a gate latch? High fiving? What are we doing here? Is it necessary to allow the game to briefly load? I can think of no other rational reason.
Wall Market is the crown jewel of this game. Just a beautifully adapted rendering.
Waypoints totally ruin the experience of it, however.
Among Remake’s various added characters, Madam M may be my favorite. She is wonderfully acted by Mallory Low and she’s bizarre, clearly stuck between being a middle management pawn in a back-alley economy but feeling herself like a goddess. She has a tinge of mystique in the form of her singularly efficacious hand massages. Here we see her blowing her top telling Cloud and Aerith they have one more round to go in the Corneo Cup. Their indignance sets her off. She’s equally screwed over by the addition of a bonus match (she has money riding on Cloud and Aerith), and her facade of power is torn down in the process as she admits she has no control in the situation. I can forgive the awkward line delivery (it’s the accompanying animation to me that moreso misses the mark) because it’s interesting character development!
My hope for Madam M is that we see her in Costa del Sol, treating herself and getting away from it all, at least for a moment.
Scotch and Kotch, two bit characters that are ascribed a perfect role as fight pit emcees in Corneo’s Wall Market, bring up an interesting point in introducing the final match. There has to be some sort of acoustic consequences of a plate 50 meters off the ground (Jessie says this distance in explaining it to Cloud on the train). Fifty meters is about 164 feet. Google it and you’ll find all sorts of quibbling about how realistic that is, but anyway. Would the plate trap sound in a noticeable way? Would the two layers of Midgar hear each other (as Scotch and Kotch demand of the crowd at the fighting ring)? Again, these aren’t details we get to in fiction, usually. But at heart I’m still a kid imagining this world is real.
Some head nods I believe in that might not mean what I think they mean: When Jessie calls Cloud over to look at the monitor on the train that shows a scaled image of Midgar, she says “Well, let’s get this over with,” and as someone who played the game through about a dozen times over the years and always feverishly skipped through this expository dialogue, I felt that. I was disappointed that, in exiting the scene of the first reactor explosion, Wedge’s butt did not catch fire; but this disappointment was somewhat assuaged when, later, Wedge has his butt bitten by guard dogs (and eventually smacked by Jessie!). Biggs, in defense of a weapons upgrade system that was very much not in the original: “What are you, some kind of purist?” And, most abstractly, Aerith to Cloud as they prepare to travel by rooftop back to her home in Sector 5: “Shall we mosey on over?” to which Cloud replies, “Let’s.” In the original, his final line to the entire party, assembled at the precipice of the planet’s core within the Northern Crater, is, “Alright everyone, let’s mosey.” He is subsequently admonished for not saying something cooler like “Move out!” Since we have to “go there” with everything anymore, does the inclusion of that line mean there won’t be a scene at the planet’s core in which Cloud suggests that everyone mosey? Or does it mean that there will?
I truly feel like the game could have successfully included Wall Market squat master Big Bro, but just ran out of energy and replaced him with the more anodyne “Ronnie” (and Jay and Jules) instead.
The reason they ran out of energy was because they exerted it all somewhat miraculously converting the scene of Cloud crossdressing, contrived most likely in the original as a big homophobic joke, into something beautiful and affirmational. Andrea Rhodea is another phenomenal invention of a character, and guides Cloud through the process of beautifying himself so he can infiltrate Don Corneo’s evident sex trafficking ring and save Tifa. The concept of crossdressing itself is shown in an entirely different and more positive light. I was extremely anxious that this particular scene would make me feel embarrassed as a fan of the original, and instead I was really proud, for some reason, like a parent, again, at the way it played out in Remake.
Again, I’m impressed at how they threaded the needle of Cloud’s too-cool character being open to drag for the sake of saving Tifa. After performing in Wall Market, he exits and can’t face Aerith out of embarrassment. He manages to be very embarrassed but never quite ashamed, which is a really important distinction.
Entering Corneo’s mansion, and the accompanying string swell, is another moment where the game turns the musical effect up to 10.
Finally, his line when reacquainting with Tifa upon being thrown in Corneo’s sex dungeon, “Nailed it, I know, moving on,” is my favorite line of the whole game.
Some spoilers apply, I guess.