Developer(s): Square Enix
Publisher: Square Enix
Platform: Playstation 4
*Spoilers for a 23 year-old game ahead, oh and also Final Fantasy XV*
In memory of Ahad, a true First-Class SOLDIER
Let me tell you a story
I feel like most people who have played Final Fantasy VII have their own personal story associated with the game. Yeah, that’s where this post is going: strap yourselves in, folks. FFVII has this special power, enchanting everyone who comes into contact with it and burning itself into their memories. It’s a special game that seems to find people when they need it the most. For me, that time wasn’t 1997 (I wasn’t even born – feel old yet?) or 2000 or 2010. I wouldn’t play FFVII until 2014 (which was six years ago – feel old yet?). To put that into context, Super Smash Bros. 4, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, Destiny, and Dark Souls II came out that year, and I was over here changing discs and slamming chibi 32-bit action figures together. Between then and now, I took my GCSE and A level secondary school exams, got a degree, and moved country for work.
So why did I devote my time to this 17 year-old game when I should have been playing with the next-gen cool kids? It was all at the behest of one of my best friends in secondary school. I was familiar with the world and characters of Final Fantasy VII through him telling me about it, watching him play the spin-off Crisis Core, and showing me Advent Children, but I had very little interest in JRPG’s in general at that point. It was only through his encouragement and a spontaneous download on the PSN store that I finally sat down to experience what he was raving about.
And holy shit. While not a looker, there was something about those loveable characters, incredibly quotable (if often mistranslated) lines, the emotional scale of the adventure, and its timeless soundtrack that lulled me into a dreamlike state and consumed me. The uncanny looks of the character models against the pre-rendered backgrounds enhanced the experience, forcing my imagination to fill in the blanks the PS1’s graphical power could not, to take in Nobuo Uematsu’s glorious score that so expertly carries the emotion of every event. The customisable materia system pushed me to express what roles I thought these characters should play within the team. In squeezing in a little of every latest gaming development the Playstation 1’s newfangled discs brought – 3d models, FMV cutscenes – it definitely felt like teen-Charles was experiencing a piece of gaming history. I had played ‘retro’ games before then, a lot of them older than FFVII, but it was FFVII that really confirmed just how little graphics meant to me if the world presented was charming and the story’s theming was tight.
Unfortunately, that same friend passed away shortly before I went to university in 2016. Although we saw each other less and less throughout secondary school – our separate subjects, exams, and splintering friendship groups dividing our attention – I was still devastated. I don’t look back on secondary school with huge fondness (it’s a complicated period in most people’s lives) but he was undoubtedly one of the people who helped me through it the most.
The Final Fantasy series thus became a coping mechanism, a way for me to feel as if I were reconnecting with that friend. I went on to play Final Fantasy’s IV, IX, and X, and still have many to check off my list. As I ploughed through those games, I noticed that my experiences with the series were irrevocably intertwined with my memories of him. As flawed and hollow an experience as Final Fantasy XV is, spending time with Noctis and the guys on the open road, cooking at camp, and watching them rage over a game of King’s Knight are still the best moments of that game. Playing it was like coming to terms with my loss, taking one last road trip, saying one last goodbye because I knew I had to move on somehow, as Noctis does.
Out of all the FF games, going back to VII reminds me of him most. Its themes of legacy, loss, and dealing with your past actions with the help of your friends retroactively felt tailor-made to help me work through this grief. The one moment my mind keeps coming back to is actually from the conclusion of Crisis Core, and also happened to be his favourite: Zack Fair futilely and single-handedly fighting off hundreds of Shinra soldiers, defending Cloud to the death, never losing his cocky smile, even though he knows this is his last stand. With his dying breath, he leans over to the terrified Cloud and tells him that he will “be [his] living legacy” before bequeathing him the iconic Buster Sword. Anyone who has played FFVII or Crisis Core knows what a formative moment this is for Cloud’s identity and the events of FFVII. Looking back, I can’t help but empathise with Cloud, losing a friend and role model, someone who was always smiling, and carrying those memories of Zack forward as he has to keep fighting on.
In spite of Final Fantasy’s identity crisis and constant development hell during the seventh generation of video games and onward, my friend never lost hope that Final Fantasy XV, Kingdom Hearts III, and VII Remake had the potential to be as generation-defining as those earlier titles. After his passing, I felt a kind of obligation to follow the series religiously, in the hope that the JRPG juggernaut would reclaim its former glory.
Despite my initial (and some persisting) scepticism, I think we might finally be there. For the longest time, I tried to convince myself that FFVIIRemake would be just a shallow facelift of a popular game to cash in on nostalgia, that I didn’t need it. I had already been underwhelmed by Final Fantasy XV, after all. For the sake of my friend’s memory, however, I couldn’t resist keeping a close eye on its progress, praying for its success. From about E3 2019, the trailers for Remake started showing ridiculous levels of promise. When the demo dropped just over a week ago, I knew what I had to do.
And holy shit. After months of apathy towards a game I thought would be a shallow upscaling of a classic to cash in on nostalgia, this demo feels like Square Enix telling me to sit down and shut up. This recreation of the iconic opening mission demonstrated to me just how serious SE is about honouring this game’s legacy, reigniting its magic, and expanding on it with modern tech where it can. This is the most confident I have seen Square Enix in a long time. Like the 1997 title it’s based on, FFVII Remake looks set to be on the cutting-edge of video game presentation and storytelling all over again. Colour me impressed, and beyond hyped for 10th April.
Look at dem graphics
Although I may have just stated how little I care for graphical power compared to art design, FFVII Remake looks stunning by both metrics. I will defend the original’s pre-rendered backgrounds to my dying day, but seeing Midgar reconstructed in full 3d conveys a sense of scale the original could not. Looking back at Advent Children and Crisis Core, their colours were washed out, a neutered version of the ethereal and oppressive Midgar of the original. In contrast, Remake’s overstylised shadows and different-coloured light sources, that iconic green glow radiating from everywhere, everything has an authenticity about it making this look like SE’s most polished product in years.The cinematography here is awesome and I have genuine difficulty distinguishing between the real-time graphics and pre-rendered cutscenes. Even the first boss is flipping all over the reactor core now, breaking off chunks of the wall – which you have to hide behind to avoid that famous laser attack. My only hope is that the developers choose to lock the game at 30 frames per second because performance can be a little choppy, even on PS4 Pro. Despite that, as the camera swung behind Cloud and he glared at that reactor looming in the distance, mirroring that classic artwork on the front of the game box, I felt instantly reassured that Remake was in the right hands. I have never seen a video game feel itself so much in the space of an hour, but I am so for it if this is the result.
Those who fight
Understandably, another thing keeping me up at night was FFVII Remake’s decision to redesign the combat to be more in line with FFXV’s. By the demo’s close, however, I found myself really excited about its potential. In essence, it feels like a mixture of Final Fantasy XV and Xenoblade Chronicles’ combat. One of those is my favourite RPG of all time and the other one is Final Fantasy XV, but the marriage of those systems here feels really slick. The base game of Final Fantasy XV did not let you control your other party members, but switching here is smooth and encouraged to make sure that all characters have ATB points on standby to execute actions like healing, magic, and special attacks. Whereas Final Fantasy XV’s combat felt like an undercooked action game, limiting player choice at every opportunity, Final Fantasy VII feels like a perfect hybrid of JRPG and action game: needing to expend ATB points to prioritise healing or all-out offence makes battles legitimately tense, especially since the only way to gain more points is to throw yourself back into the fray. I didn’t know I was playing Hollow Knight again, but that can never be a bad thing. The real-time combat gives you a lot to think about at any one time, and you can quite easily get your ass handed to you if you are not concentrating on enemy weaknesses, which keeps it from feeling button-mashy.
The increased emphasis on positioning this combat system brings is welcome, too: Barrett’s long-range gun-arm is brilliant at dispatching far-off foes, enemies can interrupt your item and spell-casting animations if you are not careful, and a well-placed sword swing with Cloud can tear through multiple enemies. When I saw that everyone would be getting their own special attacks mapped to triangle, I became giddy anticipating what the other characters might have and what synergies that could lead to. I even found myself experimenting with offensive items like the grenades a lot more than in the original because of their area-of-effect and because I knew it would not result in a wasted turn. Animations are visceral, flashy, and immensely satisfying. This is how Final Fantasy XV should have played, but if that game was a necessary experiment to get to this point, then it looks like it was worth it.
THE MUSIC
To say that Final Fantasy VII’s soundtrack is good would be an understatement. To this day, I regularly listen to it and am still struck by the sheer range of tones it covers. The music does so much work in conveying the emotions that the stiff, lifeless PS1 models cannot. Thankfully, Square Enix knew this would be a determining factor of Remake’s success, so no expense has been spared. The legendary composer Nobuo Uematsu returns, alongside more recent FF composers Masashi Hamauzu and Mitsuto Suzuki, to deliver a cinematic, bombastic twist on melodies we know and love. Right away, the instrumentation of most of these tracks sounds like a perfect conversion of the PS1 samples. The temptation with orchestral remixes is to make them too busy in an effort to outdo the original, but the remixes I’ve heard so far respect their sources, as if this is how Uematsu intended them to sound back in 1997, had the hardware permitted it. ‘Bombing Mission’ creates this train yard soundscape with sounds mimicking the pistons of heavy machinery. It effectively channels that sense of a rag-tag team of eco-warriors sneaking around and causing havoc, but with the heroic fanfare demanded by the Sisyphean task of remaking Final Fantasy VII. ‘Mako Rector’ retains those vocals that sound like the pained cries of the planet Barret alludes to. Everything I have heard so far has thrilled me in disturbingly similar ways to my first playthrough of that classic.
But Final Fantasy VII Remake’s musical ambitions go beyond simply appeasing fans, expanding on the original with modern game music trends that I absolutely adore and which complement the cinematic direction Square Enix is taking. Every theme has a calm and intense variant that the game seamlessly switches between during exploration and battles. The boss theme, ‘Those Who Fight Further’, takes it one step further with three phases that reflect the progression of the boss fight. Other really nice touches include stings when transitioning between cutscene and gameplay so that the next queued track can play seamlessly. Being a giant nerd, I was also never going to miss the leitmotif of ‘One-Winged Angel’ that plays when Cloud hallucinates and sees one of Sephiroth’s black feathers (it makes sense in the iconography of FFVII, I swear) and during the opening with Aerith. I just hope they don’t overdo that foreshadowing in the full game. All these details make Remake play just as much like a symphony as the original.
Welcome back, Cloud
With the many spin-offs based on FFVII’s characters and world, Square Enix has departed a lot from what these characters used to be. I was worried that we’d be seeing Kingdom Hearts Cloud or Advent Children Cloud creeping into Remake, but that isn’t the case. Thankfully, while the voice-acting in Remake is typically cheesy Final Fantasy fare, I would be lying if I said I didn’t love it and that it fits the characters perfectly. I’m loving Cody Christian’s delivery as Cloud so far – he really nails that disinterested, punished air but with a vulnerability and awkwardness that characterise Cloud in the original. The way that the Shinra guards shout “It’s over” at Cloud and he responds “That’s my line” with zero irony is just perfect.
More people are going to take issue with Eric John Bentley’s delivery performance as Barret because voice acting has only exacerbated the fact that his character is a shameless Hollywood black action hero stereotype. That said, I’m not too concerned about this representation in the final game because I know from playing the original that Barret gets far more fleshed out from his behaviour around Marlene to his past with Dyne. What I can’t bring myself to criticise, however, is the banter between Cloud and Barret, which is brilliant. At one point in the demo, Barret asks “what are you? Twenty?” to which Cloud responds that he is “First” (First Class SOLDIER). Understandably, Barret rebutts “The hell you talking about? I mean your age, not your goddamn rank!”, shattering Cloud’s bravado and exposing his weirdness in spectacular fashion. Similarly, Barret’s uneasiness with working with a former SOLDIER who does not believe in the imminent death of the planet makes for a tense elevator ride. Whether or not Barret’s character and all the other’s work is going to come down to those frequent moments of downtime when characters reflect on their past actions and emotions. This was the case in the original, and it looks like it will be the case here, if Square Enix continue to sprinkle interactions like these throughout the game.
Yet there is still a worry in the back of my mind. There is one character in FFVII whose personality requires more subtlety than any other: Sephiroth. History and spin-offs have remembered Sephiroth as a perfectly edgy, cool rival character, the Shadow to Cloud’s Sonic. In actuality, Sephiroth is an incredibly traumatised and deluded guy. Most of his magic as a villain comes from how omnipresent a threat he is despite having very little screen-time. He is Cloud’s hero, the reason he joined SOLDIER, and now he is a monster. Most of FFVII is spent blindly following Sephiroth’s bloody trail as he enacts his plan without any certainty that you will be able to defeat him when you find him. He’s the perfect creation of a militant corporation, but he has shunned society for over a decade. If Remake is going beyond the normal scope of a remake by expanding on story elements, I’m worried that we’re going to be seeing Sephiroth a lot more to justify splitting the game into parts. Include him too little and the player may lose sight of the objective. Include him too much and he loses a lot of what distinguishes him from other JRPG villains and, by extension, what makes the driving force of FFVII so powerful. Whether SE strike that balance or not might not even matter if each of the parts’ 50 hour runtimes wreck the pacing anyway.
The fanboy comes back down to earth
Oh yeah, the parts. For all the positives I took from this demo, I cannot help being somewhat sceptical, not about the combat, nor the soundtrack, nor the presentation in general. I am worried about how all these elements will come together in a complete package. With the game being episodic in nature, and Square Enix remaining quiet on how many parts it will comprise, that’s still up in the air. If we’re getting four episodes, each costing £50, each with their own digital deluxe edition costing £80, each taking up to 100GB of a PS4’s internal memory, each lasting 50 hours, that could be quite a difficult proposition for the average consumer. The original FFVII is so thematically rich at just 50 hours, goes for £12 on modern hardware (which even then is kinda steep for a 23 year-old game but whatever), and has modern conveniences like speeding up battles (and mods, if you’re playing on PC). I don’t see how Square Enix can stretch that same plot over 200 hours without compromising hugely on pacing. No amount of expanded plot details would be able to fill those cracks. I wholeheartedly believe Square Enix’s approach to a ‘remake’ as a standalone experience offering alternative gameplay and/or narrative to the original to be the right one. It has worked for Resident Evil 2 (2019), among other high-profile remakes. At the same time, I don’t want them to bloat the game in an attempt to justify each part selling for full retail price. That would be the worst of both worlds.
Many remakes strive to be the ‘definitive’ edition of their respective games. It is my belief that the best remakes do not attempt to erase their sources, but offer a new take on that older game that allows both to co-exist, and it would seem that Square Enix and I share that view. FFVII Remake is so vastly different in gameplay, presentation, and story that there is no way it will erase the original in the hearts of fans. Regardless of how the changes introduced in Remake are received, there will always be merit in playing the original for history and comparison’s sake. Remember that I, a fifteen year-old boy, was able to play this thing in 2014 and still get sucked into it. FFVII is a time capsule of gaming’s past and there is value in revisiting it. Consider giving it a shot – it’s about 50 hours on a leisurely playthrough: put in a couple of hours every day from now and you’ll probably finish it before the remake’s release.
Final Fantasy VII Remake has already proven that it is treating this monumental task with the respect it deserves, through trailers and demos highlighting how Square Enix is re-interpreting iconic moments with modern tech. But Final Fantasy VII is more than the city of Midgar, the bombing mission, Cloud wearing a dress, or Sephiroth brandishing that long, thin blade while walking broodingly into the flames of Nibelheim. It is a vast, gloomy, and hostile world filled with sidequests, story beats expertly conveyed through gameplay, character backstories, one-off set-piece minigames, and secret chances to score items early. Everything I’m seeing from Remake is impressing me, but the fact is that we won’t know how – or if – it all comes together until we have all the pieces in our hands.I just hope that Square Enix has the stamina to carry the demo’s level of quality across the whole game. I hope that the emotional moments of the original, carried by the music and the understated, helpless looks of the primitive models in this cruel world translate to this current-gen experience, producing a game that works within its limitations (FFVII), rather than one with good intentions but which ultimately ends up crushed by the weight of its ambition (FFXV). However the full game(s) turn(s) out, “there ain’t no gettin’ offa this train we’re on, till we get to the end of the line”.
I just want to give some shout-outs to some good FFVII content. Youtuber Maximillian Dood has an almost two-hour long playthrough of the demo where he lovingly inspects every inch of it and tries to squeeze out every conceivable detail. If you need a recap on how amazing the original FFVII is, Super Eyepatch Wolf examines how the game has carved a permanent place in the hearts of fans in spite of, and maybe because of, its technical limitations.
I will never tire of hearing people gush about this game.