Final Fantasy VII — Do we really need a remake?
Final Fantasy VII came out in 1997. It was one of the reasons I bought the original Playstation when it was released in 1995 and the hype for the game was humongously high. I was 14 years old when my parents gave me the game with a promise: I'd only play for a day and then shelf the game until school was over.
You see, after all the trauma I've been through when I was a little kid, I became kind of a rebel when I turned a teen. When I was 13, I was listening to Oasis, Blur, The Verve and other rock bands, I was starting to play the guitar and began to question my sexuality and gender. So school, grades and everything around it took a backseat and I never really gave it the attention required. I particularly sucked at math. It was my Achille's heel; my parents went out of their way hiring special math tutors for me (here in Brazil they're called "professores particulares" or, in a rough translation, "private teachers") so that I could get the necessary grades to advance and progress with my schooling.
So it's not to anyone's surprise that my grades were really bad at the end of 1997 and my parents wanted me to focus on my studies instead of video games and electric guitars, so they forbade me of playing the game. However, my Playstation was in my room, so was the game, therefore, I played hidden from them, when they were at work or asleep. Because of that, most of my early memories of Final Fantasy VII are in black and white, since my TV was PAL-M, the old standard we used here in Brazil, and the videogame, since it was north american, NTSC.
It was because of Final Fantasy VII that I fell in love with the series as a whole. It convinced me to purchase the newest title in the franchise which would later become my favorite game of all time (Tactics — and I've already written a love letter to it) and delivered on everything I expected a good RPG to do so. This game remains one of the best titles ever released, a testament to Square's golden years where everything they released was, well, gold.
C'mon, think about it: the SNES games were pure gold — from the aforementioned Final Fantasy games to all the other gems such as Secret of Mana, Front Mission and, of course, let's not forget the absolutely crazy and amazing mishmash with Nintendo that was Super Mario RPG. Then the Playstation was released and it seemed as if they'd amped up their, well, game even further, with the release of masterpieces such as the game we're talking about on this article, Tactics, Einhander, Bushido Blade, Xenogears and even oddities such as Brave Fencer Musashi (which I bought exclusively because it pocketed a demo for the upcoming Final Fantasy VIII and, as it turned out, it was much better game than that sorry excuse for an RPG — but that's the subject for another article!)
One of the reasons I'm kinda on the fence regarding the upcoming Final Fantasy VII remake is exactly that: why change or taint what represents the best development years of a great softhouse? Don't get me wrong, change is many times good and necessary; I wholeheartedly embrace it. But when you're dealing with people's nostalgia of a product they love, things can get really tricky, especially from a design standpoint: what do you change in order to accommodate a more modern view of what gamers expect nowadays without tarnishing how those same fans feel about the game? How do you redesign a game without changing its soul?
Square Enix's own Tetsuya Nomura already told us that the remake won't sport the franchise's famous, genre-defining turn based battle system (you can read more about it here and here). According to the legendary game designer, the game's battles will be "action based". And if we compare the footage of the teasers with how everything works on the awful Final Fantasy XV… Well, you get the idea.
I'm also not a big fan of the art direction they went for. The emo-goth-k-pop look doesn't represent anything to me. It's just, well, too teenagey. The greatest thing about pixel-art or early lo-poly graphics is that they allow you to imagine and picture the characters with a little bit more freedom. So when you looked at Cloud's blocky figure on the original game, you could abstractly imagine what you felt he looked instead of what the devs want you to see concretely.
This represents a huge change. Instead of letting you fly with the characters emotionally and actually get involved in the story, the way the new art direction works is kind of like a wall; maybe there's a great painting on it, maybe its got a nice wallpaper, but it's still a wall and unless you get it down, that's what you end up with. An unmovable, stiff, emo-painted wall. And this is kind of funny: while the original game was comprised of blocks suggesting what the characters might look like but being much closer to actually looking concretely like the aforementioned wall, it's actually quite the opposite because of how we felt the characters actual appearance was.
One big part of good game design, at least in my opinion, is treating the gamer/fan with respect. It's actually allowing them to make up their own stories about their adventures, it's letting them have fun the way they want while treating them as highly intelligent and adaptable. Games that treat me like this have a soft spot in my heart, helped me during many crazy times in my life and also made me write these entire articles about video games. In highly intensive, tightly controlled, hold-your-hand style games, how can you achieve that? How can you treat the consumer with the utmost respect and let him create his own special feelings and memories while still telling a pretty straight forward, linear adventure?
This is where the original Final Fantasy VII shines. Because the game lets me develop a deep connection to the characters by telling a compelling story, but also let's me wonder what would they look like if they were real. Because even though I need to complete a certain amount of events in order to reach the ending of the game, it lets me roam around and learn, at least slightly, what the history of Gaia is through other means. Because I can either not grind at all and tactfully think each battle, sort my materia and items, and have a difficult but highly rewarding time or I can just stay a couple of hours killing monsters for level-ups and have an easier time during the main story encounters. Because even though the game's linear, it doesn't feel it is. It treats the gamer with respect.
With all that said, you probably think I'm definitely not inclined to play Final Fantasy VII Remake. You might even think I don't want it altogether. That's not true. When I watched the announcement trailer at E3 in 2015 and saw the word "remake" flip and light up my computer screen, I'm almost fell off my chair and cried in excitement. Final Fantasy VII carries a lot of weight for me and to see it brought back to life in modern tech was mind blowing, something I never thought Square Enix's would tackle. But since they are tackling it, they'd best treat the game and its fans with the respect they deserve. And they also need to be very careful with something really important — the thing that makes mass-produced products become pieces of art and transcend their medium: Final Fantasy VII has a soul.
After all, what would you do? Would you redesign something with a profound soul and risk losing it in order to try and get it released with new technology or would you never touch it again, letting people's feelings about it slowly fade with the passing of the time?
