Breaking the Cycle in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake
[SPOILER]
We take a SPOILER-heavy look at the Final Fantasy 7 Remake and how it is shifting our expectations away from the Original Final Fantasy 7 game. This means there are spoilers for both the Original Final Fantasy 7, as well massive spoilers for Final Fantasy 7 Remake. There are also minor spoilers for Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core (PSP), Final Fantasy 13–2, Final Fantasy 10, Final Fantasy 9 and Final Fantasy 4. Read at your own discretion.
Confused about the final boss and the ending of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake? I breakdown the immense significance of how this ending frees us from an invisible oppression that we never knew existed.
In this article, we cover:
1. How the game’s primary driving factor became our biggest enemy.
2. How we come to hate our fate, and yearn for a new story free from expectations.
3. How fate was stunting any real character development or plot twists.
4. How destroying fate and following a new story is the only way to finish this episodic journey.
The first installment of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake has ushered the landmark 1997 game into the latest decade. We saw an obvious overhaul of the graphics and battle system to be much more attractive to the modern gamer. The question teetering on everyone’s minds was “will Square-Enix change the story”?
In my mind, the story has to change. There is too much realism with the new graphics to get away with certain plot revelations in the original. As well, modern gamers have evolved their thematic expectations over the past 23 years. The crux of Square Enix’s problem isn’t “WHAT they are going to change?” The question they had to answer was “HOW are they going to change it?” Especially with the massive expectation from gamers to re-live a classic game.
This overwhelming feeling of “HOW” will they change the story, became the “big bad” for the first section of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake. In other Final Fantasy games, we often have to “break the cycle” of depraved complacency. For example, in FF10 the cycle of defeating Sin, the Calm, and Summoner’s journey needed to be ended once and for all. In FF13–2, Caius wanted to save Yeul from a constant cycle of death. In the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, they set out to end the depraved cycle of constantly retelling the same story. Square Enix contrived the Whispers, Fate, and the Harbringers as a new plot device to make the original story our true enemy.
As we watch the Whispers drive major story interactions, we the players start to HATE the Whispers. They tried to kill Jessie, Biggs, and Wedge (they promptly died in the original with the fallen plate). They held us back from finishing off Reno in the Church (that is OK, we love Reno). They forced the meet-cute of Cloud and Aerith in the 2nd chapter, negating the impact of that beautiful love-at-first-sight moment. They made a potentially significant twist of Barret’s death into a trivial affair — showing how unfairly powerful they are to even raise the dead. In short, with the Whispers forcing the plot stringently on the path of the original, the player becomes increasingly frustrated at the lack of real conflict. They are teaching us that if we already know our fate, then life becomes rather mundane.
Sci-fi novelist Kurt Vonnegut gives us important perspectives on fate and morality. “There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.” (Slaughterhouse Five). In Slaughterhouse Five, massive war crimes are waived away as saying “They had to happen” as a requirement of fate.
When a corporation kills thousands of people without batting an eye: Are they the evil ones? No, fate required them to do it — they had no choice in the matter. The Whispers literally blocked us from stopping Reno from activating the detonation. If anything, it is MY fault, the hardcore gamer expecting to re-live the same genocide, that caused this catastrophe to happen again and scar a new generation of gamers. Can you handle that kind of guilt? I can not.
To gain the player’s approval to change the story, the developers make the story itself our enemy. They make us loathe seeing these Whispers come on-screen, push our characters around, stop me from accessing materia, and negating any sense of real danger. In other games we fight other abstract deities of death itself to release us from their grip (Zeromus (FF4), Necron (FF9)). This time we fight the deities of fate, driven into being by the game’s overbearing predecessor.
When we defeat the Harbringer of Fate and the Whispers are finally dispersed, there is a tremendous weight lifted off of the game world of the Remake. We gain a glimpse of new beginnings of Biggs stirring in bed, and we see an alternate reality where Zack survives (perhaps if we were open to plot changes earlier, he could have survived and been a bigger part of this Remake). The developers are telling us that without the Whispers, parts of the Final Fantasy Remake backstory might also be rewritten, not just the future. The game can truly BEGIN as its own “Unknown Journey” — having shed its own overbearing expectations.
In the next blog we will cover the top 5 story alterations that have ALREADY slipped through the Whispers fingers in this Remake. Showing us that they are not all-powerful, and setting up Final Fantasy VII Remake Part 2 for a massive departure from the original story.
-Andrew
