Final Fantasy VII Remake: A Review

Having finished the game, I now understand that reviewing FFVII Remake is going to mean two very distinct things. The first is to review it as a game that you play, and the enjoyment factor which means the battles and gameplay mechanisms, the graphics, the audio, the designs, the characters and relationships, the individual events, game progression and all of that.

Then there is the story you watch / read / perceive, in relation to the original game and the lore around FFVII. And, of course, that ending.

Well, that’s a lot to cover. So let’s get the first part out of the way.

Gameplay

The thing I was most unsure, going into the Remake, was obviously the combat. In the time between the original and the release of the Remake, I have grown from a young teen that can sleep 4 hours a day to a dad-of-a-six-year-old who cannot play more than 90 minutes of FPS without feeling like I’m about to throw up. The concept of an action RPG itself wasn’t so daunting, however that fight they showed with Scorpion Sentinel looked WAY more difficult than the original, and sent my head spinning just watching it.

So it would be right to say that I was… worried.

The demo didn’t help. It had been a long time since I played serious console games on TV (sorry Switch, nothing personal), and man was I exhausted after the Scorpion Sentinel. I actually played it twice the day I downloaded the demo, and the next day I had a migraine.

There was just so much going on, and it felt really challenging on Normal. I was constantly trying to heal, which depletes your ATB bar, which means you have to go in and attack to recharge, which means more damage from the damn thing, which means trying to heal again next time your ATB bar is charged. Rinse and repeat. I never felt in control, I never knew what I was doing, my dodge timing was crap, and I felt like the second time I played, I played worse than the first time, which is an indication that the battle has completely overloaded me that I had no spare capacity to learn and get better.

It led me to think, “If this is what the first boss looks like, I’m not gonna be able to complete this game.”

Alas, the full game arrived. I fought the Scorpion Sentinel for the 3rd time. I played worse yet again. I was convinced I sucked at action games and I’m just too old for this shit. There was however no other options, but to soldier on (no pun intended).

Having seen other bosses since that one, I would definitely rank Scorpion Sentinel very close to the top of the difficulty scale. I have no idea why they have to make the first boss so tough. I’m not sure if I go start a new Normal game now, and try it on one more time, that it would still feel as difficult or I have actually got better in this game. Maybe it is the lack of experience. Maybe the lack of equipment and materia. Maybe both. But it is safe to say that the game on Normal felt much less challenging in the later parts than it felt earlier on — I do take great care to maximize the number of materia I can carry most of the time, like I always swapped out maxed materia even though it might hurt my immediate gameplay, so by the final third of the game I think my materia had far exceeded the “average” levels that the game devs have calculated.

Apart from that I think the game allows you to slowly get better at the battle system. For example, I seem to be picking my moments to use the ATB more intelligently, rather than just dishing spells out once it gets charged, cuz, as we know, interruption is a pretty big part in this combat system. As such the system did grow on me and I am more able to enjoy it now than compared to the first few chapters. Do I like this over the turn-based classic system? No. Other than being old and being bad in general about timing and reaction, the aspect of clarity that you get from a menu-based system is lost. What I mean by that is that in the original game, it is quite clear to you, for example, how much difference there is between Barret’s Thunder and Aerith’s, or how much more damage I make putting Elemental-Ice against certain enemies. It is very calculatable and for me personally, that aspect of tweaking and knowing quite exactly what your tweaking is going to produce was a fun part that I treasured.

With a hybrid system rooted in action, there’s so much going on that you rarely pay attention to that kind of numeric detail (at least during your first playthrough). To this day I still cannot be sure whether I should use Thundara or Thundaga. If I defeated a difficult boss it felt more like luck than because I was good. I often cannot explain what I did well and what I did not so well, and what was effective and what was not. Maybe I beat this boss cos I made a good dodge just-in-time. Maybe not. I didn’t like the fact that there was much less clarity compared to the original.

Do I like this combat system on its own? Yes I do, abzulutely (excuse the pun)! Like I said, it had grown on me. If given the choice I would still go for a re-invented but menu-based system. But IF the premise HAS TO BE a hybrid between action and tactical, this system is probably the optimal way to do it. It is particularly clever to have included pressure and stagger, which sort of gives you a goal for every fight (and a really good reason to use Assess, unlike Sense in the original). It is shapes your strategy as you are more often laser-focused in piling up the pressure in a short burst of time to cause the stagger. And it is rewarding as hell when you succeed. It is fun, and barring a few annoying enemies / level designs, it is a thoroughly enjoyable system.

Also you cannot argue with slow-mo action. Cool AF. Never gets old.

(If only they’d have fixed the camera angles and the aerial combat…)

What also never gets old is materia tweaking. I love optimisation. It’s an itch that I have. The original game was always fun for me for the endless tweakability through the materia system. I think it is the cleverest job system in the world, without even being a job system. It is flexible, and the trade offs you make have real material consequences. You can remove everything and equip everything again to re-optimize it. Stressful for some players, mabye, a real joy for me. I’m so glad that they didn’t really change much of it from the original, and just made the menus much more user-friendly. Very very nice.

Weapons tweaking is more like a traditional jobs system where you invest points into new abilities. It is less flexible, but a good complement to the materia system. It is wonderful to be able to still use Buster Sword towards the end (I didn’t, but you could). I think personally I still haven’t completely figured out the depths of this system, because I feel like each weapon gradually reveals its true colors (or, specialization) as the upgrade cores open up. There are some very interesting things I haven’t yet tried because I didn’t feel the need to, but for example you can surely have some weapons specializing in critical hits, some in magic assistance / regeneration, some geared towards tougher fights (Low HP and Limit boosts), and so on. What I’m trying to say is, if you do away with the generic ATK Up or MAG Up abilities, and actually concentrate the SP on the “weird” ones, you might be able to build weapons with very distinct characteristics, allowing you to pick the right tool for the right job.

One thing though. Why the hell did the Upgrade Weapons menu need to be its own thing? Why can’t I push a button on the Equipment menu and zoom into the cores? It would have been so much better without that overhead, and even better if I can see how weapons compare with each other in all departments (not just attack / magic attack & defense / magic defense).

Overall, gameplay was very enjoyable, progressively gets better, and has depth to be explored post-game. Menus were mostly very intuitive and easy to use. Can’t really find too much fault with it except the aerial and camera aspects — which everybody agrees — so a well-deserved 9/10 here.

Graphics and Visuals

Probably the most original motivation for anyone to want a remake for FFVII is because of the explosive development around the end of the 90’s to the mid 00’s on video game graphics. In those short few years, the fidelity of games are have become leaps and bounds ahead of the early PS1 games. It made fans of the OG ponder how awesome this classic would be if it was done in updated graphics. It made you feel a sense of lost opportunity, like, “what if FFVII came out just a few years later? It would have been even more awesome!”

As it happens, we have been made to wait much longer to see that dream come true. And at first glance, it seems to have affirmed all of our dreams — the worlds looked beautiful, the lighting is wonderful and the characters come to life in ways we’ve only imagined (or seen in Advent Children, perhaps). But on closer inspection, some of its aura falls apart.

There are loads of textures of very questionable resolution in a game such as this, including that very lousy giant JPEG that is right there in your face the entirety of chapter 15. That one felt like it came from the original game. Lighting feels poor and unfinished, or otherwise low-res, in quite a number of places even though the majority of the game felt fine. Lip-syncing and facial expression are not its forte’s. Repeated NPC assets are LITTERED all over the place — I literally saw the same person walking towards me right after walking past him / his copy half a second ago. Given all of this, and the fact that there’s no open world / not many pre-rendered cutscenes in this game, I struggle to understand what that 90 GB are about, and whether we could / should have gotten more out of this game.

Another aspect was camera work. The OG was always known to be one of the first RPGs out there to provide a heavily cinematic experience to the player. It had changing camera angles, zoom-ins and various perspectives which aided the storytelling or gave weight to, say, a special attack in battle. The rest was, due to technical limitation, a 3rd person fixed camera looking at pre-rendered backgrounds with rendered spikes go through them. But rather than thinking that was detrimental to the experience, I felt it made the parts where the camera moved stand out more — you knew the moment was special when the camera angle started changing.

Of course in this Remake they wouldn’t do that — being able to look up and down and around really has its perks. You can look up and see the plate above, you can look at all the detail that’s gone into the every part of the environment, and soak it all in like you were there. It is just that I felt there were moments where they could have brought that old 3rd person camera back — maybe in tight spaces (god do I get dizzy sometimes), maybe to make certain fights less confusing, or maybe, in some faithfully-recreated environments, just to pay homage to the OG by giving you a moment of the old camera. The fountain square in sector 8 after you meet Aerith on Loveless Street comes to mind.

Overall I think visually Remake just about does its job. It is mostly a good-looking current-gen game that feels beautifully done — until you start scrutinizing it. More thought could have been added in how to deal with camera work. I wouldn’t say it missed the mark, but I would say there’s a lot to be desired in this department. I therefore give it a mediocre 7/10.

Music and Audio

Man, this is one area where Remake completely knocks it out of the park. I mean, the source material from the OG of course already gave them a very solid starting point. But still, I think they did an amazing job transforming it, and adding new bits that mostly fell right into place. There is one questionable track at the collapsed expressway that had FFXIII vibes (and that game really did NOT have a great soundtrack), but apart from that, I loved everything they’ve done. It is as effective, if not more, in bringing moments and environments to life as the original. The standout piece for me was the Tifa theme in minor when the crew got back to Sector 7 slums after the plate fell. It was haunting. It hurt. A lot.

In terms of SFX I think this game is very much on-point. I never felt like any effect was out-of-place, in and out of battle. The weight of attacks sounded exactly like they looked. When you stagger an enemy you can hear the moment and everything clicks. All feels consistent, no complaints. Menu sound effects were also pleasing (much improved from OG).

So, simply put, this is another masterpiece when it comes to music and sounds. 9.5/10 here.

World Building

The steampunk environment that is Midgar is very well-represented. The richer areas on the plate is very distinct to the slums, yet share the same Mako-influenced look-and-feel to it. Like many players I feel the Hojo lab design lacked the shock of the original, but it might just be down to the blood being replaced by the purple sparkly goo. Overall, a lot of the more minor areas were given a major rebuild / expansion, and while that resulted in some questionable padding of the flow of the game, they were well-done from the perspective of giving the player more weight, relevance and context.

And, of course, Wall Market — which, mind you, had a lot of fans worried that they’re going to screw this up — is just amazing and awesome and wonderful and every bit as it should be. It came to life!! Makes me anticipate Gold Saucer so much in the upcoming games …

Having said that, the real stand-out feature in recreating the world of Midgar, or even the stand-out feature of the entire game, is the population. The people. The NPCs. They were alive, they were believable (as much as NPCs in games can be believable, and more). They were relevant, and they added depth. Just like a good soundtrack, the crowd really “drove the point home”, and completes a fully immersive experience. When I first went to Sector 7 slums in Chapter 3, I spent a whole hour walking around town just listening to people talking. And then, guess what, what they say changes as you progress the story / do quests. Just awesome. They kept this up consistently throughout pretty much the entire game (where there were crowds, anyway), so I think they invested a lot into that aspect (everything voice-acted, too!!!) and it came off really well.

So, no surprises here as I give it a 9.5/10.

Characters and Scriptwriting

Here is maybe where I am going to be a little divisive.

I feel mixed when it came to scriptwriting for the main cast. There were some pretty good lines (Cloud’s “Get help” comes to mind) and there were some really weird / overacted moments (Barret’s Stamp analogy on Cloud, or Cloud being one year old). The Square Enix grunts and other very heavily Japanese anime -influenced gestures, for me, feel over-the-top and inappropriate with English VAs on decidedly western characters with western names. There were also moments where I felt the writing was disconnected, like Aerith being in awe of the trains moving in the train graveyard, while moments ago the group was still agitating over the imminently collapsing plate. Or Barret trying to be light-hearted and funny by saying something like “Ancient girl knows her stuff” when the team had supposedly just undergone the trauma of the plate collapsing, and the anxiety over whether anybody in the team survived. It’s not unbearable overall, it’s just I’m not blown away, let’s say.

Credit where credit is due, though, is that you do notice, quite often, that lines are written with a firece attention to consequence. Things people say really often echoed events that happened earlier on. It helps greatly in character and relationship building, as you feel both events and people are consistent and carries real weight.

Ultimately, the game does a good job bringing to life our much-beloved characters — the good, the bad, and the villainy. If their words, reactions or gasps at times felt off, they were believable on the whole. Visually their designs are impeccable (and that’s probably where a lot of the graphics juice went…). Also, the VA cast did their best job given the lines (and, again, grunts and gasps) they were given, and you can genuinely feel they thought about it, tried different things, and maximized the final quality of it for the fans. Apart from Tseng who sounds a bit too robotic (I get that that’s the intention, but still… it forced that image too much for my liking), I thought this new cast did a bloody good job.

I give this department a very respectable 8.5/10.

Game Progression

Let me try to discuss the chapter design and flow of the game separately to the STORY itself.

First of all, side quests. I felt they were fun. As some people already pointed out, the fact that you can see all the quests in the chapter and know your progress / next step at all times just make it simple and enjoyable. There are not too many of them and you are always in a position to judge whether you should keep doing them or move on with the story. And, because battles are fundamentally fun in this game, I didn’t really mind that the majority of the quests were “go there and fight these monsters”. They add some world-building depth hear and there and general helps in enhancing the immersion of the game, too.

But while side quests themselves were fine, it was REALLY WEIRD in Chapter 14 when you’re supposed to hurry along to Aerith’s rescue, but ended up wandering around and helping people. It would have been much better, I feel, to include some of the quests as mandatory parts of the main story (part of the bid to find a way to go to the uppercity). The remaning quests could well have been justified as a means to get the party more prepared (levels, equipment, materia, gil, etc.) before you go up to “the belly of the beast”. Again, like mentioned in the section above, this is one of the places where the writing falls short.

Now, in terms of the progression of the main story, I’m really perplexed about this one. At times, the levels and chapters felt quite dragged out. Some of it felt like padding. Most of Chapters 5, 6 and 7, as well as 10 and 11, didn’t add much to the story and could largely be collapsed (like the original) into a few screens / areas. Same thing with Hojo’s lab in Chapter 17. I appreciate that they fleshed out these areas a lot more and its not like they are not interesting, and, its also not like some good old-fashioned puzzle-solving / dungeon-beating levels are prohibited. But in the greater scheme of things, it made me wonder whether they could have replaced some of these rather superfluous parts with (a) more deep-dives into Midgar / Avalanche and/or (b) extending Part I of the Remake to some place AFTER Midgar.

On that last point — even though most of us have accepted “okay they say the first game is Midgar so be it”, I can’t help but constantly think — why couldn’t we end in Junon? How about the Shinra boat after Junon where you fight Jenova / Sephiroth for the first time? Games routinely go over 100 GB these days, so even if they had to add another blue-ray disc to achieve that, in terms of play time it wouldn’t have been ridiculously long if they had down-sized those aforementioned chapters. They could very much still have implemented the same twist in the ending (even more naturally so, I guess, because they wouldn’t have had to put a Sephiroth show-down into Midgar) and, at the same time, make the task of completing the rest of the Remake series a slightly easier job.

When all is said, I don’t hate how this game progresses. It’s long enough for people who plays slowly (like me), and short enough for people with shorter attention spans. Parts that felt stretched were ultimately salvaged by the very enjoyable battle system. I am therefore comfortable in giving this an 8/10.

(Deep breath)

OK so that’s the review for this game being a gaming experience. A game that you actually have to play and finish. A quick tally shows that it had an accumulative score of 8.6/10.

A really good game, in other words. Add the nostalgia from being a long-time FFVII fan? 9.5/10 easily. Add Tifa in HD? 3749573643/10… (sorry cannot help it)

Story

Alright now we’re into the meat of this thing. This is the review of Remake as a story that you read / watch / experience. It is going to be long. Brace yourselves.

The easy bit to review is obviously all the chapters up to 16. Here, you get a pretty faithful retelling of the original story. Parts of that were changed. Things have been added. Scenes were recreated with more modern language and more bulletproof writing. You might miss some specific lines and specific scenes, but the overall experience was consistent with OG and because the game is fun and beautiful you don’t really mind. You feel like they did a really great job.

And then there’s the ending that dumps this entire worldview on you that totally departs from OG FFVII. Your mind is fucking blown. You are left wondering “what the fuck did I just see?” And you go look for answers. And you find them. And you find more. And you contradict yourself. You start going online to find what others have found. You mind gets blown again. And again.

And again.

Now I’m not going to go to great lengths here to talk about what I think the ending means, and to speculate what sort of convoluted, Compilation-inspred time-traveller fantasy this Remake really is. What I want to say is, as a player playing through Remake for the first time, our immediate reaction to the ending was probably to question why the writers have chosen to completely spin it out of control. You ask “it would have been just fine had you not done this, why Square Enix? Why Nomura?”

Then, hopefully, you realize that this is what FFVII had always been about. What do I mean? That’ll take some explaining, so bear with me…

In the original story, the writer played with your mind in two major plot twists. And, no, its not the death of Aerith (at least not entirely).

The first one was when you’ve spent a few hours in Midgar. You are so sure of this game being a steampunk techno-industrial type of fantasy, and that the central plot was Avalanche vs Shinra. Along that groove, the game builds you up for a “finale”, only to then unceremoniously kill off president Shinra in a great anti-climax. You have the first hint of Sephiroth being the real villain. You’re then shown the world map (!!!). Literally everything you knew up to that point about this game was destroyed. You are anxious to find out “so what is this game about? Just tell me now!”

So the game tells (or, rather, tricks) you, via Cloud’s mouth, in Kalm.

Thus your second world view for this game is established. Sephiroth is the real bad guy. The world is now wide open and different cultures exist and the theme is drastically changed (Kalm, chocobo farm, swamps, mythril mines all a huge departure from Midgar). The central plot changes to Cloud & Co. vs Sephiroth, seemingly in a race to thwart his plans before he succeeds. Just like you ran with your first world view for hours on end in Midgar, you run with this world view for even longer. Through Junon, North Corel, Gold Saucer, Cosmo Canyon, Nibelheim, all the way up to the Temple of the Ancients, even though character back stories are more fleshed out, and events happen, nothing fundamentally challenges your world view. You are sure this is what the game is about.

Until it blows it to smithereens, again.

This time, it comes in a shock event where Cloud seems to be under Sephiroth’s control, and simply handed him the black materia. It blows your mind again, but then the game doubles it up with Aerith’s death. And you see that she’s REALLY dead, like, no-Phoenix-Down-is-going-to-save-her kind of dead. So, literally everything you knew up to that point about this game was destroyed. You are anxious to find out “so what the fuck is this about?????”

Sounds familiar?

This time you’re told (or, again, tricked) through a series of revelations concerning Hojo’s experiments and Sephiroth’s clones. Cloud questions his own existence and all the memories he has. He plunges into existential crisis, and you as the player plunge into the same psychological trap. Again.

Your world view is now essentially that Cloud is a clone. He is the result of an experiment. His memories are injected into him and are false. He’s a pawn of Sephiroth’s in his evil plans. You’re not sure Cloud really grew up with Tifa.

Thankfully the story finally resolves itself and reveals the truth about Zack, Cloud, and the Nibelheim incident. But you can see (and admire) the psychological tools the writers used to trick you. Everytime, they set up a world view, let you run with it for a while, and then tear it down, making you vulnerable and wanting answers. And answers they do give, except they are still false / incomplete, but you took it all in anyway because of that vulnerability. And then it does this process another time and fools you AGAIN.

Masterpiece.

Now if we use that light to look at the ending of the Remake, then we may be able to see what is being done here. Only that this time you know about the OG, so you’re not so easily fooled — they needed to add something new to the narrative. Enter the whispers / arbitors of fate / plot ghosts. Essentially, like the original, you had a pretty solid world view of the game you were playing before Chapter 17. Of course, this is not the same steampunk / Avalanche vs Shinra world view you had when you first played OG. This time it is a world view where you’re very comfortable thinking “Yeah they’ve changed some things, but they are rather faithful to OG FFVII”. It’s kind of, if you like, a META world view from the perspective of the player, in relation to the actions of the game devs at Square Enix.

Now I do not think for a second that I (or anyone on the Internet) know what kind of twist they are planning. But I’m willing to bet that we’re now in the phase of being “broken” — just like the world map opening up, just like the masamune on President Shinra’s back, just like handing the black materia to Sephiroth, just like Aerith’s death. The final chapter of Remake has completely tore apart the expectation that “this game is a rather faithful retelling of OG FFVII”.

I mean, you literally killed the very thing that ensured the plot sticks to OG FFVII, right?

And now that we have years to ponder this, by the time the second game rolls along, we’d be collectively ripe — very very ripe — for being fed some new (but, I daringly proclaim, false) ideas. If my prediction here is right, the second game is going to, rather quickly, give you some long-awaited explanation of what the whispers really were, why / where Zack is alive, what is Sephiroth up to this time around, what’s up with Aerith and how much she knows, is Marlene also an Ancient, and so on, and so forth. All of it just to fool you into getting comfortable with a new world view about all this multiverse and future-Sephiroth things. Deja-vu FFVII OG style.

Honestly just thinking about this makes my hands shake.

Anyway, I understand that this is complete speculation from my part. But even discounting that, the amount of hints that they have laid down throughout the game, those little things that didn’t seem much the first time you played, are greatly illuminated by the ending. Like how, in Chapter 2, Sephiroth has distracted you into the alley causing you to miss meeting Aerith, and how the whispers delayed her so you still met her. Like how the music being played at that point is from Advent Children, meaning this is indeed a new, future Sephiroth coming back to “fix things”, thus explaining why there’s so much more Sephiroth in this version of the Midgar arc. The black feathers. The fact that the flowers had a symbolic meaning of lovers reuniting and Aerith gave it to Cloud “on the house”, “depending on the customer”, suggesting Aerith already knows a lot about the “future”…

They thought about this stuff. They really did. And it’s all mind-blowing. Mind-blowingly GREAT.

This is the stuff of classics and this is where FFVII Remake should belong. The first 16 chapters of this game’s story makes it a really good game. With the ending’s revelation and a careful review of all the breadcrumbs of hints and evidence, this game’s story is now great. If my predictions were right and all of this was just to fool us in the second game, and there turns out to be an even deeper, hidden plot beneath all of this, this series would become another timeless classic which, in my opinion, would have surpassed even the original. I love it, absolutely, and I cannot imagine how far I’ve come from the dread we all had before the release of this game, like “Dude, is Square Enix going to royally screw this up?”

For all that it is now, and for all that future potential, I HAVE TO give this game’s story a 10/10.

Afterthought:

OK, elephant in the room — “but it is not really new-player-friendly like they said it would be!” Totally agree with that, they shouldn’t have said this game is a perfectly good point to start experiencing FFVII. You couldn’t have made sense of all the “flash forwards”, or Zack, or Barret’s resurrection, or any of that meta bullshit had you not played the OG. But honestly, this game is SO GREAT that it deserves the player to go back and play the OG to understand its greatness, and watch AC, and play Crisis Core, etc. etc. So, what if Square Enix said something wrong? I don’t care!