Weaponized Nostalgia: Final Fantasy VII Remake (Square Enix, PlayStation 4)

How Final Fantasy VII Remake’s opening hours use nostalgia and modern gaming ideologies to redefine how we think about remakes.

Spoiler warning: This piece contains open spoilers for Final Fantasy VII Remake’s first five chapters and the entirety of the original Final Fantasy VII.

Few games have changed their respective genre as much as the surprise 1997 PlayStation hit Final Fantasy VII. It released to a market broadly unfamiliar with Japanese RPGs — with most of the genre’s popularity relegated to a small but passionate fan base that had enjoyed the likes of Chrono Trigger on the Super Nintendo and Phantasy Star IV on the Sega Genesis. Final Fantasy VII features a large meteor in its logo, and, like a catastrophic omen, it collided with North American audiences with similar force, changing the gaming landscape entirely thanks to its cutting edge combination of 3D graphics and detailed pre-rendered backgrounds, iconic characters, and cinematic ambitions. Its developer Square had high hopes for its release, and budgeted accordingly, but could not have anticipated the enormous demand for Final Fantasy VII. Suddenly, JRPGs were cool. In the 23 years since its release, Final Fantasy VII has sold an estimated…