FFVII Remake INTERmission’s Soundtrack Brightens Up Life Under the Plate
Yuffie Kisaragi’s bubbly personality is an added bonus, but Midgar’s new tunes slap a fresh coat of paint on the city
I might have overpaid for Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade. Despite owning the 2020 version of the game and being eligible for the PS5 upgrade, I splurged for the physical copy. Next generation game prices are still something to get used to, but the allure of adding another PS5 game, and one of my favorite titles at that, to my collection was too much to bear.
Truthfully, Intergrade is a modest upgrade at best. FFVII Remake was already a visually stunning and tactilely enjoyable experience the first time around, so the updated version doesn’t need much more to carry the mantle. The addition of the graphics and performance modes is a welcome update — I don’t have a 4K TV but the performance mode’s 60 frames per second is a refreshing nuance for a player coming from a base PS4. The ray-traced lighting is also a showstopper depending on how much of a geek you are. I spent more than a few minutes rotating Cloud in front of fires and neon to see how these lights illuminated our spiky-haired protagonist.
But beyond the eye candy, Intergrade is what you’ve come to expect from Square Enix. Regardless of what you think of a series called Final Fantasy, which includes 15 main entries of varying quality, visual presentation is without question always a strong point.
The higher price tag does have at least one added benefit — the INTERmission DLC. Realistically I should have purchased it at a discount — it’s only $20 on PS5 if you buy it digitally. Having finished the game in about five hours, the downloadable content is well worth the upcharge if only for the way the updated original soundtrack reinvigorates the dying city of Midgar.
The story so far…
INTERmission picks in the FFVII Remake story right around Chapter 8. Players control Yuffie Kisaragi, a ninja from the neighboring nation of Wutai who, like Barrett, Tifa, and Cloud in the first game, has her own reasons for wanting to dismantle the Shinra Electric Power Company.
At face value, INTERmission is more of the same, stellar Remake gameplay. Yuffie has her own abilities which, if I’m entirely honest, might be the most intricate use of Remake’s combat system. In addition to using her shuriken in melee combat, Yuffie can, well, throw it, which allows her to use elemental ninjutsu magic at a distance. Add to that her ability to combo attacks with her partner, Sonon Kusakabe, and INTERmission establishes itself as an even more in-depth combat system despite featuring a single playable character.
Yuffie also brings a new tone to the game’s story. Just 16 years old, Yuffie parades around in her Moogle hood and cloak. Despite trying her best to be an adult, her childish tendencies, from practicing her introduction speech on her way to meet Avalanche in Sector 7 to the way she plops down on benches to take a rest, are a defining aspect of her character.
These touches changed the way I experienced the Sector 7 stomping ground. NPCs make light-hearted comments about the strange girl who is “Moogle Chic,” which is a noticeable shift from the doom and gloom that surrounds Cloud.
Pair that with INTERmission’s new soundtrack, and Midgar becomes a world worth exploring for another few hours.
Updating a modern classic
The INTERmission soundtrack isn’t as simple as updating old tunes — though the game makes a point of interlacing the Sector theme in new ways. Really, it’s about adding brand new tracks that spruce up areas of the slums.
One of the early missions sees Yuffie collecting posters for the Happy Turtle, a chain of bars that originated in her home nation of Wutai. As clues to finding the posters, the bar owner placed gramophones playing advertisements around the town. These aren’t just commercials — they are full-on songs that work the Happy Turtle brand into a variety of genres.
The cut that plays when Yuffie is trying to sneak past Marle’s dog at the apartments, for example, is a lovely Doo Wop ditty that sounds ripped right out of a 1950s jukebox. When she heads to the Tallager Factory, a death metal variant plays, complete with lyrics about turning up and getting wrecked at the bar.
Though this is a throwback to collecting records in the first game, these musical additions go beyond remixing classic tunes in new styles. This music establishes the world of Gaia and the city of Midgar as having culture and a sense of world building that exists beyond the ever present threat of Shinra’s atrocities.
Composers Nobuo Uematsu, Masashi Hamauzu, and Mitsuto Suzuki also press onward with toying with area music. When Yuffie and Sonon are chasing Zhijie in the Storage Depot, the area is filled with jazz guitar and saxophone for a fusion song before parsing down into a jazz trio deeper into the facility. Square’s composers aren’t strangers to genre diversity, with the Chocobo themes being some of the most thematically disparate songs across the series. INTERmission builds on that practice by turning expectations about what Final Fantasy should sound like on its head.
The OST’s deft ability to match the game’s areas is due in part to how each area theme is composed. According to Hamauzu in a 2020 interview with Famitsu, “a majority of the songs are made in a seamless way by partitioning a song into multiple parts that can be connected anywhere.” This is reflected in battle themes, which add high octane instrumentation to existing area melodies, to add musical flair without diverting from songs that are already playing. Old-school Final Fantasy games saw the music cut off and begin playing each time players entered a new area or scene. But here, while Yuffie and Sonon creep around the Shinra basements for example, songs play interchangeably as the two solve puzzles and pass battle tests.
INTERmission still appeals to Final Fantasy traditionalists. The centipede boss earns the typical grandiose, operatic arrangement as Yuffie and Sonon coordinate attacks on its head, tail and drones. Shortly after, Zhijie and Simon’s cheesy fist bump is met with even cheesier pop rock that wouldn’t be out of place in, say, Sonic Adventure.
If shelling out an extra $40 for DLC wasn’t enough, Square Enix might get more money out of me yet — the official Intergrade soundtrack is up for pre order. The HD games, XIII in particular, did a great job of featuring music that worked both in-world and in real life. FFVII Intergrade and INTERmission continue that trend all while adding a glimmer of light to an otherwise dark undercity existence.
