I find this one kind of all over the place. At the start it feels really glossy and polished, an enormously high budget remake of a classic full of love and craft. But then as it goes on and everything gets stretched out the seams start to show. There are good bits, but they're heavily watered down. It kind of wants its own Director's Cut that whittles it down to 8 or 9 hours.
The highlights are:
- characterisation for the leads, especially Cloud's contrasting relationships with Tifa & Aerith
- any topside view of Midgar with eerie synthetic lights in a sea of darkness
- Solid action RPG combat & progression system
- the models for every notable character
And the downsides are
- enormous padding in terms of large sidequest hubs with boring quests, mandatory busywork, large dungeons injected wherever they can think of, dungeon recycling on thin pretenses
- camera feels really claustrophobic, every town area seems to be a network of long narrow tunnels with no visible landmarks, making navigation a nightmare
- new story additions that just damage the pacing (the plot ghosts that show up to go "OoOoOoOoh what if the plot was different this time", but then the plot basically plays out the same)
- every NPC who isn't notable looks soulless by comparison to the designed NPCs
I don't want to go into detail on everything, it's a good game, I still had a good time with it. If you've bounced off the original, give this a go- if you haven't tried the original, try it first.
One thing I would like to ruminate on is how this game removes random encounters and some of the consequences of that. All the combat takes place in the same space as the overworld exploration, instead of cutting away to a little pocket dimension for fights as in the original. There's an immediate impact on the geography of the gameworld from that. Areas that would previously be small corridors, stairwells or offices are blown up into sprawling facilities with wide open rooms for you to fight in. For instance, you no longer fight in the main body of Shinra HQ, but instead in the car park. Most disappointingly, a really cool fight in the original where you're in two elevator cars descending the side of Shinra HQ has been replaced so the same boss is fought in the expansive lobby instead, because that kind of claustrophobic space doesn't fit this kind of combat. It makes the world feel artificial in ways the original did not.
Beyond the geography, though, I think it has a weird impact on the game's pacing. Random Encounters are a kind of abstraction. They represent combat, but they don't represent it at the same 'resolution' as the overworld. Once you get into the swing of things it's easy to mentally shift gears when you hear the encounter sound and understand that you're going to the fighting dimension for a quick punchup. By comparison, in the remake all the combat takes place in the same physical space as the overworld, and the lack of distinction makes it feel clunkier and more uncanny. I felt this most accutely climbing the tower to the Sector 7 support pillar. In the original, this is a very quick segment- there's a bomb ticking, and you have to reach the top quickly to try and save the whole Sector. You run into dying NPCs and have no time to mourn, they give you a line or two and then you have to sprint up those stairs to try and reach the top. You might get a couple of random encounters, which stress you out, but they're quick, and then you continue on up to the climax. In Remake, the tower now has multiple large floors so that it can present a series of long drawn out battles with the same enemies. It feels more ludicrous to exchange last words with Jessie then climb a ladder and find 3 guys fluttering around on little propellers waiting to kick your ass. Thanks for waiting guys, I guess, it was a pretty sentimental moment.
Anyway, that's my thought on the topic, I'm a Random Encounter apologist through and through.
The highlights are:
- characterisation for the leads, especially Cloud's contrasting relationships with Tifa & Aerith
- any topside view of Midgar with eerie synthetic lights in a sea of darkness
- Solid action RPG combat & progression system
- the models for every notable character
And the downsides are
- enormous padding in terms of large sidequest hubs with boring quests, mandatory busywork, large dungeons injected wherever they can think of, dungeon recycling on thin pretenses
- camera feels really claustrophobic, every town area seems to be a network of long narrow tunnels with no visible landmarks, making navigation a nightmare
- new story additions that just damage the pacing (the plot ghosts that show up to go "OoOoOoOoh what if the plot was different this time", but then the plot basically plays out the same)
- every NPC who isn't notable looks soulless by comparison to the designed NPCs
I don't want to go into detail on everything, it's a good game, I still had a good time with it. If you've bounced off the original, give this a go- if you haven't tried the original, try it first.
One thing I would like to ruminate on is how this game removes random encounters and some of the consequences of that. All the combat takes place in the same space as the overworld exploration, instead of cutting away to a little pocket dimension for fights as in the original. There's an immediate impact on the geography of the gameworld from that. Areas that would previously be small corridors, stairwells or offices are blown up into sprawling facilities with wide open rooms for you to fight in. For instance, you no longer fight in the main body of Shinra HQ, but instead in the car park. Most disappointingly, a really cool fight in the original where you're in two elevator cars descending the side of Shinra HQ has been replaced so the same boss is fought in the expansive lobby instead, because that kind of claustrophobic space doesn't fit this kind of combat. It makes the world feel artificial in ways the original did not.
Beyond the geography, though, I think it has a weird impact on the game's pacing. Random Encounters are a kind of abstraction. They represent combat, but they don't represent it at the same 'resolution' as the overworld. Once you get into the swing of things it's easy to mentally shift gears when you hear the encounter sound and understand that you're going to the fighting dimension for a quick punchup. By comparison, in the remake all the combat takes place in the same physical space as the overworld, and the lack of distinction makes it feel clunkier and more uncanny. I felt this most accutely climbing the tower to the Sector 7 support pillar. In the original, this is a very quick segment- there's a bomb ticking, and you have to reach the top quickly to try and save the whole Sector. You run into dying NPCs and have no time to mourn, they give you a line or two and then you have to sprint up those stairs to try and reach the top. You might get a couple of random encounters, which stress you out, but they're quick, and then you continue on up to the climax. In Remake, the tower now has multiple large floors so that it can present a series of long drawn out battles with the same enemies. It feels more ludicrous to exchange last words with Jessie then climb a ladder and find 3 guys fluttering around on little propellers waiting to kick your ass. Thanks for waiting guys, I guess, it was a pretty sentimental moment.
Anyway, that's my thought on the topic, I'm a Random Encounter apologist through and through.