6.5/10
The game is a valuable compendium of virtual nostalgia and retro fetishization. It's also procedurally akin to comfort and zen games: exploration, grinding, minigames, and subquests make the past feel so chilling and familiar that even the seemingly uninspired open world design turns out to be functional and effective.
Since it expands what in the original FFVII was the second act of the plot, it also has a kind of episodic, wandering, and erratic narrative structure that makes the overall experience even funnier and more undemanding. The past is nothing but a theme park here - an extremely moving, funny, and spectacular one.
If as a remake this is almost perfect, as a "rebirth" (or however you want to call this trend of meta-textual self-reflexive remakes/reboots) it has its flaws, especially compared to FFVII Remake (which was so intriguing and subversive). Here the plot is extremely diluted, so the most part of the subversion of the original narrative is left to the ending. But the ending isn't quite good as you'd expect. It's esquisitely chaotic and messy as it should be, and it's Nomura's converging worlds and identities as their finest but at the same time it seems to withdraw from the subversion that the Remake seemingly aimed for. As far as I can see, the game turns out to be nothing but an interlude between the enthralling beginning of a subversion of the past (the Remake) and whatever will be the outcome of it (the third and final episode of this trilogy, I guess). I don't blame the chaos of the final chapter, rather its harmlessness. It's almost a renunciation of the premises of the Remake.
Anyway, one of the best Final Fantasy ever made.
Favourite character: Yuffie.
Favourite crush: Aerith.
Least favourite character: Tifa.
The game is a valuable compendium of virtual nostalgia and retro fetishization. It's also procedurally akin to comfort and zen games: exploration, grinding, minigames, and subquests make the past feel so chilling and familiar that even the seemingly uninspired open world design turns out to be functional and effective.
Since it expands what in the original FFVII was the second act of the plot, it also has a kind of episodic, wandering, and erratic narrative structure that makes the overall experience even funnier and more undemanding. The past is nothing but a theme park here - an extremely moving, funny, and spectacular one.
If as a remake this is almost perfect, as a "rebirth" (or however you want to call this trend of meta-textual self-reflexive remakes/reboots) it has its flaws, especially compared to FFVII Remake (which was so intriguing and subversive). Here the plot is extremely diluted, so the most part of the subversion of the original narrative is left to the ending. But the ending isn't quite good as you'd expect. It's esquisitely chaotic and messy as it should be, and it's Nomura's converging worlds and identities as their finest but at the same time it seems to withdraw from the subversion that the Remake seemingly aimed for. As far as I can see, the game turns out to be nothing but an interlude between the enthralling beginning of a subversion of the past (the Remake) and whatever will be the outcome of it (the third and final episode of this trilogy, I guess). I don't blame the chaos of the final chapter, rather its harmlessness. It's almost a renunciation of the premises of the Remake.
Anyway, one of the best Final Fantasy ever made.
Favourite character: Yuffie.
Favourite crush: Aerith.
Least favourite character: Tifa.