Early into Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Aerith makes note that this is the party's "first step on a brand-new adventure." Not much earlier, she remarks at how green and vibrant the Grasslands are. Yet it was difficult to contain my laughter as the camera panned around to the same grassy fields I've seen in 100 other video games before.

Welcome to the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy. A series of games that understands what makes Final Fantasy VII so iconic and beloved, but not why. Though I mainly discussed this from a writing perspective in my original Final Fantasy VII Remake review, I think these narrative flaws extend beyond the script.

Final Fantasy VII was obviously limited by the technology of the time, and as such its character models were crude and had to exaggerate many features in order to be readable at all. But that exaggeration did end up becoming part of the style, and is much of what gave it its charm. The remakes' choice to lean so heavily into realism was, in my opinion, a mistake. It's not fully "realistic", especially in regard to the character models, but I think something that struck a good middle ground between realism and stylization would have fit Final Fantasy VII's tone much better. (the Xenoblade Chronicles games on the Switch strike a good balance, for example)

I had many of these issues back in Remake, but it was a lot harder to complain given the setting of Midgar lending itself at least slightly better to the flat aesthetic. But in the back of my mind, I always knew it'd be so much worse in the future games once the gang set out into the wider world. So this moment I've started this review on, in which our heroes first enter the Grasslands, ended up making me very disappointed to be right. It also didn't help that Remake's choice to make the sky visible in Midgar rather than a constant polluted black lessened the contrast between Midgar and the rest of the world. None of the subsequent areas did anything to alleviate this feeling, either, except maybe the Forgotten Capital at the very end of the game.

Much like that review of Remake, it might be confusing seeing a positive rating when I am going to be spending most of my time complaining about the story. But it's difficult to write a coherent review that discusses both my opinions of the overall experience and my opinions of the most glaring narrative choices. The latter interests me more, so that's what I'll be focusing on.



One other thing I want to touch on in terms of non-writing changes to the narrative and impact of the Final Fantasy VII remakes is the soundtrack. I want to make something clear here, I love the soundtrack. However, those earlier art direction complaints kind of end up reverberating into other aspects of the game. As there are many times where the music just doesn't feel like it quite fits anymore.

What do I mean by this? Final Fantasy VII stretched the limits of its hardware to try and create the feeling of a grand adventure. But, let's be honest here, most of the visuals left something to be desired. And yet in that simplicity it became a lot easier to mentally fill in the gaps yourself, to paint a picture of this vibrant, fantastical world. To see it fully realized as generic, naturalistic environments sort of takes away from that.

And so the sweeping, operatic score suddenly feels tonally at odds with the generic environments we see in Rebirth. They are good, faithful recreations of that soundtrack. But there are times where I hear the music and the mood just doesn't feel right anymore. The music and art direction simply cannot be fully divorced from one another. The latter failed, making the former worse. I still really like the music and I will certainly be listening to the soundtrack for weeks the minute it drops, but still, when it comes down to forming a complete experience, it falls short of the original Final Fantasy VII.

What's wilder is that during certain key narrative choices towards the end of the game, the exact opposite problem occurs. They'll alter or even completely remove some of the most important music in the entire game. I'm thinking of two moments in particular, both from the final chapter. By which I mean what they did to You Can Hear the Cry of the Planet and Aerith's Theme. Let's go in chronological order.

I genuinely think there's a case to be made that You Can Hear the Cry of the Planet is the most important track in Final Fantasy VII's entire soundtrack. Ahead of the main theme, ahead of Aerith's Theme, ahead of both Those Chosen By the Planet and One-Winged Angel, ahead of any other music you can think of. Everything that makes the Forgotten Capital what it is comes from the tone this music sets.

I only played Final Fantasy VII for the first time a few months ago, so believe me, I knew well in advance that Aerith dies. And I had sort of pieced together from my walkthrough and general cultural osmosis that the Forgotten Capital would be where it happens. But what I did not expect was the music. Hearing it kick in filled me with a sense of dread and anticipation so visceral that it felt like all of a sudden I had no idea what would happen here again, even though I literally did. That is the power of this piece of music. It captures both the fallen majesty of this place, but also the looming dread of what is about to occur. The impact of Aerith's death comes not only from the moment itself, but from what you feel leading up to it.

Imagine, then, if a remake of this game removed the song entirely. That is right, You Can Hear the Cry of the Planet does not play even once in the entire final chapter of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. I've heard the music we instead hear is taken from the Advent Children movie that I still have yet to see. But regardless of where it's lifted from, it just feels a generic tense action score meant to push you through an underwhelming fight against the Whispers. No quiet dread, but high-energy intensity. I could not believe the audacity. How do you make a choice this contrary to one of the most important pieces of music in Final Fantasy VII?

The only time You Can Hear the Cry of the Planet is heard in the game is earlier at the Temple of the Ancients. And even then it's clearly mixed in with parts of Sephiroth's theme, a callback to Seven Seconds Till The End from Remake. And given how long the Temple section is in Rebirth, that was probably 3 or 4 hours before I reached the Forgotten Capital. And yet, despite my anger at this choice, it somehow pales in comparison to what they did to Aerith's Theme.

In the original Final Fantasy VII, once Sephiroth kills Aerith, we hear possibly the most well-known piece of music from the entire game, Aerith's Theme. It's essentially a sad rendition of Flowers Blooming in the Church from Aerith's introduction. And it is a gut-wrencher. Obviously it had to be, Aerith just died! But it's important to keep that intended tone in mind because Aerith's Theme doesn't just play over a cutscene.

After Sephiroth finishes his maniacal laughter and vanishes, he leaves behind a parting gift, a boss fight against Jenova-LIFE. Rather than the usual blood-pumping battle music, Aerith's Theme continues playing over the boss fight. It doesn't fit a boss fight at all, and that's precisely what makes this choice so effective. It's almost impossible to focus on the fight itself, you'll basically be playing on auto-pilot while you try to process everything that happened. You have been put into the headspace of Cloud and the other characters.

What did Rebirth do for its fight against the renamed Jenova Lifeclinger? It remixed Aerith's Theme into battle music! They even mix it in with other tracks, like J-E-N-O-V-A. I won't even get into the other ways I think they screwed up Aerith's death (at least not yet) but even if they got everything else right, this single choice would have ruined the entire thing. I'm not even kidding. I should not be hearing "boss music" in the aftermath of Aerith's death. To do so is a fundamental misunderstanding of Final Fantasy VII's narrative. You are not driven to feel the same emotions as the original (and they are literally recreating a scene from the original, so don't hit me with anything about how the point of these remakes is that things will be different.) How do you make a blunder this severe? It makes me angry just thinking about it.



I guess on the subject of Aerith's death, we have to get to the elephant in the room. More than any of these individual narrative choices, we have to talk about what Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is trying to "say." But to do that, let's unpack just how differently Aerith's death plays out in this version. I will do my best to recap all the differences relevant to Aerith from the moment the heroes arrive at the Forgotten Capital to the end of the game.

Our heroes arrive at the Forgotten Capital only to find an array of Whispers floating around the capital, a sight likened to what happened at the Shinra Building at the end of Remake. This time it's two groups of Whispers, the black Whispers allied with Sephiroth, and the white Whispers that serve the Lifestream. I honestly don't understand the purpose of the game creating this distinction when both Whispers do the exact same thing, but maybe that'll matter more in the third game or something.

The Whispers try to block entry into the Forgotten Capital, presumably so Cloud doesn't arrive too soon, but the gang manages to create an opening just large enough for Cloud to slip through and find Aerith. Here we get the moment where Cloud raises his sword seemingly to kill Aerith, but here instead of his Jenova cells trying to force him to do Sephiroth's bidding, it's the Whispers trying to move his blade. Eventually, Cloud breaks free and manages to lock blades with Sephiroth right as he descends from the sky to kill Aerith. There's a moment of tension where it isn't clear if Cloud saved her or not before we finally see blood on Sephiroth's blade and realize Cloud failed to save her. (Well, sort of, but for simplicity's sake, let's not get into the other weirdness right this second)

Aerith is dead and it's very sad. Sephiroth leaves some remarks on how powerful of a feeling loss is, and how particularly strong he feels it coming off of Cloud in this moment. He then departs and leaves behind Jenova Lifeclinger. The gang defeats it, but unlike Final Fantasy VII, things don't end there. The gang gets pulled into the Lifestream for... reasons so we can have three more boss fights.

The first being Cloud and Zack (just roll with it) teaming up against Sephiroth in the void (so we can get yet ANOTHER callback to the final clash of the original Final Fantasy VII.) The next fight sees the entire party (and Zack) split off into separate groups to fight Sephiroth Reborn (who you might remember as Bizarro Sephiroth) because I guess we're doing that fight earlier in this trilogy some reason??? And the final one sees Cloud and Aerith (yes, Aerith!) team up to duel base form Sephiroth once again. Going back to the subject of musical criticisms for a moment, I'm tempted to repeat my complaints about using One-Winged Angel too soon from my review of Remake. These fight are so superfluous and fanservice-y that I don't think the game ever even explains why any of them happen.

After that last fight, Sephiroth simply chuckles and flies off, as Cloud and the gang (sans Aerith) are returned to their world. After spending 90 minutes fighting bosses, you might have forgotten Aerith even died until Cloud clutches Aerith's dead body once more and says "Aerith... wake up." Only, unlike in Final Fantasy VII, she does. We cut forward in time a bit, and we see the rest of the gang clearly distraught. But that can't be right. Aerith survived. They won, right? Of course, it's not that simple. Cloud is actually hallucinating Aerith's survival. For this narrative choice to make sense, this means that Cloud has excised the memories of him laying Aerith to rest and giving a speech to the rest of the party to help them carry on. So after this, they just... leave.

Why did we do all of this, then? Why did we cut out almost everything about Aerith's death other than the exact moment it happens? Why have all of this stuff with the Whispers if Aerith's death was going to play out the exact same anyways? And why does Aerith appear during the final boss fight if she's dead? Trying to answer all of these questions is bound to the whole "meta" story these remakes are trying to tell, so let me do my best to try and explain what I think they're attempting to say here.



When I talked about Final Fantasy VII Remake, I was going into the game having already heard opinions and theories about what the meta-narrative was about, and so I kind of ended up absorbing many of those same opinions. Rebirth was an attempt to look at new material with fresh eyes, unblemished by other people's takes. And I would like to say that I think I was wrong to share the claim that the Whispers are meant to represent fans of Final Fantasy VII, even toxic ones. I think the actual message here is a bit more complicated.

Whispers are agents of the Lifestream, the Planet. Final Fantasy VII itself stands in for "the Planet" here, and the Whispers don't really represent anyone so much as they are just a plot device to preserve "the Planet." So fans might want the same thing the Whispers do, but one could argue the Whispers also stand in for the struggle the developers themselves faced when trying to recreate such an iconic story. I don't think we can ascribe any one interpretation to them, as they represent the broader concept of contending with the legacy of this story.

And what is more important and iconic to Final Fantasy VII than Aerith's death? Of course the Whispers would be fighting to ensure everything goes according to plan. But here's where things get complicated. Sephiroth took control of the Whispers at the end of the first game, or at least a significant chunk of them. It seems to be the entire reason he baited the party to cross into the Whispers' realm at the end of the first game to begin with. So what does it mean when the villain is now the one in control of the narrative?

Rebirth confirms something that was implied by the end of Remake - that Final Fantasy VII now exists as a multiverse. Multiple timelines now exist as part of the Lifestream. Zack and Biggs surviving their fates did not occur in the main timeline, but two separate ones that for whatever reason, have collided with each other. This story is mainly told through occasional Zack interludes that basically go nowhere. To illustrate how pointless these scenes are, allow me to share an anecdote.

I streamed the end of the game in a discord call with some friends, and as I finished, one of my friends who had already beaten the game told me there's something really funny he wanted me to see. But I said I wanted to poke around the new "Extra Settings" options first, only to see one that jumped out at me. "NO WAY" I exclaimed. I'm not sure if I audibly laughed or not, but I was cackling. Sure enough, I had accidentally run into the exact thing my friend had wanted me to see. There is an option to turn off the Zack interlude scenes. That's right, they add so little that you can just automatically skip them for repeat playthroughs.

But we're clearly trying to say something here, right? We can't entirely dismiss these scenes. Well, okay, let's try to be fair, then. These scenes occur as a direct result of the characters breaking fate at the end of Remake. Unintentionally, they gave Zack and Biggs a second chance at life, and now it's up to them to discover what to do with that chance. Biggs in particular is so desperate for a chance to prove that he matters, to prove that he has a role to play. But neither he or Zack, in any of the multiple branching possibilities of this storyline we see, ever seem to successfully accomplish anything they set out to do. Why?

I think what all of these alternate timelines are meant to represent are possibilities. Well, that seems obvious. What I mean is that these represent more than just the story of Final Fantasy VII, but every possible story you could ever tell with these characters. Official or fan-made. Good or bad. All of them existing as part of the same whole. And yet, as we see in the sky, they're dying. All worlds except the main timeline are doomed to fade. The implication is that this is why the Whispers intervene. If they don't keep the main timeline on course, it will suffer the same fate as all the other worlds. So there's something about the main timeline, the one that follows the course of Final Fantasy VII, that's special.

Maybe that's exactly the point, then. That no matter what you do with these characters, all of them exist because of the original Final Fantasy VII. The story is so beloved because it followed the path it did. Because their characters had the fates they did. None of these spinoffs or fanfics or whatever can ever have the enduring legacy Final Fantasy VII did. There is something undeniably important about the way things played out in that game.

Enter Sephiroth, the man who wants to defy destiny. The man who speaks of "reunion" not just in terms of the Jenova Reunion, but in terms of uniting all worlds. But much like the Jenova Reunion, or the way he talks about death, this "reunion" is less a true unification and more akin to him absorbing them all. Consuming them. I think the idea is that Sephiroth is, well, a consumer. Someone who appreciates Final Fantasy VII not as art, but as content. These timelines, these stories, are all just food to be consumed before he moves onto the next thing. I imagine this is why he wants to defy destiny, not just to avert his own defeat in Final Fantasy VII, but to have more Final Fantasy VII content. He is the worst kind of fan, the one who will eat up as much slop as he can get as long as there's fanservice.

This, in turn, might explain the double fake-out with Aerith's death, tricking you into thinking Cloud might save her this time only for her to die anyways. Aerith's death is iconic and pivotal to Final Fantasy VII, almost inevitable in a way. The most unalterable event of the entire game. And that's why Cloud hallucinates her after the fact. Cloud is constantly paralleled to Sephiroth, even in the original Final Fantasy VII. And now here, he has become "like Sephiroth" in a new way. He cannot accept a version of the story where Aerith dies. He wants the version where she lived and he can be with her. He has become the kind of fan who doesn't understand Final Fantasy VII.

However, even though I'm presenting this whole possibility, and even though I genuinely believe it's what Remake is trying to say, there's an issue with this interpretation. The developers are guilty of everything they're trying to criticize, too. So many side characters and storylines in this game and even the first one only make sense to people who have experienced not just Final Fantasy VII, but all the games and novels and movies and whatnot from the extended Final Fantasy VII canon. And a theme of the first game was how good it was for these characters to be able to break fate. I don't think the developers are just suddenly trying to go back on that with Rebirth and insist Final Fantasy VII can only go one way. Biggs and Zack constantly reiterate how important it is that they have a choice, that they can still make an impact even now in this dying world, much like Wedge's storyline in Remake.

This is the dissonance at the heart of the remake trilogy, and it's why the final chapters of these games always seem to miss the mark so badly. Because the developers themselves are so indecisive. They can't decide if it's better to preserve Final Fantasy VII's iconic story or to tell new stories. It's why these games are always faithful (albeit less impactful) recreations of the original narrative right up until the last chapter where it veers off into fanservice nonsense where we fight Sephiroth while One-Winged Angel plays. Even one of the last scenes of the game, where Zack is returned to the alternate timeline from whence he came, sees him reminisce on how one day his world "might" converge with the main one again. That's right, the best these developers can muster is a "maybe."

They constantly dangle the idea of telling new stories over your head, but they're too afraid of committing. If they change too much of the narrative, they might lose what makes Final Fantasy VII so special, and they might devolve into catering to the Sephiroths in the audience. Unfortunately, in their indecision, they still end up picking a lane, it's just all crammed into the last chapter to really sour the mood of everyone playing it.

Nothing is more emblematic of this dissonance than Aerith herself. Because she dies, but then she shows up in the final battle against Sephiroth. What's up with that? Is Cloud just hallucinating her even then? I don't think so. I think this is an alternate timeline's version of Aerith. Earlier in Chapter 14, he's given a functional version of the White Materia by an alternate timeline's Aerith's as the main timeline's Aerith's has "broken" for some yet-to-be-revealed reason, turning translucent. This alternate Aerith, for whatever reason, seems to know what to do and what her fate is supposed to be. Perhaps she got that knowledge from the Whispers. Especially since the Aerith that shows up in that fight against Sephiroth is surrounded by the white Whispers, the ones allied with the Lifestream. This Aerith has been sent to help get the timeline back on track.

So when Cloud hallucinates Aerith, I'm not inclined to believe she's fully a construct of his mind. Maybe some of the things she says and does aren't exactly how Cloud perceives them, and maybe it's still true that the others genuinely can't see her, but I think on some level, Cloud is interacting with another timeline's Aerith. Nanaki even seems to react to her presence in the final cutscene, though he likely didn't even realize it was her.

I think I know where this is going, though. It won't be some return of Aerith where she and Cloud live happily ever after. Rather, it's an expansion on the end of Final Fantasy VII. At the end of the original game, after Cloud defeats Sephiroth, Aerith reaches out from the Lifestream and sends him back to his friends. It's clearly meant to be this final moment of closure for Cloud now that he's finally conquered his inner demons. This alternate Aerith, the one he's sort of hallucinating but also not, will be that Aerith who reaches out from the Lifestream. And much like that game, this moment will still be him "letting her go." I just don't think that works as well once you've gone as far as establishing a multiverse and having Cloud interact with another world where Aerith is alive and happy. That moment of acceptance just won't hit the same.



So, disappointingly, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is more of Final Fantasy VII Remake, for better and for worse. There are still positives, though. I quite enjoyed the improved combat and the open world, even if I got kind of tired of it by the time I reached the last region. And I even think much of the story was handled better than some of the more micro-scale issues I had with Remake. There are still a few issues though. For example, as much as I loved how they handled Dyne, it's jarring when you barely get a moment to process his death before Palmer shows up for an over-the-top campy boss fight. Still, though, for the most part, I enjoyed much of the storytelling compared to Remake.

But there's no shaking the fact that once again, the thing this game was building to was a final chapter that keeps on reminding you that this isn't just a normal remake. That it's trying to tell a bigger story while letting the story at hand suffer as a result. It can't decide between being a faithful remake or something unique. It's the worst of both worlds. If this game were just the first 13 chapters and then a 14th one that actually played Aerith's death completely straight without any of this other nonsense, I might have even given it 4.5 stars. But they just can't help themselves. They can't stop pulling the rug out from under themselves at the last minute.

At this point, what am I even supposed to expect from the third game? The first game ended on the note that anything could happen, and then the second game was mostly just more of the exact same plot as the original game. Am I supposed to believe the third game will be any different? That we won't go to the Northern Crater, then take command of the Highwind, then restore Cloud's memories in the Lifestream, then fight Weapons and gather the Magnus Materia, then return to Midgar to confront Hojo, then go back to the Northern Crater to fight Sephiroth again? Sure, there'll probably also be some new story content dealing with the war between Shinra and Wutai, but that has nothing to do with the Whispers, and it won't fundamentally alter that overall structure.

Once again, 95% of the game will be played completely straight, only for the last 5% to go completely off the rails. If these developers are so desperate to tell a new, unique story that comments on Final Fantasy VII, could they at least have the courtesy to integrate it better rather than doing it the way they did? Because now you're just leaving new players confused, and fans of the original upset at how much worse some of the most pivotal scenes are. Are you really telling me that this version of Aerith's death is as impactful as the original? Even if that's an impossible standard to live up to, there's no way this was truly the best they could do. They went out of their way to cram in a bunch of Whisper nonsense and Sephiroth boss fights that have absolutely nothing to do with what makes that moment what it is.

I think we should want better things from these remakes. Not because you can't tell whatever new story they're trying to weave into these remakes, but because they should actually tell that story well. Doing it the way they have only serves as a reminder of just how good the original Final Fantasy VII is. Which is just about the worst thing a remake of anything can do. If they want to tell a new story so badly, they need to commit. Instead, like Cloud, this trilogy is caught in an identity crisis.

There obviously isn't any real reason for this DLC episode to exist, as Yuffie wasn't exactly crying out for additional backstory before she encounters our main group in Final Fantasy VII. However, Yuffie was one of my favorite party members in the original game since her antics would always make me laugh. So if you were going to do something like this for any of the post-Midgar party members, Yuffie was probably the best choice, especially since as a thief she'd be the most likely to find herself in Midgar anyways.

One thing I didn't find a good opportunity to dive into in my review of the main game was the new combat system. Final Fantasy VII Remake moves away from the turn-based combat system of the original to an action RPG approach. But I think they found an interesting way of still incorporating some of the spirit of the original game's take on turn-based combat. In Remake, as you attack enemies, you build up the ATB meter, which you can then use to freeze time in the Command menu and access unique attacks along with spells and items, much like how you would use a "turn" in the original game. It's not breaking new ground, it's still fundamentally an action RPG, but it does feel like a distinctly "Final Fantasy VII" approach to that kind of game, which I appreciate. I'm more into action games anyways, so I had a lot of fun with it, which might help to explain my confusing 3.5/5 rating despite the fact that almost the entirety of the review was spent harping on the storyline.

Which brings us to probably the most interesting character to play as within this game's combat system, Yuffie. Yuffie fights with a throwing weapon, much like in the original Final Fantasy VII. So while you can just get up in an enemy's face and slash at them much like with Cloud's sword, what really makes Yuffie stand out is her approach to ranged combat. Pressing triangle allows Yuffie to throw her weapon at an enemy, where it will stay and continuously spin around them, dealing small damage. From here, you can either press triangle again to immediately have Yuffie close the distance and do an attack while simultaneously returning to melee, or you can access ninjutsu attacks, small magic explosions Yuffie can unleash from a distance when she does not have her weapon in her hand. But where this gets interesting is how all of these things interface with the command system.

Yuffie only has access to a few command abilities overall, as the weapon variety is a lot smaller due to the DLC's short length. But the developers got a lot of depth out of this arsenal, to the point that I feel like I had more options with her than any other individual character in the main game. There are some basic melee moves like Art of War and Brumal Form, but what gets more interesting are the magic-based ones. For example, Windstorm unleashes a large gust of wind in an area that pulls enemies towards Yuffie. What's interesting about this one is that its position is based on where Yuffie's weapon is, which means it's best used from a long distance as another way of switching from ranged ninjutsu back to melee, dragging the enemy to Yuffie rather than sending her in the enemy's direction.

The real stars of the show are Elemental Ninjutsu and Banishment though. Elemental Ninjutsu allows Yuffie to imbue her ninjutsu attacks with any of the four elements available in Final Fantasy VII Remake, allowing her to easily exploit any enemy's weakness. This basically cuts out the need for her to have any offensive magic materia, which is so ridiculously powerful that I have to imagine Rebirth is going to rein it in and increase its cost to 2 ATB charges. This ability also syncs with Banishment, an ability that grows more powerful as you perform other command abilities and charge it up. Banishment is an extra-powerful Ninjutsu attack, and so it'll be imbued with whatever element you selected, dealing disgusting amounts of damage if executed at full charge against an enemy weak to that element. Personally, I think Rebirth should make this ability "cancel out" Yuffie's imbued element, reverting it back to a non-elemental state, so there's at least some additional cost to using this attack.

Yuffie has so many options available to her that assuming her gameplay is still fundamentally the same in Rebirth, I almost can't imagine playing as anyone else. She has so many tools in her arsenal that it's basically impossible to approach a single battle not having an advantage. In fact, the only thing that really challenged me in this DLC (aside from the surprisingly challenging box minigame) was the last boss. While my playstyle mainly just amounted to throwing my weapon and pelting them with ninjutsu, even a more melee focused playstyle has a lot of merit, especially when you factor in that Yuffie also has a perfect guard system that gives her different buffs depending on which weapon she has equipped.

Not to mention, there's plenty of other options for switching in and out of melee that the game doesn't draw a huge amount of attention to. Holding the attack button in melee mode makes Yuffie leap backwards, providing a good opportunity to throw your weapon now that you've created distance. Holding the attack button in ranged mode creates a sort of magic fissure on the ground and then has Yuffie's weapon magically return to her hand. Additionally, several command abilities will also have Yuffie's weapon immediately return to her hand, including the aforementioned Windstorm. The amount of depth on display here is staggering, enough for a full-length game in which only Yuffie is playable, let alone a DLC you could beat in a few hours if you don't get distracted by the new Fort Condor minigame like I did.

And that's all without getting into Sonon! I practically forgot he existed for most of my playtime because I got complete tunnel vision due to how fun Yuffie was to play. Sonon isn't playable, but he does have a bit more going on as a "guest" party member than Red XII did in the main game, having his own ATB gauge and a set of unique command abilities. I imagine this was the developers testing out this concept given that the Kalm flashback sequence that I imagine will serve as the tutorial mission for Rebirth will likely need similar mechanics for Sephiroth who functioned similarly in the original game's version of that section. But what really makes Sonon special is the new Synergy system. Pressing L2 in combat will have Yuffie and Sonon enter "synergy mode" in which, as long as both Yuffie and Sonon have an ATB charge, Yuffie's Art of War and Windstorm abilities become "synergized", allowing the two characters to attack in unison and make both of these abilities much more powerful. The trailers for Rebirth seem to show similar combo attacks, so I'm hoping this system makes a return for all party members.

This DLC genuinely makes the main game feel like a prototype as far as combat goes. But what about the story, the thing I spent most of my review of the main game talking (and complaining) about? Honestly, I don't really have many thoughts. Yuffie is such a basic archetype, this overeager young kid with a simplistic view of the world getting way in over her head. Sonon is almost more basic, providing a more mature, level-headed counter to Yuffie's confidence. It's a fairly played-out dynamic, admittedly, but not one that isn't effective when used properly like we see here. I enjoyed having something a lot more light-hearted than the fairly dour main game. Some of the charm of Final Fantasy VII gets lost when you make an entire game out of Midgar, one of the most dour sections of the entire story, so it's nice that this DLC tried to break out of that framework.

The DLC is set at a fairly specific point in Final Fantasy VII Remake's story, starting in the aftermath of the Mako Reactor 5 bombing and ending right when the plate over Sector 7 is dropped. So the first chapter uses this as a chance to show a few scenes of what Tifa, Barret, Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie were all up to during that portion of the story, since both the original game and the remake spend that entire section from Cloud's point of view. While this does take some of the focus away from Yuffie, admittedly, it's never to the point of utter distraction, it doesn't seem like we ever lose the plot just for the sake of adding connective tissue, so I ended up coming away from these scenes more positively than I would have expected had you pitched this concept to me beforehand.

The actual story revolves around the updated version of Wutai, a fairly underdeveloped side area in Final Fantasy VII (likely owing to Yuffie's nature as an optional character.) As the Remake established, the vague "war" referenced in the original game was actually against Wutai, which makes sense given that one of the few things we do know about Wutai was that they stood up against Shinra in the past, securing independence but otherwise withdrawing from any conflict against Shinra and the injustices they're committing elsewhere. The main game expands on this to much greater effect, one of the biggest story changes that I actually liked in Remake.

Shinra has incorporated a real-world propaganda tactic, using Wutai's resistance as an excuse to paint them as these scary, dangerous foreigners plotting the destruction of their society. They then concoct a narrative of them collaborating with resistance group Avalanche, now having a way of easily demonizing Avalanche, especially as Barret's more radical, destructive approach indirectly creates collateral damage. Shinra even intentionally worsens some of this damage (not to mention pinning the Sector 7 plate incident on Avalanche) to further characterize Avalanche as not really fighting for the planet, but as mere terrorists, an arm of Wutai trying to restart the war. This could not be further from the truth, as we learn that President Shinra himself is the one who wants to restart the war with Wutai, this entire propaganda campaign being his means to do so and continue expanding Shinra's control.

Intermission makes this a bit stranger, as it does seem to imply that Avalanche and Wutai are collaborating to some extent. There's not much elaboration here, though, but Yuffie and Sonon were sent from Wutai to Midgar to coordinate a heist with Avalanche to steal an experimental Materia from Shinra, less to get their hands on its power and moreso as an intimidation tactic, to show that while Wutai is no longer fighting Shinra, picking a fight with them again is a bad idea. However, we also learn later into the DLC that Wutai and Avalanche were enemies in the past to some extent, though it's not clear how or why. This seems to result from Remake's new version of Avalanche.

I already talked a bit how I dislike the change from it being a makeshift group of five people started from Barret to a splinter cell of a much larger organization, and while I thought Intermission was going to be a chance to justify this change, instead I'm more confused than ever. What is Avalanche? How did such a large armed resistance come into being? And why were they fighting Wutai? And if they're working with Wutai now, was President Shinra's propaganda not actually a lie? Perhaps the Corel section in Rebirth will add some clarity here as we learn Barret's backstory and how he even ended up joining this new version of Avalanche.

As for how Yuffie and Sonon fit into this, their heist naturally goes wrong just at the finish line. Shinra's fight against Avalanche to restart the war with Wutai has taken top priority for them, and their "ultimate materia" project was temporarily shelved, leaving nothing for Yuffie and Sonon to actually steal. However, this is still a chance for Sonon to get revenge on the lead of the advanced weaponry department, Scarlet, whose weapons are the reason his sister died. It's not a particularly complex story, but transitioning from the ultimate materia heist to this more personal conflict seemed to flow rather naturally, and using an underdeveloped character like Scarlet as the main antagonist was a good idea to me. But Tetsuya Nomura couldn't resist making things more complicated, could he?

Introducing Nero and Weiss, two villains you can just tell at a glance were designed by Nomura, with their spiky hair and ridiculous outfits. They are barely explained, found locked up in Deepground, seemingly the deepest level of the Shinra Building. They hardly seem to fit into the world of Final Fantasy VII, so I honestly assumed they were original characters until I ranted about them to some friends, where I was informed that they actually do have some precedent. Apparently there is a little known spin-off of Final Fantasy VII called Dirge of Cerberus starring Vincent Valentine, though even after verifying its existence by looking it up I could still easily be gaslit into thinking it was some bizarre fanfic. Nero and Weiss are two major antagonists of that game, but otherwise I know very little of the plot because I arrogantly assumed the only thing I would need to play to understand Final Fantasy VII Remake was, you know, Final Fantasy VII.

I cannot explain to you how nonsensical this aspect of the DLC is, especially as Nero and Weiss only show up in the last hour or so of playtime after absolutely nothing else about the story seemed to be building up to them. And again, they're barely explained when they do appear, their first scene being Nero talking to Weiss about Shinra trying to create some sort of digital replica of him, after which Weiss doesn't even appear again. Nero, on the other hand, starts interacting with our main characters (after seemingly being released by Scarlet) and absorbing Shinra soldiers to gain power for whatever reason.

The final boss fight of the DLC is against him, despite the fact that he's a complete enigma and has absolutely zero connection to our main characters at all. He even ends up killing Sonon, and while that death works for me, it coming at the hands of this random masked dark angel guy takes so much away from this moment. I don't even know what the point of this is. Are we setting up a Dirge of Cerberus remake? Or will Nero and Weiss re-emerge as part of a Vincent chapter in Rebirth? I don't know and I kind of don't care because they're both one-note and forgettable and turning the end of this DLC into an advertisement for these characters would have soured me on them regardless.

I don't know, this doesn't really bother me as much as the final chapter of the main game because it honestly does represent such a small, insignificant chunk of Intermission's story. You defeat Scarlet, then Nero shows up, you do a couple of simulator battles, and then you fight him. You can basically just close your eyes and imagine Scarlet's robot killed Sonon instead and suddenly the whole experience works. So that's just what I'm gonna do here, because I had a lot of fun with Yuffie and Sonon, and I'm looking forward to seeing how Yuffie interacts with our main characters in Rebirth (and maining her once I finally get to play as her.)

In my review of the original Final Fantasy VII (or at least the Steam port of it) I talked about how the conversation surrounding Final Fantasy VII Remake had to do with elements that were less interested in merely retelling the original storytelling, but instead with commenting on Final Fantasy VII's wider impact on pop culture. This was, of course, referring to a brand-new element introduced in Remake, the Whispers, a group of what I can only describe as time ghosts that attempt to impede any attempt for our heroes to take the story down a different road from the original game. I knew all of this going in, and while the concept intrigued me, I'm not exactly sure how to feel now that I've seen them for myself.

So, one interpretation I saw of the Whispers a lot before playing the game, one which I've come to a similar conclusion of, is that they are meant to represent, to an extent, fans. People who hold Final Fantasy VII up on this pedestal, an untouchable masterpiece that cannot be altered or else something will be tainted or ruined. The Whispers actively intervene whenever a character acts in such a way that the plot of Final Fantasy VII will be significantly altered, such as when one gets in the path of Sephiroth's sword to spare Barret, who certainly doesn't die in the Midgar section of the original Final Fantasy VII.

I think the main problem I have with the Whispers is that while they are incredibly invested in preserving the plot of Final Fantasy VII, I don't think they seem to particularly care about the meaning of it. If they are meant to represent obsessive fans, this could theoretically be clever commentary, but given what happens when the characters do change fate at the end of the game, I'm not inclined to believe that much thought was put into this aspect of the narrative. No, instead the Whispers seem to be willing to ignore the fact that several aspects of the story that are meant to be mere expansions on Final Fantasy VII have a noticeably worse impect.

So let's drop the framing device of the Whispers for a second and just look at some ways in which the game tries to recreate Final Fantasy VII and doesn't quite hit the mark. In particular, let's talk about when I first understood how fundamentally different of an experience this remake would be from the original game - the first chapter. I'm not trying to be the type of person who wants to act like this game is terrible from the start, but I genuinely think how the two versions of Final Fantasy VII open is one of the best points of comparison in terms of how narrative is conveyed.



The original Mako Reactor 1 bombing mission is genuinely one of the best intros to a game I have ever played, not because the things the player gets to actually do (in fact, it's a pretty sloppy introduction to what makes Final Fantasy VII's combat work) but because it's such an effective tone-setter. Cloud riding that train while the bombastic music ramps up in intensity, watching the Avalanche fighters hop out of the train and take out some goons, and then within seconds you're put in control of Cloud and told to hurry deeper into the reactor. You have almost no context for what's going on here, you barely know what this game is about yet, but there's such an immediate sense of momentum, and it's all thanks to that iconic soundtrack. In fact, I had to do this section of the game multiple times because of issues with my controller that repeatedly made me accidentally softlock myself in a menu before I reached the first save point. And I hardly cared because this part of the game is just that good.

In Final Fantasy VII Remake, things start off similarly, Cloud riding on the train, although the iconic Bombing Mission score has not quite kicked in. But when we see Shinra goons beside the train, rather than hopping out in over-the-top action movie poses and doing karate moves, we slowly watch them prepare and eventually execute a stealth takedown. Cloud then gets off the train, talks to Barret for a second, and it's only once more goons arrive that the remastered Bombing Mission soundtrack finally kicks in. And it just doesn't quite hit the same way.

For one thing, the pacing was all off building up to this moment, that music kicking in the second our heroes arrive on the scene is the entire point, and the impact is lessened when you delay it. For another, and this is a problem I hadn't expected to consider, the sound mixing is different. I could barely hear the music in the background as I entered the first proper fight of the game. I think this has to do with the fact that due to this being a modern game with voice acting, the music can't be blaring as loud as it used to otherwise you wouldn't be able to hear the other characters, whereas in the original they spoke only through text and the music could be as loud as the developers wanted.

Every aspect of that original opening was carefully constructed to push the player forward and get them on board with this adventure before they even knew what the adventure was. In Final Fantasy VII Remake, we are recreating the music and the events, but the actual intent and goals of the scene are not intact. Because we now have the freedom to give every character a voice, we have to give everyone something to say. Because these characters are going to be developed more, we have to give them all more time to show what they're made of. What the player actually experiences and feels as they play the game has been tossed aside for the sake of expanding the story, even as the altered, slower pace turns one of the most iconic video game openings into... a generic tutorial mission.



This is a microcosm of almost every choice Final Fantasy VII Remake makes. Recreating the elements of a scene is far more important than preserving its impact. It's like when you watch a live action adaptation of a book or a show only for the people working on it to seemingly miss the point of what made the original work. Which is a disappointing statement given that the Remake does share at least a few members of the original's creative team. That's not to say every expanded scene doesn't work, in fact there's quite a lot of them I like, in particular Chapter 3 which expands on Cloud and Tifa, and Chapters 8 and 9 which do a similar thing for Cloud and Aerith. These are both key relationships in Final Fantasy VII and all of the new interactions put a smile on my face. But the times where this game falters threaten to cancel out everything it does right.

I'm not sure exactly what to call this phenomenon. I'm sure everyone reading this is already familiar with the phrase "addition by subtraction" wherein, by removing an element from something, you actually enhance it. Final Fantasy VII Remake, in many ways, feels like the opposite. Subtraction by addition. The original Final Fantasy VII was incredibly focused. The story moves by quickly, yes, but it says a lot with a little. Very rarely did I feel like something was underdeveloped or didn't get the time it needed. There are exceptions, like everything regarding Cait Sith, but they were rare. There's nothing in the Midgar section, certainly, that I felt needed more time. And again, this is not to say every new scene is bad, or that I don't even prefer some choices the Remake made, but most of the time it's the opposite, and I came away from a scene or a section of the Remake where I went "wow, this worked so much better in the original" and usually the only substantial difference was that the original game had less dialogue.

Let's look at a really small example of this. About midway through the Midgar section of Final Fantasy VII (or halfway through the Remake) Aerith takes Cloud to her house to meet her adoptive mother, Elmyra. Once Cloud and Elmyra are alone, she pieces together that Cloud was in SOLDIER and asks him to leave in the middle of the night without telling Aerith. We're not really told exactly why she's asking this, but it's not exactly hard to guess based on the violent life SOLDIERs lead. Cloud doesn't even respond, and the only thing the player can do from here is go upstairs and get some sleep. A lot of subtle choices all come together to make a fairly generic beat, Elmyra thinking Cloud is trouble and telling him to stay away from her daughter, feel genuinely sad. A lot is said with very little, and the player is given the freedom to sit with the implications of it for a moment before they choose to go upstairs. This part of the game is basically only a few seconds and yet it's one that stuck with me.

In the remake, Elmyra makes the same request, but then she does explain exactly what she means when she criticizes Cloud and his history, going on to say that SOLDIERs traded normal life for power. It seems she intended to go on about this even longer, but the two get interrupted by Aerith. The player then has no agency in progressing the story, you do not go upstairs as Cloud, we simply fade to black and then cut to him in bed. To top it off, as Cloud leaves later that night, he gets stopped by Elmyra again just so she can remind us that him being a SOLDIER is bad, and telling him to never talk to Aerith again. Technically speaking, the player can choose when they leave the house, but it just doesn't hit the same way. The original worked because just like Cloud would have to spend the rest of the night thinking about what Elmyra said, the player would spend a moment thinking about it too. It doesn't work as well when you move this moment to when Cloud was already on his way out of the door.

In that Elmyra scene, we see a way in which even a small level of interactivity, and when that interactivity comes into play, has a massive effect on the story. Final Fantasy VII is still, obviously, a video game at the end of the day. How the player engages with the story is a fundamental aspect of that story. But the original game had to tell its story through text boxes, and thus had to be much more aware of this fact. I think the remake, in its freedom to tell is story through proper voice acted cinematics, kind of lost sight of this fact. Expanding a scene doesn't always actually make it better. But if I went on about every single recreated scene from the original that falls into this problem, I'd be here all day. Instead, let's talk about one of the biggest scenes and how it's just completely different now.



One of the most important events in the Midgar section of Final Fantasy VII is when Shinra drops the plate hanging over Sector 7 just to wipe out Avalanche. It's a small resistance group of only a few people, but Shinra is petty and cruel and ultimately won't be significantly harmed, so they do it with little hesitation. By the time our heroes arrive on the scene to try and stop Shinra from committing such a horrible act, it's already too late to save Biggs, Wedge, or Jessie. They're already dead or dying. Half of Avalanche died essentially off-screen with little fanfare just trying to prevent this atrocity. Barret is still at the top of the pillar trying to make sure they didn't die in vain. But unfortunately, much like with the other Avalanche members, it's already too late to do anything. Shinra drops the plate. Sector 7 is destroyed.

In the aftermath, you're just left with this profound emptiness. So much destruction, so many casualties, and now even Barret has lost a majority of the people who once fought alongside him. All that remains of Avalanche is himself, Tifa, and Cloud who was basically just a contractor up until now. It's the kind of thing that makes him question what he's even fighting for. But his daughter is safe, and now Aerith, the one who protected her, has been taken by Shinra, and he finds new resolve in helping Cloud and Tifa rescue her.

There's a lot that can be said about how the remake changes this section of the story. For one thing, Avalanche is established to be a much larger resistance than just Barret's group. This change is entirely superfluous, adding absolutely nothing to the story and kind of taking away from the ragtag group vibe we had in the original. Barret's resistance felt truly organic and makeshift, instead now they've just splintered off from some larger organization. Not to mention, now when three members of the resistance die, it's not some huge blow to the cause. Avalanche will endure even without them. Sure, they vaguely gesture at the idea that Barret's group splintered off because HQ wasn't really doing anything, and that only Barret is actually making progress in the fight against Shinra, but it still just doesn't hit the same way.

For another, we can look to the fact that very few people actually die in this version of the Sector 7 plate incident. Because earlier chapters spend so much time building up the community and characters in the Sector 7 slums, there are now people there you'll remember. People who might have unfinished stories. So the game goes out of its way to establish that there's an evacuation so that everyone you recognize actually survives and can go on to appear later in the game and possibly even in the upcoming Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. But what this means is that the plate incident doesn't really feel like this event of mass death. Despite Shinra pinning the events on Avalanche, their propaganda news doesn't even seem to mention casualties, only destruction. Did anyone actually die in this version of events other than Jessie?

Oh yeah, that's right. Biggs and Wedge survive this, too. Biggs gets a death scene (and we'll talk more about why I think this is a mistake too in a second) and pretty much spends the rest of the game presumed dead, at least. He only seems to survive as a result of the characters actively changing fate in the final chapter of the game (which we'll also talk about later.) But Wedge, on the other hand? Despite us seeing a bunch of rubble fall on him, he somehow survives the plate incident, even though that's where he died in the original game. The Whispers don't seem to notice this until the game is practically over, attacking him and pushing him out a window, but the game cuts to black before it's even clear if he's dead for real or he made another miraculous recovery. So yeah, even the few named characters who died in the original version of this scene make it out okay. Jessie seems to be the only one who actually stays dead for real in this version, and even then, given how this game ends, literally anything could happen so she might end up returning in Rebirth somehow anyways.

But I think my biggest issue with this scene comes down to the attempts to develop Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie more before it happens. It's time for a hot take - Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie should have stayed one-dimensional characters who die anticlimactically. I understand why people prefer the new version, I get why it could be more heartbreaking seeing them die when they've been rounded out a little more, but I think that misses the point. When you give these characters backstories and personalities leading up to drawn-out death scenes with tearful goodbyes, it can be emotional, but you're feeling those emotions for them as individuals. That's not the point of their deaths in the original game, or at least not why they were effective to me. Those deaths for me are effective precisely because they're so anticlimactic.

Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie don't get heroic last stands or anything in the original game. Sure, dying to protect all the people in Sector 7 is noble, obviously, but it almost feels disgraceful just how easily they're tossed aside. We don't even see how they died. Whatever random Shinra goons killed them are either already dead or long gone. When you find them, there's nothing you can do. All you can do is keep moving forward. And it ends up being for nothing in the end, as the plate drops anyways. It's not just sad, it's deflating. To meet such pathetic ends only to not even succeed in achieving what they died for. They die not as heroes, not as individuals, but as mere casualties. They don't die in a way that matters. They just die.

This was not a bug, it was a feature. It's what gives the plate dropping such weight, and why these characters die (other than explaining why they don't become party members.) A sudden death is emotional in its own way, but sometimes it just takes longer for it to hit. But now when Biggs and Jessie "die" I'm only being asked to feel sad for them as individuals. To feel something as the life slowly goes out of their eyes. To be sad that Biggs can't go back to see the kids at the orphanage again, to mourn the fact that Jessie can't get that date with Cloud she was so desperate for. The plate dropping, the thing they actually fought and died for, seems to fade into the background. Despite the drawn-out pre-rendered cutscene when Shinra finally succeeds, where we watch Cait Sith (who is here all of a sudden to confuse anyone who didn't play the original) fall to his knees in horror at the untold destruction, I felt nothing when that plate dropped. Not in the same way as the emptiness of the original, but rather a sense of boredom.

I think Jessie's death in particular doesn't work for me here because I don't think the attempts to flesh out her character particularly work. I was actually on board with what they were doing in Chapter 4, giving her a backstory and a reason she eventually joined up with Avalanche. The problem is that none of this actually matters. Genuinely, how does any of the things we learn effect Jessie's character going forward? I guess we learn why she likes making pizza? It's new backstory, sure, but filling out a wiki page doesn't actually equate to character development. Jessie doesn't gain a character arc from all these new additions or anything.

So what does she do with all of her scenes in the present day? Well, I'm glad you asked, because apparently the only thing the Final Fantasy VII Remake team can think to do with a new female character (or I guess a fleshed-out version of one that technically already existed as a blank slate) is to create a third love interest for Cloud that exists to prop him up. In fact, I don't think there's anything about Jessie's dynamic with Cloud that we don't already get from Tifa and Aerith. Jessie is an Avalanche member who seems to have a particular affinity for Cloud, trying to vouch for him to Barret who is still skeptical of him, a thing that Tifa seemingly already did to get him in on the Mako Reactor 1 bombing mission. And personality-wise, she's fun and adventurous, trying to crack Cloud's cold exterior, the thing that makes Aerith's character so memorable and effective. So really, what do I get from this character that makes her a meaningful addition to the story? Another love interest of Cloud who can die to make him sad in a way that's far less meaningful than with Aerith? Is that really the best they could do with Jessie?



Again, all of these new additions that ironically end up taking things away get frustrating when you consider the Whispers. The Whispers are here to prevent things from veering too far off-course from Final Fantasy VII. And yet, so many times in this game I was practically screaming at the Whispers to show up and fix a scene that was done way worse than the original. They're actually really bad at their jobs, as it turns out. As long as the basic skeleton of Final Fantasy VII is intact, they're surprisingly forgiving. And there's no one they're more forgiving of than the one-winged angel in the room. You didn't really think I'd go this whole review without mentioning what they did to Sephiroth, did you?

Sephiroth does not show up at all in the Midgar section of the original Final Fantasy VII. He barely even gets mentioned. The first time we hear his name is in a flashback to Cloud and Tifa's childhood, where Cloud says he wants to become a SOLDIER to become a hero like Sephiroth. This was a shocking moment to me when I played the game for the first time a few weeks ago. Obviously with the whole one-winged angel thing going on, I should have assumed there was some fallen hero angle for him, but still, it's worth nothing that for first-time players in 1997, that is the first thing you learn about him.

He mostly goes unmentioned for the rest of Midgar, until suddenly, after getting captured by Shinra, something strange happens. No one is trying to keep them in their cells anymore. The building is an ominous quiet. As the heroes head up to the top of the building, they find President Shinra impaled with a katana. Cloud immediately recognizes what this means, saying that Sephiroth did this. And when the others seem to think this indicates that Sephiroth is on their side, Cloud corrects them. Sephiroth has his own, nefarious agenda here. This is a reveal. Sephiroth is a bad guy. And he's already left with what he came here for. Cloud's new drive is to find him and put an end to him once and for all. It's not until after the heroes escape Midgar that he finally explains what's going on, his history with Sephiroth, and how a war hero became this murderous monster. Sephiroth is a presence long before he ever actually shows his face. You're forced to understand him as a part of the world before you really know who he is. So there's a weight in that slow burn building up to the payoff in the flashback at Kalm, one that finally pulls back the mystery on Sephiroth, but also many of the secrets Cloud has been hiding about himself.

But wouldn't it have been so much better if Sephiroth showed up like 5% of the way into the game as a hallucination and starts taunting Cloud by saying "IT'S SO SAD THAT THE PLANET IS DYING BECAUSE BEING ALIVE LET ME KILL YOUR MOM" instead? Look, I get why this happened. Sephiroth was popular and it was difficult to imagine doing an entire 30-40 hour remake of Midgar while still leaving him absent the whole time. And to an extent, he is a very personal villain for Cloud, so it makes sense that Cloud might be tormented by him like this. But keep in mind, this game will be some people's first experience with Final Fantasy VII. They will have heard the hype about Sephiroth. Imagine this being your first impression of one of the most iconic villains in video game history. Sure, it's not the real Sephiroth, but it is still the first time any version of Sephiroth appears. And it sucks. (Mind you, Cloud's mom dying isn't even directly addressed in the original game, it's just a thing you have to infer from context when we learn about Sephiroth burning Nibelheim in the Kalm flashback.)

And this isn't the only Sephiroth vision. There's a lot more of these, a lot more of him taunting Cloud in hallucinations, or Cloud having random flashbacks, all so we can hear the words of Sephiroth for the sake of fanservice, I guess. Not to mention that he does show up in the flesh in the final few chapters of the remake. Despite how much time I've spent comparing this game to the original, I don't want to be a Whisper here. I don't want to hold the original Final Fantasy VII up on a pedestal and insist that the developers can't change things. But for one, the Whispers don't intervene, and I question their judgement if they don't consider Sephiroth's early presence a fundamental alteration of the original story. For another, even as I tried to be open to the idea of Sephiroth showing up early (since I knew this about the game going in) the debut of the real Sephiroth is undermined by all of those previous hallucinations.

Not to start getting into rewrite mode like my previous review, but imagine, if you will, a version of this game in which we did not hear Sephiroth speak at all in any of Cloud's hallucinations. If he were instead this vague figure from Cloud's past that still weighs heavily on him, but one who does not get characterized at all beyond that. Sephiroth is still an utter enigma, but perhaps we know from earlier on that he is a malevolent presence and one that effects Cloud personally. Cloud himself remains a mystery a consequence of this too, as we don't know about Sephiroth burning his village and killing his mom. And then, at Hojo's lab, our heroes finally awake and attempt to finally evacuate the Shinra building, only for Cloud to once again see the face of his enemy - Sephiroth. Only this time, the others see him too. He's real. And he knows how heavily this weighs on Cloud, saying "Don't deny me. Embrace me." And suddenly, Cloud lashes out violently, as we realize just how personal this conflict actually is. Do you see how much effective this scene that already exists in the remake is if you do it without pointlessly telling us Sephiroth killed Cloud's mom at the start?

Sephiroth is the biggest case of subtraction by addition (other than the Whispers, who we'll revisit in a moment) in this entire remake. Every time Cloud has a vision of something Sephiroth has done or is going to do, or hallucinates something Sephiroth never even did, it inherently undercuts his presence. It's as though the developers were unwilling to put any trust in the player to be patient enough to wait to see and hear Sephiroth in the flesh, so they had to cram as many scenes of him as they could into the narrative before then. And when you do that enough times, it doesn't just undermine Sephiroth himself, it makes this narrative harder to understand if you haven't played Final Fantasy VII. Because if you're writing this with people who already played that game and are hyped for Sephiroth in mind, you've chosen them over the new people experiencing this story for the first time. And that decision applies to more than just Sephiroth himself. Okay, I guess it's finally time to talk about how the Whispers actually impact this story.



Throughout the game, there are constant allusions to the future events of Final Fantasy VII. Cloud's second Sephiroth hallucination sees Sephiroth put a hand on Aerith's shoulder and tell him he can't save her, clearly alluding to the fact that eventually Sephiroth will kill her, which you'd know if you played Final Fantasy VII. This scene also marks the first appearance of the Whispers, the invisible arbiters of fate trying to keep him, Aerith, and every named character on the path of the original story. It's telling that we first see them swirling around Aerith, as we'll get to in a moment. But for now, what's important is that as they start appearing, we start to see glimpses of not just the past, but also the future.

One of my least favorite moments in the entire remake comes not long after this. After Cloud returns to Sector 7 and is given an apartment by Tifa, he is suddenly awoken by strange sounds coming from his neighbor's apartment. He goes over to inspect, and finds a strange man in a black robe with a number tattooed on his arm. This is cool! It's a way of establishing the black hooded figures that work with Sephiroth later on in Final Fantasy VII. Sure, them sort of popping out of nowhere is part of what makes the return to Nibelheim so effective, but I think there's a case to be made that this is still a change with more positives than negatives. But they couldn't just leave it as this cool little mystery for new players that would get revisited later on. They had to turn this into fanservice. Because when Cloud touches this hooded man, he suddenly gets a vision of all the hooded figures heading to the Northern Crater as one of them says "Reunion... Reunion.." Remember the Jenova Reunion? Remember Final Fantasy VII???

This is what most of the visions of the future in this game actually feel like. Sure, they're supposed to be about gradually building up to the reveal of the Whispers as arbiters of fate, showing characters events that have yet to be. But these visions are lacking in context, and don't even seem to affect the characters in any particularly meaningful ways. It's not as though there's a moment where someone sees something that happens in the future and goes "well that sucks, we should change that future." Instead these flashes seem to exist moreso for the audience, who will recognize these out of context snippets and turn into that gif of Leo DiCaprio pointing at the screen. I can't tell you for certain how these things would play to someone who lived under a rock and knew absolutely nothing about Final Fantasy VII, but I have to imagine these wouldn't come across as cool mysteries, but instead random and confusing.

This all comes to a head in the final act. For the most part, leading up to this point, the Whispers were a weird and vague subplot, barely interacting with the main story in any meaningful way. But then we suddenly have one saving Barret from a death that he did not meet in the original game, and then shortly after that we get the iconic motorcycle escape sequence and things truly go off the rails. The Whispers begin swirling around the Shinra building for reasons I'm still not entirely clear on. We suddenly cut to what appears to be some kind of alternate timeline of the ending of Crisis Core (which I have not played but watched the last few cutscenes of) in which Zack's fate appears to be changing, as we see Whispers swirling around Midgar in the background. And back in the main timeline, our heroes suddenly find Sephiroth at the end of the highway where ordinarily they would have merely rappelled down and left Midgar. He opens up a portal and walks through it. And here is where the game comes as close as it gets to making a statement.

At some point during her earlier capture by Shinra, it seems Aerith downloaded some knowledge from the Planet, unconsciously learning about the nature of the Whispers, souls of the Planet crying in anguish because Sephiroth is a malevolent force that wants to reign over the Planet as God. Aerith wants to stop Sephiroth here and now, but she knows it's not their fate to intervene. But through that portal is the power to change destiny. As Aerith explains, once they cross this threshold, they'll find "limitless, terrifying freedom." And given that this is a remake of a story that's already been told, it's impossible to interpret this scene completely literally. A statement is being made about this remake within the context of the original. Aerith is saying that once they go through that portal, once they cross it, the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy will no longer be obligated to follow any of the events of the original game.

And so they do. The heroes go through it, and are confronted by the Whispers making one last stand in the form of the Whisper Harbinger, seemingly the true consciousness that all other Whispers are merely extensions of. And when they kill it, fate is now seemingly entirely within their hands. They can do whatever they want with their freedom. And again, through that meta lens, it now means anything is possible in this story. We're free to diverge. But this is where I have to question something - why? Change is good, I fully embrace remakes wanting to change things, but what exactly do they want to change so badly? If the whispers are fans who demand a straightforward recreation of the original, then I struggle to see what the developers intend to change. I watched all the trailers for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth this morning, and honestly, it still looks like they're just telling more of the same story as Final Fantasy VII. Remake even ends on the characters leaving Midgar to scour the world for Sephiroth, just like the original. And I can't imagine the climactic confrontation of the final game in this trilogy won't still be a battle against Safer-Sephiroth.

That's not to say that some things don't change as a result of the characters' defeat of the Whisper Harbinger, but I hope and pray that what happens at the end of Remake is not indicative of the type of changes they want to make going forwards. Because you want to know what the first thing that happens is once the characters seize control of their destinies? What happens immediately after Final Fantasy VII Remake says "we're going to tell our own unique story now"? They have a big, over-the-top fanservice fight with Sephiroth.

A grand new version of One-Winged Angel starts ramping up intensity as the fight progresses, Sephiroth eventually even sprouting a black wing after taunting us with black feathers the whole game. This is what we do with limitless freedom. We let the characters fight what feels less like Final Fantasy VII's Sephiroth, and more like the flanderized ideal of Sephiroth created by all of his appearances in other pieces of media. It's so fanservice-y that it feels intentional, so if the Whispers as antagonists are meant to comment on fan expectations, why does killing them result in catering to a slightly different group of rabid fans?

I knew going into this that there was a climactic fight with Sephiroth that wasn't in the original game, but I was hoping the developers would have at least a little more restraint. Sephiroth being the "One-Winged Angel" wasn't actually a huge part of his character in Final Fantasy VII. There isn't any sort of explicit angel motif with his character until literally the final battle, when we see him with a single red wing in his Safer-Sephiroth form. I was shocked to learn that the black wing I often saw him depicted with in human form was never in the original Final Fantasy VII when I played it for the first time, it had just become cemented as a part of his identity by later media. Similarly, as iconic as the One-Winged Angel theme is, it's not actually some main theme for Sephiroth, it's only used in that one battle against Safer-Sephiroth because it was designed to fit that specific fight. Sephiroth's actual main theme is Those Chosen by the Planet (which thankfully, the developers did at least remember to use in every scene of his before the new fight against him in Remake)

These aspects of Sephiroth's character worked precisely because they were built up to. Now when the remake inevitably does still try to do Safer-Sephiroth, the impact has been robbed. We've already heard One-Winged Angel. We can't even do the iconic final stand-off between Cloud and Sephiroth in the void now, because they decided to recreate that as a cutscene in this game. Unless this remake trilogy veers off into such an absurd direction that Sephiroth is no longer the main antagonist of the story, the third game has essentially already been ruined by the first game. These aren't changes that present some bold new narrative direction. What they've done by breaking free of the shackles of following the original story to the letter is just cram in as much fanservice as they could.



The few other changes we see in Remake don't really fare much better. That random cut to Zack eventually does result in Zack surviving, and even though that takes place before the events of Final Fantasy VII, the fact that it's intercut with the characters breaking the shackles of fate implies Zack's survival is a direct result of their actions. So presumably, in whatever alternate timeline or pocket dimension or whatever we see Zack in, he's survived and will probably show up to have a tearful reunion with Cloud or whatever. More fanservice. Biggs also survives too, but I can't imagine such a nothing character had many fans before Remake fleshed him out, so maybe there's something more interesting they're cooking up there (especially as we do see him run into Zack in a trailer for Rebirth) but I can't imagine whatever is going on with him will be so interesting as to undo all my previous concerns.

Again, I just have to ask, what are we actually trying to say here? What was the point of all of this? Conceptually, I really like the idea of the Whispers. I like the idea of a remake gradually tossing out the very idea of being a remake and veering off into its own direction. I like idea of the Whispers representing the kind of fans who would obviously object to that. But I'm not seeing that promising new direction, for two reasons. The first reason Final Fantasy VII Remake itself isn't some drastically different take on Final Fantasy VII's story. For the most part, it is just a straightforward remake, just a massively expanded one. There's just a bunch of random fanservice and Whisper nonsense sprinkled on top to confuse anyone who hasn't played Final Fantasy VII. The other reason I simply don't buy this "new direction" the remakes are taking is that I'm not seeing anything in the future of this series but more of the original Final Fantasy VII's story, except this time no one dies. Most likely not even the most significant character to die in the original game, Aerith.

It's pretty much impossible to play Final Fantasy VII Remake and not go "is Aerith even going to die in this continuity?" As I said, the Whispers are first introduced to us when they surround Aerith. Later on, when Aerith enters the story properly, she's the first character to introduce the idea of being concerned about her future being set in stone. And although this is partially due to her nature as an Ancient, she's the one who first gains insight into the Whispers, even if we weirdly hear it from Red XIII due to her passing the knowledge on to him. Still, she's the one who gives the big speech about changing their destinies in the final chapter. Aerith is tied to almost every step of this entire meta thread about changing the story of Final Fantasy VII. And what is the most iconic scene from that game? What is the main thing that happens in the future of these characters that they would want to change? Yeah, it seems like we're building up to Aerith's fate being altered in some way.

I'm not sure what to make of any of this. I've spent this whole review being a negative nancy, but it's not out of some fundamental hatred for this remake and everything it's trying to do. I still enjoyed most of my time with this game, despite how it sounds. If nothing else, I'm enjoying the combat and that's enough to keep me playing these games for as long as they make them. But I'm also still trying to keep an open mind with regard to the story. There's a chance Rebirth suddenly introduces the clarity I've been missing, that all these trailers showing what looks like a straightforward retelling of the next major chunk of Final Fantasy VII's story are a lie, or that it does follow the same story but manages to deliver some kind of interesting message by having the characters still end up following that original path anyways.

But they've really written themselves into a tricky corner, because they've alienated a lot of potential newcomers with all of this Whisper nonsense, and they've made it hard for people who liked the game to not wish they hadn't even bothered with the meta angle and instead that they had went with the basic approach of telling a stretched-out but straightforward version of Final Fantasy VII. I'm a bit more open to what they're doing here, I want AAA games to be more ambitious and that means trying to embrace the kind of artistic freedom this remake is seemingly advocating for. But with freedom of expression also comes the freedom to be criticized. Freedom is good, but the art that results from that freedom is inherently neutral.

This team still has to prove they're doing something good with that freedom. Otherwise the Whispers feel less like a criticism of a type of toxic fan, and more like the developers essentially creating a shield from criticism. Like they're saying "if you don't like what we're doing here, you're just whining that it's not like the original game." Which I would hope is not the message here. But if we're just to follow the story of Final Fantasy VII with only a few divergences along the way, then they're probably better off not doing any more of this meta stuff. If they really want to continue to reckon with Final Fantasy VII's legacy like this, then they need to be willing to examine the original under a more critical lens instead of just using this freedom to do more fanservice. Because as of right now, I'm still not sure what these developers think was so wrong with the original Final Fantasy VII to warrant all of this to begin with.

Up until last week, I had never played Final Fantasy VII. I'm not exactly much of a JRPG person. But one thing has fascinated for the last few years, and that was the discourse surrounding Final Fantasy VII Remake, namely rather than being a retelling of the original game's story, it introduced changes and new elements that turned it into more of a commentary on Final Fantasy VII and its impact. Anyone who's followed my reviews on here and other sites can probably guess that this kind of discourse immediately put the remake on my radar.

Like I said earlier, though, I'm not much of a JRPG player. However, I knew that if I was going to play Final Fantasy VII Remake, I needed to play the original Final Fantasy VII first so I could appreciate it on its own before diving into the remake and trying to decipher what exactly its changes and additions meant. Which meant playing 30+ hours of one of my least favorite types of games: a turn-based RPG.

For what it's worth, Final Fantasy VII, despite being such a formative staple of the genre, actually uses a system that separates it from a typical turn-based RPG. The "active time battle" system means every individual character and enemy's turn is dictated by an individual timer rather than waiting until every single player on the field has acted. Which means that while you're busy choosing actions for one character, the enemy is already recovering and might attack you before you finish.

This system didn't really grip me at first, it seemed like a useless change that didn't solve my two issues when it comes to turn-based RPGs: my own impatience and the inability to truly react to your opponent. Impatience is self-explanatory, but by "inability to react" I am referring to the fact that when an enemy does an attack, you have no real way of intercepting or countering, you will simply get hit and there's nothing you can do about it unless there's a chance it misses or something. Of course, the player has the same advantage against enemies, but the "fairness" of the design doesn't change how frustrating it feels when an enemy just suddenly busts out a move that you couldn't have anticipated and ruins the fight for reasons that were basically out of your control because you couldn't have taken it into account on a previous turn.

Active time battle, again, isn't actually that much of a solution. There's still a lot of sitting through animations, so it's not as if battles are actually quicker than in a typical turn-based RPG. And for the most part, because the game pauses during certain animations, you're still not afforded the freedom to react. I pretty much hated the combat system for the entirety of Midgar, a 6-hour "prologue" of sorts. That is, until, I finally reached battles challenging enough where I was being asked to consider healing not just between fights, but during. In a regular turn-based RPG, when a character is low on health, although it's kind of scary, it's not truly a big deal, you just go into the menu and use a potion or have your healing character cast a spell. Your only worry is if you'll be able to heal enough to withstand the next attack, which usually isn't a problem.

In Final Fantasy VII, every frame you spend in a menu brings the enemy an inch closer to attacking again. So you don't just have to heal, you have to heal fast. Some battles got so frantic to the point where my optimal strategy genuinely came to be giving every single character a Restore Materia just to make sure I could not possibly miss a chance to heal. This worked to an extent, but once certain bosses started to whip out attacks that hit the whole party, even this lost its usefulness. The solution to this problem is where some aspects of the game's age began to show.

As with a lot of old games, sometimes the tutorializing is suboptimal. One flaw in Final Fantasy VII in this regard is how poorly it explains the Materia system, which essentially allows you to equip magic and various other abilities to characters. This is good on its own, but Materia's real power is meant to shine when you pair it with support Materia that augments it. But the actual text explaining what these support Materia items do is not always very clear. I genuinely did not consider that "All" Materia was referring to area-of-effect until the walkthrough I was using mentioned how useful it would be for an upcoming fight. It's almost essential that you have at least one character with a Restore Materia augmented by an All Materia or else you simply will not be able to prevent your party from getting wiped in some fights.

Once I realized this, of course, the game instantly became more fun. Suddenly I found myself rushing to queue up a party heal during an enemy's lengthy attack animation when I knew significant damage was coming up. It's the closest a turn-based RPG has ever come to emulating the feeling of an action game, and for that, I do have to respect the design at play, especially for a game from the 90s where I wouldn't have expected such deviation from the norm.

But enough about the gameplay. Although that certainly will be a point of comparison I have to consider when it comes to Final Fantasy VII Remake, obviously the main thing I'm here to compare is the story. So, what do I think of the story of Final Fantasy VII, one of the most highly regarded, iconic, and influential video game narratives of all time? Dear readers, I desperately wanted to have a hot take here, I cannot help but enjoy being a contrarian sometimes. But only when I'm honest about it. And here, my honest statement is - it's almost as good as people say. Not flawless, as we'll get to later, but it lives up to its reputation.

Final Fantasy VII is most well-known for its strong environmentalist themes, and that's evident almost immediately. Shinra, both a major corporation and the primary government of Final Fantasy VII's world, powers the world's technology through a substance known as "Mako", but the production of Mako is slowly killing the planet. Our protagonist, Cloud, finds himself in the fight against Shinra alongside two of our other main characters, Barret and Tifa, in the resistance group AVALANCHE just before the game begins. Although Cloud isn't much of a believer in the cause, AVALANCHE's goal is to stop Shinra from killing the planet by any means necessary. The first several hours take place entirely within the Shinra capital of Midgar as Cloud, Barret, and Tifa fight Shinra and attempt to protect their new friend Aeris who the Shinra are after.

Although I had not played Final Fantasy VII before, I did absorb a lot of discourse over the years. One criticism I've heard is that these those environmentalist themes sort of fall by the wayside after the group leaves Midgar, especially since towards the end of Midgar they lean more heavily into more traditional fantasy instead of the more sci-fi approach the early hours took. I think it is fair to say that the game certainly expands beyond that laser focus we see in the Midgar section, but I would argue everything those opening hours establishes still remains at the heart of the story for almost the entirety of the dozens of hours it takes to beat the game.

For one thing, Shinra's influence is still felt beyond Midgar. They are the government of almost the entire known world, after all, and will constantly interfere with our heroes along every step of their journey. Not to mention, their Mako reactors are everywhere. On top of that, even the more fantastical elements connect to Shinra. A crucial plot device to the world of Final Fantasy VII is the Lifestream, the combined sum of all the planet's life energy. All living things are born from the Lifestream, and everything that dies returns to the Lifestream. The reason the production of Mako causes such harm to the environment is because it essentially "uses up" the Lifestream's energy, leaving it unable to return to its source and disrupting that fundamental cycle.

And then we have the main antagonist, Sephiroth. Sephiroth himself is the product of a Shinra experiment, and now intends to destroy the world upon learning the truth of his nature. Although, he learns two different stories. The first being that he is the son of Jenova, one of the Ancients, also known as the Cetra. The Cetra were a nomadic people deeply in tune with the Planet and the Lifestream, but were wiped out in a catastrophe, abandoned to their fate by humans who chose the path of remaining in one place, destroying the environment and harming the Planet for the sake of building their cities. Sephiroth's reaction to this version of events is one of vengeance, wanting to punish humanity for their crimes against the Cetra and the Planet as a whole. Although most of this story ends up being untrue, it immediately justifies the pivot from Shinra as the primary antagonist to Sephiroth, as Sephiroth becomes more than just a singular figure, but this manifestation of all of humanity's sins coming back to haunt them.

However, the truth of the matter comes slightly later. "Jenova" is not a Cetra, nor is it Sephiroth's real mother. Rather, it's an alien entity that crashed down on the planet two thousand years ago, the "calamity from the skies" that brought about the aforementioned end of the Cetra before it was eventually defeated, leaving Aeris' family line the last remnant of her entire race. Sephiroth was created when his pregnant mother was injected with Jenova's cells by his father, Hojo, though Sephiroth does still seem to believe he is the direct offspring of Jenova. Regardless, he is aware of Jenova's true nature, and now seeks to finish what it started and kill the world, so that when the Lifestream attempts to "heal" the dying Planet, he can absorb its energy and rule the new world as God.

This new backstory and motvation does still have its merits. It makes Sephiroth an interesting parallel to our main protagonist. Cloud is a former soldier constantly looking up to others. First his hero Sephiroth, then his friend in some nebulous, undefined war, Zack, who would eventually die at the hands of Sephiroth. Cloud, though injected with Jenova's cells in an attempt to recreate Shinra's perfect soldier Sephiroth, never ended living up to his heights. He wasn't even as good as Zack. He was a failure destined to remain a nobody. So when he reunites with his friend Tifa a few years after the tragedy that destroyed his hometown and left him traumatized, he sort of tricks himself into believing Zack's feats were his own. Not maliciously, since he seems to believe the lie himself, but it's a lie nonetheless. Cloud is full of self-doubt, and he doesn't know who he is or who he wants to be, so it's easy for him to just want to be someone else.

Sephiroth, on the other hand, believes he knows exactly who he is. Sure, it's a momentary crisis when he learns he might be some kind of science experiment, but this only fills him with new drive, new purpose. Him being the product of an alien bent on destroying all life on the Planet doesn't give him pause, make him doubt what he's fighting for. Instead, it only makes him more sure of himself. Gives him a sense of destiny. He was brought into this world to become the God his "mother" never could, and he will stop at nothing until he achieves it. Such certainty is born from tremendous ego, literally exerting his will over that of the entire Planet.

Thus ends up being ironic in two ways. The first is that said ego gives him more in common with the Shinra and the humans he detests than he realizes, prioritizing his own ends over the good of all life on the Planet. The second is that as we learn, Jenova's cells exert subconscious influence over everyone who has them, slowly desiring to converge and resume Jenova's mission. Although I don't believe it's ever stated, there's no reason to believe Sephiroth is any exception. His entire sense of self is likely a myth. A puppet of Jenova's will, mistakenly believing his desires to be his own, much like Cloud did with his fallen friend Zack.

But as I alluded to a moment ago, I don't think this second version of Sephiroth's backstory is quite as tight and cohesive as the first one. I do think it is still, overall, the better choice for the story, I don't think they should have had the original version of events turn out to be the truth. Otherwise the game doesn't really have much more of interest to say than "humans are destroying the planet and that's bad." It's true, obviously, but what would fighting Sephiroth really represent other than saying that the entire human race doesn't deserve to be punished? That being said, there is something to be said about humanity's selfishness allowed them to turn a blind eye to the dying Planet, and how Sephiroth being a descendant of one of the Cetra, the people who wanted so desperately to protect it, turns him into more than an individual. How his evil is not born only from within, but from all the problems the world has been facing for the last two thousand years.

The truth of Jenova, this alien being from outside of the Planet, kind of undermines this. Jenova is a complete outsider. This is a very text-heavy game, so maybe I missed something, but it's not really explained what Jenova is, exactly, other than some sort of parasitic alien. I think this ambiguity is a strength, to be clear, but what does Jenova really represent in the context of the environmentalist themes? It's not born from the Planet, nor the abuse of the Lifestream by humanity. So for Sephiroth to be enacting Jenova's ends, either as a puppet or just trying to finish what it started, we sort of lose his connection to most of those environmentalist themes. Humanity's only real involvement in creating Sephiroth, in turning him into the man he is, is Hojo's experiments. The fault now rests entirely on individuals, rather than a broader societal failure.

This issue is compounded by the reveal of the way Sephiroth intends to end the world and remake it as God, a visual from the game so iconic it's part of the logo - Meteor. You would think at this point in the game, especially with Shinra being a presence, you'd want to find some way of tying these two threads back together. Shinra is killing the Planet through its actions, and now Sephiroth wants to kill the world so he can remake it in its last moments of life. What Shinra is doing accidentally (or rather, as a side effect of their actions that they're willing to ignore) Sephiroth intends to do with intent and malice. But it turns out, rather than killing the Planet through any of the means by which it's already dying, instead he's relying on some Cetra magic from thousands of years ago that also conveniently has planet-killing capabilities.

Obviously, I get why this happened. For one thing, going into the second half of the story, it certainly raises the stakes to have this singular impending event of destruction. And within the rules of the fiction, Sephiroth's method of destroying the world needs to preserve what energy remains in the Lifestream, which means if he destroyed the world with Mako reactors or a similar process, he wouldn't be able to become God, everything would just die forever.

But I think an answer was staring them in the face here. Perhaps this will get a bit fanfic-y, me suggesting a rewrite to a game that is nearly three decades old now. But at the same time, Square Enix and Tetsuya Nomura are clearly willing to spend millions and millions of dollars and most of the 2020s on essentially telling a high-budget fanfic rewrite of the original game, so I think I'm afforded that right in this review, too.

So, Sephiroth obviously can't just will something as powerful as Meteor into existence. As we learn shortly after the reveal of its existence, it requires a powerful catalyst known as Black Materia. In the world of Final Fantasy VII, Materia can be formed in two ways. The most common one is as one of many byproducts of Mako production, making Shinra the world's primary supplier of Materia. But also, rarely, the Lifestream's energy crystallizes on its own, which is how Materia was created and used before the time of Shinra. The oldest and most powerful of these Materia are the Black Materia and the White Materia. The White Materia is used to cast Holy, a powerful spell that essentially allows the Planet to do whatever it believes is necessary to protect the Lifestream. Black Materia, on the other hand, has the sole purpose of destruction, hence its use in summoning the world-ending Meteor.

But what if the Black Materia wasn't this ancient thing that had always existed? What if it was moreso a theoretical possibility, a thing the Planet warned about but did not come to be in the time of the Cetra? In the game, the Black Materia takes the form of an entire temple, but can be shrunk down into a usable size by completing various puzzles. This explanation is pulled almost entirely out of thin air. It's not clear how or why the Cetra built a temple out of Black Materia or how they were able to grow and shrink it like that. And I get it's magic, but this entire thing is basically born out of nowhere basically just to justify a single (admittedly important) character beat for Shinra double agent Cait Sith.

But let's say none of that happened, and once the characters learn about Black Materia, it doesn't turn out that they're already conveniently standing inside of it. Instead, it's a theoretical thing that they just know Sephiroth believes exists somewhere in the world. Where, or rather what, could the Black Materia be in this hypothetical alternate version of events? And how could it better tie into the Shinra story thread and its associated themes?

Well, all Materia is just the Lifestream's energy condensed, right? And Shinra is using the Lifestream's energy to create Mako. And here we're already telling an environmentalist story where the production of that energy is sucking the life out of the planet. What if, much like in our own world, some energy sources produce toxic waste that can cause ecological damage, Mako produces waste of its own? Spoiled energy from the Planet, unable to return to the Lifestream, left to fester on its own and, much like ordinary Materia, gradually crystalize? Rather than some random temple, this could be your Black Materia.

It's clear that the "Black" in the name isn't just referring to color, but a more metaphysical darkness or corruption. So it being born from Mako, itself a perversion of the Lifestream certainly seems logical to me. It just feels so much more impactful when I imagine that the catalyst that Sephiroth needs to end the world is something that is, once again, born from humanity's abuse of nature. Instead, it just isn't really explained why Black Materia (and the subsequent world-ending spell it casts) exists. It just does. A meaningless macguffin that the characters can toss around before it finally ends up in Sephiroth's hands once and for all, with absolutely no greater narrative significance.

And this isn't a problem because I need magic to have an explanation inherently or anything, but rather, the obligatory nature of Black Materia's existence is sort of the final nail in the coffin in terms of how the game's Sephiroth and Shinra threads don't really tie together by the end, despite being so intrinsically linked from the start. Because without this, there is absolutely nothing about Sephiroth's entire goal that has anything to do with the ecological consequences of Shinra or humanity's lifestyle. Hojo would still be a mad scientist trying to create super soldiers with Jenova's cells no matter what, which would always inevitably lead to a Sephiroth trying to finish what Jenova started long before humanity turned their backs on the Planet.

So hopefully this overly long detour about a seemingly small and insignificant plot device like Black Materia made sense by the end. It's not that Black Materia is the only way they could have fixed the problem, but it certainly seems like the most obvious one. Sephiroth's destruction being born from humanity's mistakes would even enhance the ambiguous ending. The game literally cuts to credits at the climax of this clash between Holy, a spell born of the will of humanity fighting for the Planet's future, and Meteor. If Meteor worked a little bit more like I suggested, then it becomes this metaphorical collision of the best and worst of humanity, and you're left to decide for yourself which one the Planet deemed representative of the fate of the human race. (Though, while I haven't seen Advent Children, the very existence of a proper sequel narrative set before the game's epilogue seems to definitively answer this question.)

Hopefully amidst all my complaining, I don't come across like I dislike this story, or that it doesn't deserve the legacy it has. But not even the most iconic stories are beyond criticism. That the game presented such strong ideas and themes that I was even able to talk about it in this much detail should be a testament to just how much of a landmark this was for video game storytelling. It's not some bad story because it got a few things wrong, it's a great game because of just how much it got right. It raised the bar for a reason, and I'm only more curious to see what exactly such a drastic remake of this game looks like now.

There isn't really a whole lot to say about Spider-Man 2 because in reality, most of what you can say about the previous Insomniac Spider-Man games still holds true even now. Even story-wise, almost every beat is exactly what you'd expect based on both the comics they draw inspiration from and also just how they've written these games in the past. The symbiote storyline is so well-known and so hard to innovate upon that there really wasn't much Insomniac could do other than tell the same story again and hopefully be competent at it in the process. I think they succeeded, but there is one weird thing that happens towards the end, one that only seems to exist because this story happens to be told in the medium of video games.

I'm talking about the presence of the "Anti-Venom" suit, and it's something that got me thinking once again about a subject that's been on my mind for years but I've struggled to put into words. Because despite my issues with Anti-Venom that we'll get to in a moment, it's also fairly inconsequential. Anything and everything I say about it will inevitably be countered with "it's fun" and I wouldn't even disagree with that. This is not meant to be an "Anti-Venom makes the game bad" criticism, but rather it's a symptom of a larger problem I have with our collective understanding of game design, not just for Spider-Man games, but for almost all video games.

But before I get to those wider issues, let's talk about this one video game first. Spider-Man 2, among other things, is an adaptation of the fairly iconic "Black Suit" Spider-Man storyline, in which Spider-Man comes into contact with a mysterious black substance that turns into a new suit that gradually warps his mind until he isn't truly himself anymore, corrupted by the alien symbiote that is what he initially thought was just a fancy costume. Eventually, of course, he is able to reject the symbiote's influence and tear off the gooey "suit", leading the symbiote to seek out a new host and become the villainous Venom. If you've seen one version of this story, you've seen them all. Spider-Man 2 is doing nothing different in that regard.

Yuri Lowenthal, who plays Peter Parker in these games, recently did an interview where he likened his version of Peter being corrupted by the symbiote to addiction. At first the rush of power the symbiote gives Peter is great, but over time, he becomes more and more dependent on it, until he serves it rather than the other way around. I'm no expert on addiction here, but the analogy seems decent enough. And I think we can apply that to more than just his performance or even the writing, but to an extent, the game design.

After Peter finally dons the symbiote suit in Spider-Man 2, you'll instantly feel a change in the gameplay. For starters, you unlock the new Symbiote Surge ability, one that temporarily puts Peter into a state where he can utterly wallop most enemies in just a few attacks, essentially a "mash square to win" button. In addition, new symbiote powers replace abilities that previously utilized Peter's Iron Spider legs. And quite frankly, these symbiote abilities are far more useful than the Iron Spider ones ever were. In particular, the Symbiote Yank, which allows you to instantly grab a group of enemies in a surprisingly large area in front of you and then slam them down, taking every enemy affected by it out of commission for a moment while also doing heavy damage, is a life-saver on higher difficulties where large groups of enemies can feel like a death sentence.

Because of this, because the Symbiote has empowered Peter so much, as you play it's hard to imagine going back to a world without them. Even the powerful electric abilities of the other Spider-Man, Miles Morales, don't feel as devastating as anything you can accomplish with the Symbiote's power. Like in the story, in gameplay you'll come to be dependent on the Symbiote's abilities more and more, especially as the "Hunter" enemies pose a far more significant challenge than the basic gangsters you fight at the start of the game.

So, when you reach a point in the story that the time finally comes for Peter to reject the Symbiote and take off that black suit once and for all, you immediately notice the difference. Those old Iron Spider abilities you're now forced back into using just don't pack the same punch, and the aforementioned Symbiote Surge is gone, not even replaced with some lesser alternative. You have been put into a feeling of withdrawl, perfectly capturing the toxic influence of the symbiote. Video games are an interactive medium, after all, and here they successfully managed to convey narrative through the gameplay itself.

And then a handful of story missions later, we find out Peter has a piece of the symbiote still lingering inside him which is then cured by Mister Negative's powers, giving him the white Anti-Venom suit, essentially a version of the symbiote that won't mess with his head. Which means all those powers you lost earlier in the story are back. Although two of the previous symbiote abilities are replaced with slightly less powerful variants, two of them return completely unaltered from their original versions. On top of this, the Symbiote Surge, which caused you to play as the brutal, highly aggressive madman the symbiote turns you into, also comes back completely unchanged. Even in the story, this is outright described as having all the power of the original symbiote with none of the consequences.

I don't need to go into too much detail about why I take issues with this, right? It immediately goes back on all the praise I just laid on the gameplay/story synergy they achieved with the symbiote. Of course, I know why this was done. The symbiote was fun! Why take that power away from the player forever? Why leave one Spider-Man with less combat options than the other? And I'm not here to say the game is ruined because of this or anything, but just because I understand the thought process here doesn't mean I agree with it.

This moment is, I think, a good encapsulation of an approach to game design I wish had become less normalized. As much as we all like the idea of gameplay and narrative both working in harmony to tell the same story, too often there is a tension between doing that and still prioritizing "fun" above all else. And this is where we run into trouble, because when I say that, it sounds like I'm saying games should be less fun, which is not the case. I'm generally a completionist when it comes to the games I play, so it's not as if I want that experience to be painful.

What I'm trying to say is that I think most people who play games want video games to be taken seriously as an art form. And I think to some extent, that idea has become vastly more popular now than it was, say, 10 years ago. But I still wouldn't consider it quite "mainstream" yet, and I think there are a few roadblocks to that, and part of that comes down to how we think about game design. Fundamentally, even though we still understand games as being able to tell stories, to communicate emotions, they're still seen as "lesser", something meant to be enjoyed in the same way as a toy moreso than any other narrative medium.

I'm talking about this with Spider-Man 2 not because I think it is the most important game to placed within this phenomenon. It's, obviously, a mainstream AAA game meant to drive up console sales. We were not robbed of some deep artistic experience because it made certain choices. But that whole Anti-Venom thing finally helped me put together these thoughts. Its inclusion, fundamentally, treats the game as a toy. And that's fine! Toys are fun! Again, my takeaway here is not to say that the game is bad because of this, or that it shouldn't exist in the form it does. But it's not as if it's the only game we're designing this way.

I think there's just a fear in game design, more than any other medium, of losing the player's interest. Games require the most money to buy into of almost any art form. For the price of a single AAA video game, you're paying the equivalent of more movie tickets than you can count on one hand, or a few months of a streaming service where you could find several shows you want to watch. So there's an expectation that, when you buy a game, you're going to get something worth the money you put into it. There's a reason AAA open world games have become so homogenized.

But this mindset isn't one that I think indie games are immune to either. I don't think most indie games are really trying for anything less, even if there is somewhat more variation in the types of games being made. But any indie that tries to, perhaps, experiment with our typical notion of "fun" in order to generate unique meaning through its interactivity, it's often ignored entirely or met with derision. The existence of the term "walking simulator" is perhaps the clearest example of this phenomenon.

But I think even games that are more conventional than, say, Gone Home, are able to perhaps subvert this "fun at all costs" mindset. For example, Undertale is a pretty typical turn-based RPG for the most part, albeit mixed with some bullet hell elements. However, it also features the infamous "genocide" route, which forces you to grind for what feels like hours in order to achieve it as a way of commenting on how what you're doing is senseless and pointless and is solely motivated by wanting to see what will happen at the end. It's not exactly "fun" outside of the few cool unique boss fights that exist seemingly just to generate word of mouth for this route and get people to try it, but the story it tells through the player's own interactions with it is incomparable.

The reason this all matters to me so much is, again, not because I think Spider-Man 2 is terrible or even unique to having these problems. But it's just one of those examples that gets you thinking about these sorts of things precisely because it actually gets these things right at first, only to trip over itself just before the finish line. Something I don't think I've talked about before is that game design is a field I am interested in working in one day, so I kind of can't help but think about the games I play this way. All of these questions of how we approach design are not just ones I'm asking others, but also ones I might have to ask myself one day if I'm put in the position of designing my own game.

So hopefully it's clear that this review isn't really about Spider-Man 2. It's about video games as a whole and how we think about them. And I still think I've really only scratched the surface on this topic of how we're designing games like toys, but talking any more about it felt like too much of a tangent. Again, this is something that's been on my mind for years, this game just happened to be the one that got me to start putting it into words. Video games are such an interesting medium for storytelling not just because of the way the player's actions can impact the narrative, but how the narrative can reflect those actions back at the player and make them question things about themselves. We can challenge people playing games on more levels than mechanical skill, we just have to try.