“The reunion at hand may bring joy. It may bring fear. But let us embrace whatever it brings.”

As early as that original E3 2015 trailer, Final Fantasy VII Remake labored to clarify its mission statement: “We’re about to take some artistic liberties, please bear with us.” If you listen past the fluffy prose, it becomes clear that this narrator isn’t actually part of the game’s fiction: when they speak of “us” and “them,” they’re literally describing our perspective on the original game, the “silence” following in its wake, every “remembrance” since (Advent Children, Crisis Core, etc.) and the natural fervor resulting from that very announcement. As we all know by now, the final game would go on to completely defy traditional understandings of that “Remake” moniker, literalizing its meta context in the form of the “Whispers” (the plot ghosts) — it’s a “remake” in the sense that the events of the original FF7 are literally set in motion again (supposedly in some alternate timeline,) only for Cloud’s party to eventually destroy the Whispers, defying the boundaries set by that game and leaving the door open for Remakes Part 2 and 3 to go off in a completely new direction.

I, too, gave that aspect of FF7R a reluctant nod of acknowledgement in my original review for the title, which was a more traditional and comprehensive look at its failings as a game first-and-foremost. If you’re reading this, it should be clear by now that that was not enough to exorcise my demon; if FF7R wants to be a cheeky little meta prank this badly, it seems only appropriate to look at it again primarily in this larger meta-context for its third anniversary. And the statement I want to lead in with is that leaving that proverbial door open for any upcoming games to realize the potential of its message was giving it way too much fucking credit.

FF7R wants to have its cake and eat it, too. Three years on, I’m still floored at the amount of hypocrisy and hubris in literally constructing an entire plot around the message “please have faith in our original ideas uwu” while leaning this obsessively on your past and succumbing to the shallowest trends. Think about the premise of redoing Midgar with current technology — a 3D camera with polygonal environments means seeing the world from the kinds of angles and at an intimate scale unthinkable on the PS1. It could mean more granular interactions with your surroundings, NPCs that genuinely inhabit the space instead of being mere exposition delivery bots. It could mean a more seamless flow to the experience, letting the player dictate more autonomously how they transition between locations or conveying story while maintaining player control.

Instead, FF7R copies the original’s design scope almost verbatim, placing a giant magnifying glass over its limitations when coupled with these jarring new production values. You have bartenders verbally offering you a seat, yet all you can actually do is stand around and watch them cycle through their idle animation as they repeat that one line of dialogue. You can transition between rooms without the game cutting to black now, but that’s accomplished via squeeze-through loading tunnels that will not benefit from any future hardware improvements. Environment traversal is now expressed via bespoke gameplay for those sections, but the way that works in practice is that you hold up on the analog stick for five minutes at a time as you watch Tifa robotically climb across an entire room of monkey bars — and do you really want me to talk about the part with the robot hand?

Some environments now invite you to hang out in them for longer stretches, but the new activities on offer here include highlights such as “have quest giver tell you to kill some rats, go to dead-end circular combat arena, kill rats, return to quest giver, be told you ‘didn’t kill the right rats,’ literally go back the exact same way, kill the new set of rats that just spawned there, return to quest giver again and receive your reward.” Combat now takes place within the game world in real-time, but the only way for you to decipher the properties of any given attack still is to read the big dumb name popping up over the enemy’s head, with no consistent indication for how these attacks conform to any of your defensive options, be it your three different parry moves or the non-functional dodge roll. This is a game that puts you up against flying opponents, but is somehow reluctant to give its characters anything in the way of aerial mobility, so what you’re left with is either linearly throwing out some kind of ranged option or watching your one robotic alibi air combo play out. This is a game that goes to the length of eliminating the original’s instanced combat transitions, yet it also makes you watch its characters slowly throw out potions one-by-one to heal outside of combat, with no way to have these kinds of items take effect immediately on pressing the button the way it literally worked in Final Fantasy 1 on the NES. (https://twitter.com/wondermagenta/status/1286438919916093444)

Instead of focusing on how hard I’m nitpicking, I really want you to think about just how absurd all this shit is. Consider FF7R’s approach to loading specifically: consider that it literally re-released on the PS5, a console whose entire premise is “we know what an SSD is,” only a year later, yet the game’s flaws are so deeply embedded in shortsighted design that a whole generational leap can’t salvage them. This remake was dreamt about for a solid decade before its eventual announcement, and yet somehow it manifested into a game that feels so much more outdated than its source material. It’s “upscaled PS2 JRPG (derogatory.)”

Consider further how much more intimate you could get with these characters now that you’re spending so much more time in this setting. They could’ve gone for a Mass Effect-esque structure, where you inhabit Midgar a day at a time, watching your crew progress and go through various personal struggles — the game is even hinting at this by giving Cloud his own apartment! Instead, you’re still bound to a rigid progression of events and set pieces, now padded by vapid exposition. You now regularly spend PS1-FF7-Midgar-level stretches of time simply running through linear tunnels, and somehow the only type of dialogue that void is filled with is “damn I hope we don’t get lost in this linear tunnel.” You have locked doors that are opened by flipping a single switch within the same room, characters regularly making observations that don’t actually match their surroundings in a way that makes them sound like complete himbos and a general disregard for the player’s intelligence.

In a sense, this game does actually cater to our current-day sensibilities in its Marvel-fication: more, more, more of “thing you already love,” thematic focus be damned. How ironic that this game desperately contorts itself around some vague message about the value of artistic freedom in its final act, meanwhile the way there is paved by shoving tear-jerk origin stories into the framework of every random background character the original presented that contribute absolutely nothing to any kind of overarching message. We literally will not be “free” until we realize that stories like this or Kingdom Hearts can be spun ad infinitum — Square have effectively proven you can reuse the same iconography for 20 years in slightly different scenarios, and people will show up. This game wants to be all meta, yet it never actually analyzes or challenges its source material, it’s all empty reverence.

What this means is that almost every “original idea” in FF7R either directly undermines the original’s pacing, drama and charm, or fails to be compelling on its own terms. This is why any charitability toward future entries in this series feels misplaced: so many resources at their disposal, so much talent eager to put their mark on a monumental game, so much distance to analyze its legacy from… and this is what you come up with? You may be inclined to call this game brave for being so explicit in its intentions and willing to subvert expectations with its finale, but there’s nothing “brave” about grafting these hollow-ass platitudes onto a shallow, rigid, predictable 40-hour fan service vehicle. The creative team here may have attempted to kill the burden of fan expectation alongside those plot ghosts, but the only thing they truly eviscerated is my interest in their games.

If you reached the end of this post and feel disappointed at how many points I remade from my original review, you may have some understanding of how I felt when I rolled credits on FF7R. Damn this meta shit is easy. 🤪

EDIT: had to bump up the score by half a star because I couldn't justify having this at the same level as TLOU2.

[April Fools 2023]

”I’m in love. I’m floating, I’m happy… Ahh, the world is so beautiful.”
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On the surface, you may be inclined to write off 2005’s masterpiece Marry Me, Misato! as nothing but a cute love story, strewn with the longing desires of a boy way out of his league on his journey to marry Misato. This read is certainly the easy one, but it's understandable that the reader may come to a conclusion such as that. The deliberately faceless protagonist makes it a natural instinct for the reader to slip into their shoes, and their journey is a selfless one. He yearns not to satisfy his own desires through matrimony, but to fulfill the needs of his one true love. However, this read would be missing the trees for the forest, as I believe something far more poignant lies within the text.

At the heart of Marry Me, Misato! lies a greek tragedy for the ages. The tale of a love that can never be. A tale of a boy throwing everything away in pursuit of a mistress who remains ambivalent toward his existence right up to the very end. And perhaps most tragic of all, a tale that rings far too close to our mortal realm to be fairly maligned as anything resembling “fiction”.

Whether we admit it or not, far too many of us have found ourselves longing for love from beyond a computer screen that we should not, nay, CANNOT pursue. Whether that be someone from within our realm who we wish to lay, or a fictional character that exists only within the confines of hand-drawn animated cells, flashing 24 times before our eyes with every passing second of our attention. We know deep down this lust is sinful, yet we pursue regardless. This is not an emotion that has gone unnoticed by the author, as illustrated towards the end of the adventure wherein the protagonist has a rare moment of lucidity: “I thought I was happy, but I am devastated. All my plans to marry Misato were in vain.” There’s a clear understanding of the psychological impact this type of longing can do to a person - should they push themselves to such extremes anyway - yet in a moment framed initially as newfound positive twist of fate, the boy shifts course for one final time and devises a new plan to get just what he desires. What may be seen as a moment of grand victory after a minor trip on the curb can only be described with context as tragic. Despite the courteous feather capping off the adventure in the tasteful arial-fonted “THE END” blazen on screen after our hero's revelation, this this just as shallow as the blank screen that lay beyond the text. This is not a resolution, it’s simply the first loop of a newfound never-ending story, and one with no true conclusion for this boy if his final statement is anything to go by.

As stated previously, it's easy to slip into a trance with Marry Me, Misato! and the narrative it lays out (Who DOESN’T want to marry Misato, after all) but admitting to such hypnosis simply proves its thesis to be correct. There is no clear end in sight for such an adventure: all that lies beyond is a desert of blistering pain and betrayal from the one you think you hold closest to your heart. It may seem fruitful now to chase that woman in red with the soft blue hair dancing in the starlight-draped park, but calling it a wasteful venture would be generous. There’s more beyond the curved pixels on your screen resembling a woman, and unless you pull that plug, you’ll never face that grim reflection on the other side. There’s plenty of things to love in this world, plenty of fish in the sea, but none of them are Misato. None of them can be Misato.
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“I love you, Misato!”

While a great throwback to the NES Era of video game, Final Fantasy simply fails to live up to its predecessor Stranger of Paradise, keeping in mind its shortcomings and lack of content this game should've been a DLC bonus for Stranger of Paradise rather than its own standalone title.

Final Fantasy is a total step down in everything, even the combat, and story which was greatly shocking to me as I found those aspects of the original to be phenomenal.
Gone are the complexities of the soul shield system, and in exchange, we have a watered-down job system with a tiring and exhausting turn-based combat system which is a complete insult to everything Stranger of Paradise was.

The story is a complete rehash of Stranger of Paradise with plot points removed, despite the fact this is a sequel which greatly upsets me as the story was one of the best aspects of the original game and a follow up had a lot of potential, yet the execs over at Square care not for artistic integrity but trying to make a quick buck cashing on a massively popular IP which makes it safe to assume that Stranger of Paradise was a lightning in a bottle that they will never be able to capture again.