approaches the stage with 73809 page manifesto on xenogears' impact and its troubled dev cycle and why it is both one of the most interesting, rewarding narratives told in gaming history and one of gaming's most incredible dev journeys, from beginning as what was originally ff7 before being repurposed into xenogears and then being cut in half, and how legal battles have prevented it from ever truly being returned to in the manner it deserves
ahem
screams into microphone, tears running down my face
BROKEN MIRROR A MILLION SHAPES OF LIGHT THE OLD ECHO FADES AWAY BUT JUST YOU AND I CAN FIND THE ANSWER AND THEN WE CAN RUN TO THE END OF THE WORLD, RUN TO THE END OF THE WORLD
is dragged offstage while vocalizing the guitar solo

Didn't grew up with a PS1.
Didn't grew up with Crash.
Didn't grew up with racing games.
Didn't grew up with hot italian gay rats.

And it still made me feel nostalgic. What a timeless classic.

A time machine? Look, time travel, the kinda of time travel that you're thinking of, is a scientific impossibility.
It would violate the second law of thermodynamics.
You're talking about regrets, so if you want to ask about regrets, just ask about regrets, and leave all this time-travelling no sense out of it.

- Walter White to Saul Goodman in Better Call Saul S06E13 "Saul Gone"

EDIT this review is from years ago and shows a lot of its age, I still maintain ff7r is awful for newcomers but I played the original ff7 since and I'm willing to give it a second chance. Potential second playthrough incoming but still TBD

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I just finished the Final Fantasy 7 Remake and honestly, as a newcomer to FF7, it was kinda mid? Soundtrack was fire and presentation was mostly good but I definitely have some criticisms.

Combat was mixed for me. I liked the stagger mechanic and real time combat flowed well. Each party member having unique skills and play styles was neat, it honestly made me wish there were more playable party members. Summons were cool and the materia system was intuitive. I liked how different weapon skills being temporarily exclusive to their weapons compelled the player to try out all of the different ones. There were so many problems, though.
First off, the targeting and camera were complete garbage. Wanna change targets? Have fun flailing the right stick around until you can target the right enemy for a split second. Targeting the correct enemy? Make sure never to touch the right stick or you're in danger of switching your target when you don’t want to. This means putting up with some absolute ass camera angles where nothing is visible, just so your battle target doesn’t change. We are far past the point of excuses. By no means is it ever okay to not have a separate button for this kind of thing.
I started the game on Normal mode and I had to switch to Classic mode about a third into the game. I don’t know how the game expects you to constantly switch between party members in order to build enough ATB to actually use their skills. Classic mode had party members build small amounts of ATB on their own, so it felt like a small bandaid on a battle system where I was always frantically trying to manage all party members’ real time control AND skills. There’s just too much going on at once.
I don’t know if there’s a proper aggro system, but if there is, it is completely broken. In my experience it felt like aggro was always drawn on the character that the player is controlling. Barret, who was supposed to be the “tank” never successfully occupies the enemies that are constantly stunlocking me. To circumvent getting stunlocked by annoying enemies every two seconds, you just have to switch to playing as another party member before enemy aggro switches to that new character. I love Aerith’s play style but she works horribly with the aggro system. She's a glass cannon who casts wards in order to set up her powerful hits. This takes time, and is frustrating to pull off when all of the enemies start charging you even if you're still setting up.

The character dialogue could be cringe at times and other times incomprehensible. Sometimes the characters just say really existential things out of nowhere, they act like they know characters they’ve never met, and act like they know plot points that the player doesn’t know. This is particularly bad with the female characters, as so much of their dialogue feels like fanservice. You can tell that no women were in the room when the dialogue was being written, and their models being animated. But the worst offenders of all are the villains. I understand that it’s hard to write compelling antagonists. But hearing Don Corneo literally calling himself a villain in a monologue and Heidegger and Prof. Hojo doing the most cringeworthy evil laughs made me groan and roll my eyes.

All plot points are described in the most vague terms known to man. “The Ancients can lead us to the Promised Land” means absolutely nothing. As someone who never played the og ff7, I have no idea who Zach even is. And who is Sephiroth? We see him all the time but the game never tells us why he does what he does, what he’s even doing, or how any of the party members know who he is. I liked the story with Shinra but it absolutely blew up into something incomprehensible as the game progressed. There were plenty of other incomprehensible moments too. The mission with Jessie had you run into a motorcycle dude who never establishes who he is, and his dialogue is basically gibberish. When the plate falls, a cutscene shows this weird cat thing that never shows up again. I want to reiterate how unfriendly this is to newcomers.

Each main character is basically an archetype, and Cloud’s love triangle is cringe and minimizes the actual important themes the game is trying to convey. Character design for the main characters (& Sephiroth) is good but every single other NPC looks and acts like they’re on PS2. The villain character designs (except for Sephiroth) look so grotesque and not in an intentional or good way. The way Heidegger’s mouth moves and his stiff arms raise when he does his evil laugh is so pathetic and low quality. Most side characters also look very unpolished. They have no distinct art style to them, unlike Dragon Quest, for example.

Side quests were so incredibly dull. I did the first two batches of three sidequests but when it came time to do the lategame remaining 9 quests I just said nope and continued on. Couldn’t take it anymore. There was no fast travel within towns, and the level design was incredibly linear and dull. There was SO much padding with the amount of ladders I climbed, tight spaces I ducked under or squeezed through, or just moments where you have to walk at a snail’s pace. There’s a scene at the Shinra HQ building where you have to climb 59 sets of stairs and the higher you get, the slower your character moves. Your run function is taken away from you and the whole sequence took multiple minutes of your party just panting and complaining. I don't care if it's an "iconic gag", it takes up multiple minutes in real time of me doing absolutely nothing.

Traversal took way too long and you can really tell that this game is stretching out 5 hours of a PS1 game. There were actually only a few major plot points and the rest of the game was just you moving from place to place, getting sidetracked or roadblocked on the way. It’s not like I spent 100 hours on the game, more like 30. But everything still felt too long. It felt like a walking simulator.

The ending made no sense to me and I think the “fate”/time travel stuff is so corny. It’s the reason why I stopped playing Dragon Quest 11 after the second act.


I played this game on PS4 Pro and it ran very well. Not only is it a reprehensible decision for Square Enix to cut a PS1 game up into 3 ~30hr pieces and sell them for $60-$70 each, and force players to upgrade to PS5 to continue the remake trilogy, but the fact that this game was advertised as a remake makes this all the more evil. I am fine with Square Enix reimagining the FF7 story and universe, but I am not fine with advertising it as a newcomer-friendly remake where players can experience the world of FF7 for the first time. There were so many details that made absolutely no sense to me, and it was painfully obvious that this game survives off of nostalgiabait. If you're a FF7 veteran looking to experience this game in a new way, by all means give it a go. But if you were a FF7 newcomer like me, please, DO NOT START WITH THIS GAME. This is an incomplete product that absolutely depends on the player knowing the original PS1 game front to back.